3D printed flaps

[wifasoi]

I think it's something that can automate the pain of sourcing, cutting and sticking the letter for making each flap.
For multimaterial printing you need to separate each color/material in a separate STL/mesh file.

For doing si I hacked the openascad script for generating the multi material file for me, and now I'm printing the flaps with my 3D printer; the result are: good enough :D

The question if this is something you want to support, so I can put some effort to clean up the script to support this output (maybe using something based on #113).

[scottbez1]

Hi @wifasoi, sorry for taking a while to respond!

I'm happy to include this and support it, so long as it can be done without too much deviation from existing design files, so that the cognitive load and maintenance burden is minimized. I'm assuming that mult-material flap printing will be relatively rare (though this reddit post has me rethinking that assumption), so the complexity it adds needs to be very low in order to be worth the inclusion.

That said, I currently have another flap refactor -- an alternative to #113 -- in progress (#154), which may make it tricky/painful to modify flaps for 3d printing until that has landed - the flap 3d model has been moved to its own file and now incorporates the letter positioning as part of the module as well - maybe a useful step towards supporting this, or maybe it complicates things?

By the way, did you take a look at generate_stl.py and ColoredStlExporter? Those may be useful for the export process - it generates separate STL files automatically per color and is used to build the 3d model seen here - but I'm curious if you came up with a different approach.

[caseydierking]

Scott, can the files exported from the generate_stl.py be 3dprintable to work with the overall design?

[scottbez1]

Closing this issue for lack of response. @caseydierking sorry for not responding earlier; for the more general discussion of 3d printing the entire enclosure/mechanics, please see #127

[wifasoi]

Sorry for the super late reply.
So i rewritten my code based on #154, and the flap refactor helped alot :D
So a description of what I did to archive my goal:

• I made the letter thicknes a module parameter, and sunk it down in the flap if the tickness value is < 0 (wifasoi@7483325)
• create a new .scad file that implement two module for getting the letters and the flap (for now just hardcoded with a subtract with the letters) (wifasoi@c018901)

What is missing:

• modify (maybe generate_fonts.py) or create a python script to export the models.

Anyway, is this an acceptable contribution I can open a PR and we can discuss further.

[scottbez1]

Cool, yeah those 2 commits look good! Would love a PR to add those