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mlmonkeyyesterday at 6:55 PM8 repliesview on HN

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


Replies

givcyesterday at 9:12 PM

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/202488-manhattan-subway-map/deta...

doleyesterday at 9:21 PM

I was able to take the image of the star-shaped graph from OP, fed it to claude and used this for the prompt: "figure out a good formula or equation for this graph and use it to create the lampshade in openscad. use the graph as the bottom for a lampshade, and taper it all up to center point. leave a hole at the top big enough for a lightbulb fixture to pass through." It did a surprisingly good job of generating the OpenSCAD, STL, and preview renders in-browsers.

Zarathrusteryesterday at 7:48 PM

I was in your shoes about a year ago with an A1 mini, getting into OpenSCAD to make my own keycaps.

If you're getting into OpenSCAD I'd highly recommend getting Belfry ASAP.

https://github.com/BelfrySCAD/BOSL2/wiki

I wouldn't really consider using OpenSCAD without it

hessammehryesterday at 7:10 PM

I haven't used OpenSCAD much beyond combining primitives. Truthfully these organic shapes are more of a use-case for 3D modelling software like Blender rather than CAD, but I'd be keen to hear if you end up giving OpenSCAD a go.

My Bambu A1 mini has been reliable despite the challenging geometry; pretty sure your P2S will work just as well if not better. Good luck!

horacemoraceyesterday at 10:39 PM

Yes. Claude is surprisingly capable in this area, maybe because the shapes are so simple. Using a slicer in vase mode should make it print quickly too.

nomelyesterday at 10:29 PM

For this case, I'm not exaggerating when I say you would probably have an easier time generating the meshes yourself in python and something like the trimesh library to load the vertices into.

aforwardslashyesterday at 8:51 PM

> 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.

show 2 replies
dheerayesterday at 11:26 PM

Yeah OpenSCAD would have made this a lot easier than the exported-SVG-DXF pipeline