Printable View
Two identically-shaped pieces twist together to form each of these boxes. I uploaded the STL file to Thingiverse in case anyone else wants to print it. The exterior dimensions are 74mm wide by 85mm tall.
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4628578
This might be the last thing I ever upload to Thingiverse. I encountered multiple bugs and had to start over three times to get it uploaded, and I'm still not sure that everything uploaded correctly. (Click on thumbnail to enlarge.)
that's a great looking build. What did you use to design it?
Thank you. I used OpenSCAD.Quote:
Originally Posted by fred_dot_u
I was hoping that was the case. Would you consider to share your code to enable others' learning?
I like that, pretty cool.
couple of adjustments and you've got an actual useable box :-)
ie one half (bottome) has full height interior cylinder and the pther half (top) has no interior cylinder.
I will make this :-)
what filament are you using ? that stuff is really shiny - also can't see any layer lines - what resolution did you print them at ?
And yeah thingiverse has gone a bit odd since they changed the server - presumably to save money.
Also be interested to see how you wrote the script.
I can see a few ways to do it.
Rotate/extrude a 3 sided sylinder with a minkowski hull for round edges.
Then do a repeat to get the multiple arms.
use short pieces around a cylinder to crate the base. And insert a cylinder in the middle.
we'd all model it differently - and I can pretty much guarentee my code would look nothing like yours :-)
Plus I keep getting spam from there now. never had that before.
But at the end of the day - there's nothing else around to compare to thingiverse so I'll keep using it.
I printed these at 0.16 layer height using Qidi Print's defaults for all parameters except Z seam, which I specified to be inside to make the outside smoother. Z seams are ugly on shiny filaments. (Qidi Print is Qidi's customized version of Cura.)
The filaments are different brands of silk PLA. The gold and copper are Sunlu, the silver is TTY3D, and the blue is eSun.
I wrote the OpenSCAD code with customizer parameters to change the dimensions, degree of twist, and many other characteristics. I've only tested it with this box design and I think it would need adjustments to work with a wide range of designs. I'd thought I'd wait to see how much interest there was on Thingiverse before deciding whether to clean up the OpenSCAD code and upload it. Unfortunately, one of the bugs in Thingiverse apparently prevents me from uploading anything new to that thing. I'm attaching a code snippet that shows the basics of how I made the spiral arms. Please let me know if you have any questions.
Thanks for sharing that segment. I added a scale factor to the second object in the difference portion and translated it downward by a smidgen to get rid of the z-fuzz. Of course, I played around with some of the numbers to see what would happen. I'm not sure my changes are good coding, but the result looks okay.
Can you share the base and cylinder portion too? I realize that the base could be anything and the cylinder is going to be a cylinder, shouldn't be too tough, right?
I'm disappointed with Thingiverse too. It was a halfway decent resource and now it's become a struggle.
Here's a code snippet with a base and cylinder. It's kludgy and not exactly what I did to design this box, but it should give you the idea.Quote:
Originally Posted by fred_dot_u
It looks great. The code isn't kludgy compared to my scrawling!
programmer code lol
why do you lot always write it back to front ?
Ie: the modules last and the final instructions first ?
So you actually drew a triangle, didn't even know you could do that and as I can't draw - I never would lol.
Neat.
Sunlu silk - I'll stick some on my christmas list :-)
£25 a kg from amazon - not bad.
Amazon econo do the same stuff for £23 :-)
When I first started to code in 1974, the primitive compilers that I used then required you to put modules first so that the compiler would see them before seeing any reference to them. As compilers got more sophisticated and did multiple passes, you could put modules anywhere. That was a big improvement. Programmers were no longer limited by the limitations of the compiler. It never made sense to me to put modules first. I always wanted to see the code in execution order, i.e., the first code you see in the source code should be first code to be executed by the computer. I was happy that putting subroutines after the main routine was the standard at the software company where I worked for most of my career.Quote:
Originally Posted by curious aardvark
I thought one had to create the modules first, otherwise the calling code would not "see" it.
The issue was about where to put modules, not about when to create them. You do have to create modules before you reference them, but you don't have to put them at the beginning of your source code. You can put them at the end, if you like.Quote:
Originally Posted by fred_dot_u
yeah figured it was aprogrammer thing.
So my ongoing openscad issue - how to make inported stl's actually work in a full render.
I used to load stls into tinkercad and export them back to my computer - and any stl you did that to would work 100% in openscad.
But tinkercad will no longer import stls.
And even stls rendered by openscad - when re-imported do not work.
Was just going to change the box so one half had a full cylinder and the other half was just arms, and fiddle the sizes slightly, so it doesn't require all the fine filing to get a smooth open and close.
But will it do an f6 render ? will it buggery !
no issue with f5 - but then there rarely is.
So do you know of anything I can do to get openscad to actually work with imported stls.
I've tried 'repairing' in simplify3d and exporting as both .bin and .ascii files.
But they don't even show up in openscad at all.
It's very bloody frustrating and I'm a man who doesn't get frustrated easily.
"I used to load stls into tinkercad and export them back to my computer - and any stl you did that to would work 100% in openscad.
But tinkercad will no longer import stls."
I just checked and was able to easily import an STL into Tinkercad. I did just that last week to modify a Thingiverse file, with zero problems. I'm aware Fusion 360 changed some features on the free license, but tinkercad did its thing for me.
Yeah, I used to be able to import and modify STLs in OpenSCAD, but it doesn't seem to work anymore. It is very frustrating. In any case, the code I uploaded to this forum is a simplified excerpt of the code I used to generate my STL that was just meant to demonstrate some techniques. I don't know whether an STL generated from it would make a working box.
It seemed like a fun challenge to make a box from two identical pieces. I was more concerned with how well it looked and worked than whether it would be useful, although I suppose it could be used as a cigarette box. It was easy to add an option to my code to specify how tall the inner cylinder should be. I'm printing one now with a full-height inner cylinder. If it works, and if Thingiverse cooperates, I'll post the STLs in a day or two.