Designing Parts, Creating AssembliesĪfter you have your Vitamins ready, you can start designing your 3D-printed parts. Not the prettiest servo model, but does the trickĪt this point, I had the basic Vitamins I needed, so I moved on to the next step: designing the actual parts. Modeling the complete trumpet would take me a long of time, so I only modeled the relevant section: the keys (and the attached values), and part of the lead pipe that goes in front of the keys, as I wanted to attach the mechanism to it: Obviously, the mechanism would need to attach to the trumpet and press its keys. The first Vitamin I modeled for the finger mechanism project was the trumpet itself. This will allow you to use them in your design’s integration tests - it is similar to mocking a database server, if we continue with the web application analogy. You will need to model these Vitamins, despite the facts that you are not going to print them. Just like the vitamins in our body, these are essentials parts for the design which can’t be synthesized (3D-printed). In order to test my designs before printing them, I need some kind of simulated environment, that would contain all the non-printed parts that I will be using in my design. And this is what I came up with: You Need To Take Vitamins 💊 I spent a couple of days looking for information online, reading discussions in the OpenSCAD forums, and found an incomplete tutorial about using OpenSCAD for Machine Design.
In other words, I wanted a way to do Integration Tests for my designs before I go to production. I wanted to find a way to design the entire mechanism upfront, and only after thoroughly checking the complete design in the computer and making sure everything fits together, send everything to the printer. Integration Tests Before Going To ProductĪfter finishing the Motorized Syringe Pump project, I reflected on how I can improve my workflow. Overall, the process was very inefficient and also wasted a lot of plastic (but I recycle my failed prints ♻). I printed each part at least 3 different times until I got it right (well, only 2 times for the big ladders).Īs you can imagine, designing this part took several days, as I had to wait for the parts to print before I could test them, making each iteration taking an hour or more. My design process was the same - designing a single part, printing it, trying to attach it to the other parts, failing, and then iterating until it worked. For instance, this is a linear-motion mechanism I designed a few months ago: I’d usually sketch a solution in my head or scribble it on a piece of paper, take some measurements, and then start designing each of the parts that comprised the mechanism. When I started designing 3d-printed mechanisms, I did it one part at a time. My 3D Design Workflow Was Very Inefficient I will use the finger mechanism I designed for my Trumpet Playing Robot, which will hopefully be ready for display in the Chrome Dev Summit in a few weeks. In this post, I am going to share my workflow with you. I spent about 20 minutes following the tutorial, and by the end of the tutorial, I was able to start modeling simple shapes.Īfter working with OpenSCAD for several years, I developed a workflow which allows modeling complex mechanisms with multiple 3D-printed parts. I started my journey with OpenSCAD thanks to a great tutorial called Know only 10 things to be dangerous in OpenSCAD. This means you can use variables, loops and functions, create re-usable components, and make parametric designs (such as the small shelf I designed for my bathroom).
Openscad animation software#
It has a feature which appeals to software developers (like me): you create your 3D models by writing code.
OpenSCAD is my favorite tool for designing 3D-printed parts. My Trumpet-Playing Robot Needed Motor-Controlled Fingers.
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