Thinking, Creating, and Printing Using Tinkercad

-
My first task this summer was to create useful objects using Tinkercad. It sounds like a simple task; however, I spent a good amount of time pondering about what objects I can 3D print that are "useful." Eventually, I decided on building an egg lamp, which was inspired by Daenerys' dragon eggs from Game of Thrones.

Daenerys' dragon eggs in Game of Thrones.
Photo from Popsugar

In Tinkercad, I used two egg shapes, the Voronoi design, and two cylinders to create the egg lamp. I partially followed a tutorial as I was just starting to learn my way around Tinkercad, but rather than using a ring shape and a square for the bottom, I used a cylinder so that the egg can stand upright.

This was my final result in Tinkercad.

Once I was satisfied with how the egg lamp looked, I had to save it as an STL file and open it in Cura in order to prepare it for printing. In Cura, I am able to adjust the size of the egg lamp  and I can determine if supports are needed as well as what kind of supports would work best. Cura also  allows me to preview how the 3D printer will print the egg lamp and it tells me how long it will take to print. After making adjustments to the settings as necessary, the final step before printing is to save the file as a G-code and save the G-code to an SD card, which will be inserted into the printer.

I can change the size of the egg lamp in Cura.

Cura allows me to slice and see how the 3D printer will print the egg lamp.

Before printing the actual size of an object, it is important to print a smaller version of it in case something does not turn out as expected. I printed a mini version of the egg lamp using the Flashforge Creator Pro 3D Printer.




For the most part, the mini version printed perfectly; however, I decided to make minor changes to overall enhance its appearance. I adjusted the Voronoi designs to ensure that they would not overlap and instead of using a cylinder for the top opening, I used a sphere to create a smoother edge. For the final print, I decided to make the egg lamps between 3.5 to 4 inches tall, and it came out amazing.

String lights were used to give the egg lamp an icy blue look.

Tealights fit into the egg lamp as well.

The egg lamp is a beautiful piece of decor that can be placed anywhere, such as a bedroom or living room. I find it useful in my bedroom at night when I'm reading Game of Thrones.

The egg lamp was only one of the two ideas that I had for printing useful objects. The second object, which is a coin jar, is not as intriguing as the egg lamps, but it definitely useful as most people have one. The process of building the coin jar in Tinkercad was not difficult at all. I simply used two cylinders to construct the base, making one of the cylinders slightly smaller than the other. I then made the smaller cylinder a hole and used the align feature to place it perfectly inside the other. The lid was also created with two cylinders, but I flatten the cylinders significantly. One cylinder was made smaller and was placed on top of the other cylinder.  In order to ensure that the lid fit into the base, I made the smaller cylinder one millimeter smaller than the inner cylinder of the base while the bigger cylinder is the same size as the outer cylinder of the base. Lastly, to complete the lid, I adjusted the size of a box to give it a rectangular shape and made it a hole to have it serve as the opening for the coins to be inserted into.


On the left is the prototype and on the right is the actual size of the coin jar, which is about 5 inches tall.

Although the coin jar is not as attractive as the egg lamps, it is useful when it comes to saving money. Instead of carrying change in your wallet, put it in the coin jar and after several months, you might find that you have a hundred dollars or more saved!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

An Exhibition of Minimal Surfaces

-
Image
In my previous blog post, I provided a brief history and explanation of the math of minimal surfaces. Now, in this post, I will give a plethora of examples of minimal surfaces as well as illustrate the relationship between minimal surfaces and soap films and demonstrate applications to 3D printing. Some of the examples will include images from Maple where I plotted the surface and colored it by its mean curvature, while other examples were taken from online because the minimal surfaces were too difficult to plot. Overall, this post is meant to be a visual presentation of minimal surfaces. The first nontrivial minimal surface was discovered by Leonhard Euler in 1744, which is now known as the catenoid (Dillen & Verstraelen, 2000, p.207) . The catenoid on the right is colored by its mean curvature. It is a single color because the mean curvature is zero at every point. In order to plot the catenoid in Maple, I used the uv -parameterization that  Weisstein provided on Wolfram
Read more

Printing a Gorgeous Goblet with the Help of Maple

-
Image
Part 1: Generating the 3D Model in Maple Along with using Tinkercad to create stunning egg lamps, I used Maple, a powerful math software, to design a unique 3D goblet. Unlike Tinkercad, Maple does not have built in shapes that one can modify to obtain their desired object. Rather, Maple allows me to graph functions so that I can see the 2D version of the goblet before I revolve the functions about the z-axis in order to generate the 3D model. Thus, using Maple was more challenging than building objects in Tinkercad, but Maple has an abundance of commands that enables one to generate a 3D model of a complex object. The goal of this goblet project was to not only successfully design and 3D print the goblet, but to also learn how to use the various Maple commands and to calculate the volume of the goblet using calculus methods. Before opening Maple, I had to ponder about the shape of the goblet as I wanted the stem to consist of several different functions, ellipses, or circles so tha
Read more

The Historical Timeline of Minimal Surfaces and the Mathematics behind its Defining Property

-
Image
A photo of a catenoid. Image from Catenoid Minimal Surface What is a Minimal Surface?  As one might think, a minimal surface is a surface that minimizes its surface area for given boundary conditions. Moreover, the more mathematical definition of a minimal surface is a surface with zero mean curvature ( Weisstein) . In this post, I will not only expound the mathematical definition of a minimal surface, but I will also provide a brief history of curvature and minimal surfaces. The Study of Curvature and Minimal Surfaces Throughout the Years  The history of curvature goes back a long way, but for this post I will begin telling its story in the 18th century. Leonhard Euler (1707-1783), being the first to study curvature of surfaces, provided the world of differential geometry the formula for normal curvature in 1760 (Schreck, 2016, p.120). This was seen as a huge breakthrough. Adding to the study of curvature in 1771 was Gaspard Monge (1746-1818) who studied space curve
Read more