I used OpenSCAD to create a map of Manhattan. It shows the live location of subway trains. It was surprisingly easy, I struggled a lot with OnShape and Fusion360 trying to do this because there were too many polygons.
I found that starting with an SVG and extruding from there is perfect in OpenSCAD, but I’m sure I’m underutilizing it a lot.
I was able to take the image of the star-shaped graph from OP, fed it to claude and used this for the prompt:
"figure out a good formula or equation for this graph and use it to create the lampshade in openscad. use the graph as the bottom for a lampshade, and taper it all up to center point. leave a hole at the top big enough for a lightbulb fixture to pass through." It did a surprisingly good job of generating the OpenSCAD, STL, and preview renders in-browsers.
For this case, I'm not exaggerating when I say you would probably have an easier time generating the meshes yourself in python and something like the trimesh library to load the vertices into.
Yes. Claude is surprisingly capable in this area, maybe because the shapes are so simple. Using a slicer in vase mode should make it print quickly too.
Just noticed that this has made it to the front page, so just had a quick look through to see if there are any broken links, etc. (as I have a habit of forgetting them) and added the missing OnShape link to the LED strip diffuser.
Also recommend checking out the live Marimo notebook linked down at the bottom. Incredible what you can do with Pyodide + Marimo these days. I only wish there was a webassembly version of jax to make it easier to share random numpyro experiments.
Cool project. The author used PLA, but for anything near a heat source PETG or ASA would be a better choice. PLA will soften and deform at only mildly elevated temperatures. An LED light strip will generate enough heat to cause normal PLA to warp and droop over time.
Good to know about the risk of deformation due to heat from the LED strip. Ours hasn’t visibly warped over the past few months of use, fingers crossed it will last a little while
This is awesome. I’ve also been playing with OnShape to make lamps and it’s been quite challenging. I also tried Blender but the learning curve is just too steep for me. I like this idea of using Python. I might try OpenSCAD too like someone else suggested.
Here’s my lamp if you’re curious, printed with a .8 mm nozzle, otherwise it would fail https://imgur.com/a/mRqw1pI
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 39.5 ms ] threadI'm just dipping my toes in 3D printing, with a recent acquisition of a Bambu P2S
Yes, but it is painfully slow. Even perforated patterns are quite slow to generate.
I found that starting with an SVG and extruding from there is perfect in OpenSCAD, but I’m sure I’m underutilizing it a lot.
I wrote a bit about it here if you’re curious https://hackaday.io/project/202488-manhattan-subway-map/deta...
Also recommend checking out the live Marimo notebook linked down at the bottom. Incredible what you can do with Pyodide + Marimo these days. I only wish there was a webassembly version of jax to make it easier to share random numpyro experiments.
As per drooping over time, perhaps for some of these models the "Persistence of Memory" might apply a nice transform to the shapes.
Here’s my lamp if you’re curious, printed with a .8 mm nozzle, otherwise it would fail https://imgur.com/a/mRqw1pI
https://github.com/CadQuery/cadquery
https://www.juxt.pro/blog/designing-3d-printable-objects-wit...
Looks quite fun
And you're saying it would fail with a nozzle smaller than 0.8mm?!