Twisted box

[jamcultur]

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.)

[fred_dot_u]

that's a great looking build. What did you use to design it?

[jamcultur]

that's a great looking build. What did you use to design it?

Thank you. I used OpenSCAD.

[fred_dot_u]

I was hoping that was the case. Would you consider to share your code to enable others' learning?

[curious aardvark]

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.

[jamcultur]

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.

[fred_dot_u]

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.

[jamcultur]

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.

[fred_dot_u]

It looks great. The code isn't kludgy compared to my scrawling!

[curious aardvark]

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 :-)