Purpose and Inspiration:
In the Innovation Lab this week we had a request from an M-Term trip to create connectors for a group students going to French Polynesia to study marine and coastal ecologies and their biodiversity.
The trip wanted us to create 3D printed corner connectors for the “One Cubic Foot” cubes they were building out of broken or damaged arrow shafts. This project was inspired by National Geographic’s coverage of David Liittschwager’s work (video)
Customize it!
Since there was a good chance that not everyone has broken arrows laying around I took this as the perfect excuse for me to finally learn the basics of MakerBot’s Customizer tool that allows Thingiverse users to create custom 3D files for printing. Users are able to change the radius of the holes and wall thickness in the model and then save the resulting custom-sized corner piece to be printed.
The tool uses the OpenSCAD modeling language which creates the model from a series of commands. Some of the documentation is great but it definitely has a steep learning curve. Perhaps I’ll create a video tutorial if time permits (before I forget it all).
Result:
It is still in beta since there are a couple of tweaks to be added but it’s up and functional: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:253081
One Cubic Foot Connector
Deer track
Completed “Cubic Foot”
MakerBot Customizer Corner tool
For those interested in David Liittschawager’s book you can find it here: A World in One Cubic Foot: Portraits of Biodiversity