Xmas Brain Decoration

Let me start this off by agreeing with you – yes, this is a weird idea!

But when you work at the Herston Biofabrication Institute and spend most of your days working on neurosurgery and other medical projects, it hopefully makes a bit more sense why anyone would 3D print a “Merry Xmas” brain to decorate our office Christmas tree.

The design of this was quite simple and was based on some tutorials I’ve previously written about mashups and remixes – basically, taking 2 (or more) different files and joining them together in a new and creative way. The brain itself was downloaded here, and then the letters were quickly modelled in Solidworks and exported as individual STL files. All of this was then combined in Meshmixer, which is my go-to software for this type of mashup project (and it’s free for anyone looking to do the same).

This was 3D printed on my Craftbot Flow IDEX XL 3D printer in PLA, with a small hole drilled on the top afterwards to thread a piece of string through. And of course, I’m giving this design away for free to anyone crazy enough to also want a 3D printed Xmas brain decoration! Just click the links below to your preferred 3D print file website and enjoy:

Thingiverse, Cults, MyMiniFactory, Prusa, Pinshape.

Merry Christmas and happy 3D printing 🙂

– Posted by James Novak

3D Printed Outdoor Lights in PETG

It’s official – my entire house now uses 3D printed light covers!

If you follow this blog you may have seen some of my previous indoor light covers, featuring a 3D scanned sea urchin shell and a pineapple. Of course, I couldn’t stop with indoor lights, especially since the outdoor wall-mounted lights on my house looked like the cheapest fittings available. They were desperately in need of an upgrade.

Luckily the fitting includes a piece that is easily unscrewed to accommodate standard DIY light covers. A few simple measurements, including the diameter of the fitting and distance of the protruding light bulb, meant that I had everything needed to create my own design in CAD. For this one I decided to use Fusion 360, just to keep my skills up as I’ve done a few projects in Solidworks recently. The only other limitation was the size of the Prusa MK3S+ build volume (250 x 210 x 210mm), as I wanted the light cover to be 3D printable in a single piece.

Putting all of this information in Fusion 360 gave me a starting point, and of course I began experimenting with a few simple ideas. The one that stuck was this collection of lofts that twist in different directions. Not overly complex, just a clean design that is easy to clean (a complex lattice would just invite spiders!) and protects the lightbulb from sun/rain. Because these are mounted quite high on the walls, what I really wanted was a cool effect when you are looking directly up at the light from below – see the top right image.

Something else I experimented with for the first time with this design was 3D printing using PETG filament – specifically, PETG from eSun. Why? Mainly because PETG has good UV stability so should last while out in the elements and sunshine. But what I’ve really enjoyed is how easy it is to print with – no warping, good adhesion to the build platform and no smelly fumes while printing. Happy days! I actually used the default PETG settings in PrusaSlicer and they seem to be dialled in nicely (no surprises really, thanks Prusa). The material also has a translucency, so the light shade has a bit of a glow when the light is on as you can see in the photos. If you’re looking for more details about the material properties and slicing settings for PETG, this article is a good starting point.

And of course, I’m giving this design away for FREE! Download from your favourite 3D file marketplace: Thingiverse, Pinshape, Cults, MyMiniFactory or PrusaPrinters.

Happy 3D printing.

– Posted by James Novak

3D Printed Toys with Moving Parts

My desk is covered with 3D prints, some of them my own designs, and others are just cool examples of what can be done with a home 3D printer. This is one of those examples.

Stian Ervik Wahlvaag (@agepbiz) has created a clever range of 3D printed vehicles known as “Tiny Surprise Eggs” – why? Well, because they fit within an egg of course! The unique feature of each toy (and egg) is that they feature moving parts printed in place, without the need for any support material. Once the toy is taken off the printer, it is ready to go. The example pictured above is “Surprise Egg #7 – Tiny Car Carrier” and all the vehicle wheels rotate, and the car carrier itself can raise and lower the ramps.

While I didn’t print the egg, I did scale these prints up 200% to have something a little bit more child-friendly. Unfortunately I enjoy them so much they have permanently stayed on my desk, but I promise I’ll print my son another set! The moving parts still work really well at this increased scale and provide some clever design tricks to ensure multiple parts can be printed as an assembly. As an example, above is a cross section through one of the cars showing how the wheels and axels are designed within the main body of the car. Some simple angled details mean that no support material is needed when printed in this orientation, yet from the outside the car just looks like it has normal cylindrical wheels. Great example of how to design for additive manufacturing (DfAM) as it’s known.

Following the vehicle carrier, I’ve also 3D printed “Surprise Egg # 6 – Tiny Jet Fighter” which features wings which fold out, again at 200% scale and with no support material. Both of these designs, as well as at least 8 more surprise egg vehicles, are free to download from Thingiverse, and highly recommended as a way to test your print settings (if there are any issues the moving parts may end up fused together), and learn a few of the tricks for designing assemblies for 3D printing.

If you print these yourself, or have any other recommended prints that include clever design details like moving parts, please share them in the comments section.

– Posted by James Novak

3D Printed Mounting Brackets

Brackets are pretty boring, I know, but being able to 3D print exactly what you need, for just a few cents, just makes good sense (see what I did there?).

I wanted to mount a LED strip underneath my kitchen bench top, but also wanted it to run off batteries so I didn’t have chunky cords to plug in for power. The set that I ended up buying had a battery pack which needed to be mounted along with the strip, as well as a remote. One option would be to use double sided tape, however, this would make accessing and changing the batteries painful. So, a simple bracket was needed. While doing this, I also decided to mount the remote so it wouldn’t get lost.

Like many of the projects on this blog, the entire process from CAD to finished 3D printed parts only took a few hours. Solidworks was used for the CAD modelling, while the brackets were printed on a Wanhao Duplicator i3 Plus in PLA. A couple of screws up into the bench top and job done. Secure and out of the way, but easy to remove the remote and battery pack when needed.

If you’re interested in more quick projects like this, check out my special friction hooks or hex business card holder tiles.

– Posted by James Novak

3D Printed Pineapple Light

3D printing light covers and lamps are always fun projects, you can’t really go wrong.

Continuing from a previous post where I outlined the process of designing sea urchin light covers for my house, I’ve still been wanting to design another light cover to mix things up so each room isn’t the same. Enter the pineapple light! 🍍

Unlike the previous process of designing the sea urchin light from scratch using a 3D scan, this time I was able to find something on Thingiverse that was almost perfect – this model of a pineapple. The bottom part had a really nice geometric pattern that saved me hours of mucking around in CAD and designing the same thing from scratch. This is one of the things I love about the 3D printing community – the open sharing of 3D models to be remixed (also known as a mashup) just like a song or video into something new and creative. You can read more about remixing in one of my previous tutorials.

Similar to the sea urchin light, all the pineapple needed was to be scaled to the right size, hollowed, given a thickness, and have a neck piece added to connect with the light fitting. This neck piece was directly imported from my previous project in Meshmixer (free CAD software), and both pieces were joined together. Nice and easy!

Just like the sea urchin light, these pineapples were 3D printed on a Prusa i3 MK3S in a natural PLA from eSun – it’s a translucent material which I found from previous experiments to work really well for light covers when given a very light dusting of white spray paint. The painted exterior still allows the light to shine through nicely, but just helps define the form better than the natural finish on its own. If you want to see exactly how this compares to the natural filament on its own, or a pure white PLA, check out my sea urchin light post. This design can also be 3D printed without any support material.

Best of all, you can download my pineapple light cover completely free from Thingiverse, Pinshape, Cults and MyMiniFactory! Just like the original design of the pineapple which helped me in this project, I hope this remix will help you in your own project – even if you don’t have the same size light fitting as me, with a bit of editing in Meshmixer or another CAD program, you can easily modify this design to suit your own needs. Enjoy.

– Posted by James Novak

3D Printed Oahu, Hawaii

Sometimes you see a design online and just have to 3D print it!

This is an amazing 3D topographic map of the Hawaiian island Oahu, and for anyone that’s been there you should be able to make out the airport, Pearl Harbour and Waikiki areas. Thanks to Eric Pavey who created this model and detailed the process of using a tool called Terrain2STL on his blog. It’s also available on Thingiverse. The detail is amazing!

For something a bit different, I wanted to do a two-tone print to separate the water and land. Using the Pause at Height feature in Cura, I was able to swap out filament after the first handful of layers, going from eSun white PLA, to eSun bamboo filament. I must admit, the pause feature didn’t quite work how I’d like it to on my Wanhao Duplicator i3 Plus, not actually pausing the print and allowing me to resume it again when I was ready, but I was able to time my prints and catch the feature in time to quickly do a swap during the 30 seconds or so that the Pause at Height feature ran. All it did was move the extruder to the home position and extruded a bunch of material, and then resumed automatically. I might need to create some better G-code for this next time.

However, I’m very pleased with the effect, especially when you move a light around the model!

– Posted by James Novak

3D Print some Aloha

At this time of COVID-19 lockdowns, panic buying and general insanity, we could all do with a bit of aloha. Aloha of course is the traditional Hawaiian greeting, but it also has many other meanings and uses including love, peace and compassion.

If you need a little aloha, you can download this to 3D print for free from Thingiverse, Pinshape, Cults or MyMiniFactory.

This was actually designed to stick on our front door which is freshly painted in a very tropical blue. The design process was very simple:

1. Create the outline in Adobe Illustrator.
2. Export as a DXF file.
3. Open in Solidworks.
4. Extrude.
5. Export as a STL file for 3D printing.

Print it large, print it small, and spread some aloha vibes.

– Posted by James Novak

 

Surviving COVID-19 with 3D Printed Toilet Paper

Most of us would agree that some of the events of the last couple of weeks have overshadowed the seriousness of COVID-19 (Coronavirus). In particular, the panic buying of toilet paper, which seemed to start here in Australia and spread like the Coronavirus itself around the globe, has been quite ridiculous to watch. While there is a serious side to this issue, it’s become one of those situations that you have to have a sense of humour about in order to get through.

In response, I thought it would be fun to start 3D printing toilet paper rolls (aka. loo rolls). What started as a single 3D model last week, quickly turned into a series of different toilet rolls that can all be downloaded for free and stockpiled to your heart’s content! Simply select your preferred 3D file platform to download: Thingiverse, Pinshape, Cults or MyMiniFactory.

Collect them all:

1. Hotel Triangle: For a touch of class and those 5-star vibes.
2. Hanging Square: Fully stocked and ready to go.
3. Neat Perf: The clean-cut toilet roll.
4. Half: Nervous times, time to print some more.
5. Last Square: Oh dear….

They were all modelled in Solidworks at half the size of a regular roll of toilet paper. If you prefer a different size, just scale them up or down (i.e. scale 200% to be the same size as a real roll). Great to carry with you everywhere you go for any unexpected emergencies 😉

Divide them amongst your family members, share them with your neighbours, be generous and take a few spares to work – we’re all in this together during Coronavirus 2020.

– Posted by James Novak

 

3D Printed Sea Urchin Light

This project has been a little while in the making and it’s exciting to finally be writing about it. About a year ago I posted about 3D scanning some shells, and as part of the scanning I captured a sea urchin shell. At the time I didn’t know what I’d do with it, but fast forward a year and I’ve found a perfect application; turning the sea urchin shell into ceiling light covers in my house.

In this post I’ll go over the main processes and experiments I went through to get the finished product, but in case you’re just here for the big finale, here’s the link so you can download the final Sea Urchin Light exclusively from my Pinshape account and 3D print as many as you like!

3D Scanning

As explained in further detail in my previous post, I used an EinScan Pro 2X Plus 3D scanner, which included a turntable to automatically capture all angles of the sea urchin shell. This resulted in a full-colour, highly detailed model of the shell, as shown to the right. However, as anyone familiar with 3D scanning will know, this model is just a skin with no thickness or solid geometry, and was just the starting point for the design process.

Design

If you don’t have access to expensive CAD programs, good news; this project was completely designed in free software! I’ve used Autodesk Meshmixer for many of my tutorials and posts, it’s a surprisingly powerful tool and a must for anyone involved in 3D printing. Additionally, it’s quite useful when you are working with 3D scan files, which are typically a mesh like a STL or OBJ. The process took a little time, but has been outlined in 6 basic steps below:

1. Fill any holes and errors in the 3D scanned sea urchin shell. In Meshmixer, this simply involves using the “Inspector” tool under the “Analysis” menu.
2. Scale up the shell to the appropriate size, then use the “Extrusion” tool to thicken the skin into a solid shell. So that the shell would allow a lot of light through, I used a 0.7mm thickness for the overall design.
3. I wanted to create an interesting pattern when the light was turned on, so separated several areas of a copy of the original mesh to be used to create thicker sections. This was a slow process of using the brush selection tool to remove areas, before repeating step 2 with slightly thicker geometry. For this design I ended up with 3 different thicknesses around the shell.
4. To allow the light fitting within the shell, a larger opening was needed at the top. A cylinder was added from the “Meshmix” menu and placed in the centre.
5. By selecting both the shell and the cylinder together, the “Boolean Difference” command became available, subtracting the cylinder section from the shell.
6. Lastly, a neck section measured off the original light fitting was added. I cheated slightly and modelled this in Autodesk Fusion 360 (also free if you’re a student), but you could use Meshmixer – it would just take a bit longer to get accurate measurements. Then the separate parts are joined together using Boolean Union, and the design is finished.

3D Printing

As well as the new design needing to fit the geometry of the existing light fixture, it also needed to fit the build volume of the 3D printer – in this case a Prusa i3 MK3S. As you can see below, the shell is only slightly smaller in the X and Y dimensions than the build plate.

In terms of print settings, I stuck with some pretty typical settings for PLA, including a 0.2mm layer height. Support material is necessary with the light printed with the neck down – this is the best orientation in terms of ensuring the surfaces visible when standing below the light (remember, it is ceiling mounted) are the best. Where support material is removed is always going to be messy, and you wouldn’t want to have these surfaces being the most visible. Overall, this meant that each light took ~32 hours to print.

Material & Finishing

One of the steps that took a bit of experimentation was choosing the right material in order to look good when the light was both on and off. Each of these lights are the main, or only, sources of light in the spaces they are installed, so they need to provide a good amount of light.

As shown above, 3 different materials/finishes were trialled. Initially I began with a Natural PLA from eSUN, which is a bit like frosted glass when printed. While this allowed all the light to escape and illuminate the room, most of the detail was difficult to see in both the on and off settings. It was just like a random glowing blob. I then tried pure white PLA, hoping that the print would be thin enough to allow a reasonable amount of light out. Unfortunately very little light escaped, however, the shadows from the different thicknesses looked excellent, and when the lights was off, it was very clear this was a sea urchin shell. Perhaps this would be a good option for a decorative lamp, but not so good for lighting a whole room.

So the “Goldilocks” solution ended up being in the middle – I 3D printed the shells in the translucent Natural PLA, and then very lightly spray painted the exterior with a matt white paint. Just enough to clearly see that it is a sea urchin shell when the light is off, and translucent enough to allow a lot of light out. Perhaps there is a material/colour of filament that would achieve this with needing to paint, but I didn’t want to have to buy rolls and rolls in order to find it. PETG would be interesting to try, and if you have any other suggestions, please leave them in the comments section.

The Result

To the right are the dimensions of the ceiling light fixture within which the sea urchin light comfortably fits. The light itself is a standard B22 fitting, so the sea urchin can comfortably fit most standard interior lights. However, if you have a different sized fitting, or want to fit it over an existing lamp, you can easily scale the design up or down to suit your needs. I’ve already fitted one of the early small test prints over an old Ikea lamp, it just sits over the top of the existing frame. In total I’ve now installed 5 of the large ceiling light covers in my house, and am planning a new design to replace some of the others (my house is full of this terrible cheap fitting!).

As mentioned at the beginning of this post, I have made this design exclusively available on Pinshape – it’s just a few dollars to download the file, and then you can print as many as you like! If you 3D print one, please share a photo back onto Pinshape, I love seeing where my designs end up and what people do with them.

– Posted by James Novak

3D Printed Model Aircraft Stand

What good is a model aircraft if it’s stuck on the ground? Planes are made to be in the air!

Unfortunately in our recent interstate moves the stand for this model aircraft was lost. But as I’ve said many times on this blog, including the previous post, 3D printing to the rescue! Projects like this really tick all the boxes for me:

1. From idea/need to the final solution can be done in a matter of hours.
2. No need to spend a lot of money buying a replacement (if you can even find one). With 3D printing you can make your own for next to nothing.
3. Bring the product back to life. While there was no need to throw this aircraft away now that it had no stand, some products are not so lucky. If you can replace a missing part, you can extend the use and enjoyment of it.
4. Share it – chances are someone, somewhere, may be looking for exactly the same part. Just as I’m doing here, by sharing what you make, you might save one more product from going to landfill.

Having said that, you can freely download and edit this model aircraft stand from your favourite 3D printing platform: Thingiverse, Pinshape, Cults or MyMiniFactory.

It was designed in Autodesk Fusion 360, and features 2 pieces that print nice and flat, making them strong and durable. Fitting them together is tight, you may need to shave off a little plastic with a file or knife depending on your print quality, but this ensures that you won’t need any glue, and it should hold a good amount of weight without wobbling. The critical dimensions you may be interested in are the size of the stand tip that slots into the aircraft: It measures 6.0mm long (front to back direction of aircraft), 2.3mm wide (wing to wing direction), and 6.0mm tall as pictured below.

If you need a different size, please feel free to make modifications to the files uploaded to the various 3D printing platforms, and then re-share them as a remix. I’m not an aircraft collector and don’t know how many different geometries there may be for stands, this was just the one we needed. Hopefully it is useful for someone else.

– Posted by James Novak