Category Archives: Holiday

Laser Tops!

Halloween, Holiday, projects, toys,

My friend runs a cool open crafting studio, Knot and Purl and I wanted to help her with some give-aways for her Halloween open house. I’ve always wanted better cad for laser crafting, so it was a good opportunity to experiment with different CAD methods. I first modeled it in Onshape. Exporting each of the sketches was a little tedious, but the tools were pretty nice, and it was easy to make the design parametric.

FreeCad is something that has been getting better, and I could learn how to do assemblies to make better pictures for assembly instructions.
The sources and some SVG’s are saved here.

The Sketches were fairly easy (though you really do have to think about how the holes and tabs enlarge and shrink due to the laser’s no-zero kerf.

It was easy to extrude the sketches to make the full top.

I added sliding joints to an assembly. I think the limits can be improved in a parametric fashion, but I was able to make a cool animation.

The TechDraw workbench also allowed me to export all the parts in one sheet:

The SVG export was somewhat doubled. The full figures were on a lower layer, and individual paths were duplicated on top of that. The DXF export however was perfect.

I then wanted to make a kit, and initially I edited the paths in lightburn to make little gaps in each of the outlines to make “tabs.” This is great for a file to share, but it was also easier to use the generate tabs feature in lightburn.
The last thing was to add a QR Code linking to the assembly video.

Holiday Ornament Design Challenge

3Dprinting, Crafts, FamilyFun, Holiday

Over the Holiday break, I challenged my family to design some ornaments for our tree. So far, only Mason (17 year old son) rose to the challenge, and I think he did very well indeed.

He did the designs in OpenSCAD, and at first hardcoded all the measurements until I encouraged him to make the designs fully parametric. This piece was designed to accept a light (from the string lights on the tree) in the bottom. Printed in Natural PLA with about 15% fill, giving it a kindof stripey, plaid texture.

This was printed without support on the Ultimaker 3. The very inside top is a little stringy, but hardly noticeable, and very easy to clean up.

The second design was really the first one he did, and isn’t fully parametric. You’ll have to scale it in your slicer, but it turned out pretty nice.

I printed it in white, thinking it might be fun to use a sharpie to color in the facets. This was printed with the PVA support.
I also printed it in transparent ColorFabb XT. I had a problem with the wipe tower, so the top was a bit messed up with mixed PVA and XT, which broke off, but a light fit into it, and I think it looks nice.

I encourage you to sit down and design with your family this holiday. You can get the sources for these at: http://github.com/osbock/HolidayOrnaments. Feel free to do some Pull requests to add your own designs!

For younger, or less mathematically inclined designers, I recommend Tinkercad.com, or I’m sure there are cool Ipad apps out there. Let me know if you have a favorite!

Lasercast Activate!

3Dprinting, electronics, Halloween, Holiday, toys

I recently got my thumb reconstructed (due to Osteo arthritis). And my new cast felt like it could use an upgrade. Laser! I figure it will be a good addition to my mad scientist costume for Halloween. Chinese laser pointer from ebay or aliexpress (don’t remember, I have a drawer full of laser modules). Adafruit powerboost 500 basic (If I’d had the full one, it could charge too, but this is what I had lying around).  I designed a very basic platform in OpenSCAD, and stuck the board down with mounting tape. The enable switch is soldered directly to the board (I cut off one of the terminals.)

Both the laser platform and the activation button are mounted with Velcro (the cast is coming off…) the button is superglued to the disk that holds the velcro dot.

If you want to make it, it’s very likely that your laser module will be sized differently so edit the openSCAD file to  fit.

3D printed circle the same size as a velcro dot

Holiday project: Dreideltron 5775

FamilyFun, Holiday

The Boston JCC  called me looking for maker activities for an upcoming Hanukkah event, and I thought of this little activity.

The copper tape is pretty unreliable though, and it may not be suitable for a big crowd where there may not be time to debug. I’d be curious to hear of other people’s experience doing paper circuits and the like. This was working perfectly for a while and then it stopped. I suspect the adhesive (which is supposed to be conductive), just stopped conducting. Perhaps I just need to buy higher quality copper tape?