Design tips for creating 3D digital models for printing on a MakerBot
Just because I didn’t label the Clockwork Spider on Thingiverse as a “work in progress,” don’t think I’ve given up on it. It exists now as an actual physically printed object and I’m very happy about that. However, the legs are just a stand-in1 for nice spidery looking legs I’ve already designed. There’s no point in printing the real legs up until I’ve gotten a mechanism that will make them work.
I’m so freaking happy with the design, print, and assembly.
You can assemble the entire thing by hand in just a minute or two with no tools or hardware. Turn the center wheel to make it walk. Right now the gears are a little rough – but I have an idea on how to fix that in the next revision. But, if the gears turned even slightly better, I think this design is almost ready for the big time.
I cannot wait to have a printed wind up rubber band powered clockwork spider skittering across my desk at work.
*skritch* *skritch* *skritch* “Oh, don’t mind leggy. She can smell fear.”
So, I’m about to begin a completely new design on my little spider bot using what I’ve learned from the last try.
Failure is fun!
I just uploaded my latest designs to Thingiverse. I’m working on a RoboSpider using a set of gears run in an elliptical cycle. I’ve been through a few revisions already and just came up with a new idea on how to design it with a thinner profile and hopefully work more reliably.
Unfortunately, the snap-together system I had designed just wasn’t working very well. Also, my very VERY DIY gears are a poor substitute for using a legit gear script. They don’t mesh that well and it shows. I think I’ll give Cbiffle’s spur gear script filter for Greg Frost’s gear script a shot.
In the meantime, is anyone interested in designing a little rubber band powered motor to drive this thing?
Let’s see if I can upload a new thing to Thingiverse for each day in February. This post will be my updated list of Things as I upload them.
Comes abuse. I’ve come to realize that OpenSCAD can indeed be abused. It’s so easy to import several objects and manipulate them that I wish I had gotten around to learning OpenSCAD a long time ago. You can do some pretty amazing (and scary) things with just the import and translate functions. 1
And, in retrospect, I probably could have whipped up that Voltron remix in a fraction of the time if I had OpenSCAD at my disposal…
Oh well, that just means the next time I’ll be that much better.
They’ll continue, but I think the next one will come out on Friday. So far I’ve covered the interface of OpenSCAD, 2D forms, and 3D forms.
My goal is to show people how to use OpenSCAD in a way that is intuitive and builds quickly on what was taught earlier, with a secondary goal of getting the reader to be able to make something useful as quickly as possible. Here’s the rough outline/idea of where I’m going:
I know I’m leaving a lot out of that outline. What would you like to see?
So, I’ve been working on some OpenSCAD tutorials over at the MakerBot blog.
What did you think of them? Are they too high-falutin’ or too basic? Are they too serious? What would you like to learn next? I’m probably going to cover 3D forms next. Do you want to see more tutorials? What other things would you like to learn besides OpenSCAD? (That will give me a good excuse to learn it too!)
Well, it looks like the poll is 67% in favor of more OpenSCAD tutorials. The comments to my recent tutorial seem very positive. So, I’ll keep going until I get a ton of hate mail or I hit the limit of my knowledge. 1
I’m really just learning OpenSCAD right now. I can make some basic shapes, put things together, and whatnot. I was thinking about putting together some super super basic tutorials that would take a user from knowing nothing about OpenSCAD to knowing as little about OpenSCAD as I do.1 Is this something you’d be interested in?
Please leave a comment and let me know. What would you like to know about it? What would you like to learn?
