Initial Design Idea
- We’re creating animal ring stand/ring dish holder. We are giving the option of having an elephant where his trunk holds up the rings, a giraffe with his neck being the part where the rings go, or a bunny where its’ ears have the ability to hold the rings.
- We already are familiar with making polybowls so we’re going to modify them to make the base and then add 3 options of animals to our design in OpenSCAD.
- We’re going to have to learn how to upload a previously made model from Thingiverse (the animals) into openSCAD and then group that with our already made polybowl. We will then have the incorporate our three options into the OpenSCAD code to give people the option to choose which animal they prefer.
Design Iteration
- This part of our code shows the elephant stl on the dish. We had to resize and translate the elephant to fit in the center of the dish.
- The first thing we had to change was how the bowl looked. We wanted to modify the polybowl code to make it more of a round dish. We also had to change the height and flare of the bowl so it looked more shallow. We also still have to have the other animal stl options added into our design code.
- The above screenshot shows the progress of our design and the code that goes along with it.
First Draft Print
- Our print was overall successful. We decided to make our draft a smaller version to ensure it will print well when it’s full size. We learned that OpenSCAD is all about detail and we need to pay attention to the small things.
Thingiverse Customizer
- The above code allows for people to choose which animal they want out of the three options. The animals have all be sized and centered, so in order to choose which animal the person would just have to pick either elephant, giraffe, or bunny. Someone can do this under “which animal do you want?” and put “elephant”, “giraffe”, or “bunny”.
- Users can also modify the amount of sides on the bowl to add more of a custom design to it. For example, you can change sides to equal more or less than 15. You can also change the bodyTwist of the bowl and bodyFlare of the bowl. These two parameters will expand or compress the amount the bowl spans outwards.
- Thingiverse
Final Prints
- The elephant was the first big print that we printed, it looks way better than we thought and it’s very sturdy. The bowl of the elephant has 15 sides with a flare of 1.7. The two smaller prints were also successful, but since we printed them on a much smaller scale they aren’t nearly as sturdy as our final print. We ran through a problem with trying to use a bunny as an option for the centerpiece. Since we couldn’t solve the issue with its rendering, we decided to switch it to a cactus. We are happier with the cactus option because it allows rings to sit on it better than the bunny would have. Other than that one issue of the bunny stl not working, we didn’t run through very many issues. The giraffe bowl has 10 sides with a flare f 1.5 and thickness of 2 instead of 1.6 like all other ones. The cactus bowl has over 30 sides to make it more round and bowl shaped with a flare of 1.7. Overall I think our finals prints are a success.