Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

3D-Printed Mathematical Lampshades

hessammehr.github.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 34 posts

Re: 3D-Printed Mathematical Lampshades

#23

Post by embedding-shape »

dekhn wrote: post #16
MengerSponge wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aside from Fusion360, is there a Free (or FOSS) cad package that uses breps and is scriptable? Fusion360 is just stupid fast at perforations and sophisticated modeling constructions via its python API. I use it because it works well, but I'd be happier if I didn't have to maintain that Autodesk dependency...

freeCAD is brep based and scriptable.

FreeCAD via AstoCAD (https://www.astocad.com/ - 4€/month) is quite more user friendly too, compared to the vanilla experience, for those who want to do CAD sometimes and forget things between uses. It's made by FreeCAD contributors who push things upstream too.

Re: 3D-Printed Mathematical Lampshades

#25

Post by nszceta »

dheera wrote: post #20
aforwardslash wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In theory, one should be able to use OpenSCAD to come up with fancy surfaces to 3-D print, right? Yes, but it is painfully slow. Even perforated patterns are quite slow to generate.

OpenSCAD nightly using the Manifold engine is a lot faster than the CGAL crap the stable version ships with

I am learning build123 and skipping OpenSCAD altogether

Re: 3D-Printed Mathematical Lampshades

#26

Post by dekhn »

givc wrote: post #13
mlmonkey wrote: post #2

In theory, one should be able to use OpenSCAD to come up with fancy surfaces to 3-D print, right? I'm just dipping my toes in 3D printing, with a recent acquisition of a Bambu P2S

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 wrote a bit about it here if you’re curious https://hackaday.io/project/202…

Cool project, but just how many polygons are you talking about? Also, my guess is you did meshes, instead of breps- they are far more efficient in my experience.

The largest mesh I worked with in Fusion 360 is a digital elevation map of California, it has 2.8M vertices and 5.6M faces and it's still possible to get things done (like making a CAM to carve a 2 foot x 2 foot map with reasonable details).

Re: 3D-Printed Mathematical Lampshades

#27

Post by bschwindHN »

nszceta wrote: post #24

Author should consider going straight to G-CODE (skip the STL)

I came here to comment this too - if your surface is entirely mathematically defined, converting that to what your 3D printer speaks is probably easier and gives better results than approximating it with triangles and then converting those triangles to G-code.

Re: 3D-Printed Mathematical Lampshades

#28

Post by godelski »

givc wrote: post #7

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

FYI FreeCAD also has Python support

And you're saying it would fail with a nozzle smaller than 0.8mm?!

Post reply on HN