this was the starting image
Ask ChatGPT for a cartoon of a happy axolotl and then feed it into the Bambu Flexi-Toy maker and you get something like the above. Although I don’t think I made a very good job of placing the hinges. However, it did manage to impress the recipient, which was kind of the point.
Behold, the super secret encoder. Each spy has their 3D printed encoder strip. Individually they are meaningless, but stack them together and the secret word is revealed. Other words can be entered if required.
You can create your own encoders using a little Python program that runs inside FreeCAD. The code is here: https://github.com/CrazyRobMiles/Python-in-FreeCAD
Might be fun for Christmas messages. It’s never too early to start.
My scheme to bring back punched cards is gathering pace…
If you wear glasses and have a 3D printer, or have a 3D printer, don’t wear glasses and know someone who does wear glasses or…. This is getting far too complicated. This looks like a really nice print for a very clever foldable case. I’m going to have a go with it.
I fancied some 3D printed lens cases. So me and ChatGPT wrote a little Python program that runs inside FreeCAD to make them. I find ChatGPT a useful coding companion. It doesn’t usually get the code right, but it does provide enough insight into how the code is supposed to work to make it much easier to create something that does what you want.
As an additional flourish, we managed to put text on the outside of the case by rendering a TrueType font into a shape and then cutting it out of the case. You can see the results above. Next step is to get some foam and make some inserts to keep the lens nice and safe. I’m going to tidy up the code a bit and put it on GitHub.
If you ever need a film holder to scan some APS film you can find my film holder on Thingiverse here.
If you fancy a slightly different Christmas Wreath (although it might a bit late to start now) you could do a lot worse than download “Not another LegoBrick Wreath” from Bambu Maker World and print a copy.
YOu can print a case too
I’ve put my Minox Cassettes on Thingiverse so you can download them and have a go at printing your own cassettes. You can find my other Minox resources here.
Close but no cigar
As part of the fixing of the Canon Dial camera I needed a spanner to remove the dial spring winder. The spanner is a bit special because it needs to fit between the winder and the camera body. Ivan was kind enough to make me one out of brass, but it turned out to be a little bit too thick. So I thought I’d 3D print one. I’ve been impressed with how tough PETG prints have turned out, and the spanner doesn’t have to be particularly strong, so I was hopeful this might work.
And, since I’m lazy I thought I’d ask ChatGPT to produce the spanner design as a Python program I can run inside FreeCAD. I asked the question and out popped some Python. Which didn’t work. There then followed around fifteen minutes of me explaining why the supplied design was wrong, followed by ChatGPT then producing a differently wrong result along with an explanation of how it had fixed the faults that were still there.
Eventually I gave up and wrote the design in about five minutes or so. These things are very clever, but if they get it wrong it seems that sometimes it stays wrong whatever you do.
The spanners worked a treat, although I had to make a really thin one
You can find the stl file here. If you want to change the thickness you can scale the Z value when you slice it.
The two images on the left are at 0.2mm layer height and the one on the right is at 0.1mm
I forgot to mention that my article about Carbonization is also in HackSpace this month. Worth reading if you’ve always wanted to embed your friends and relatives in plastic.
Shown with mug for scale..
If you fancy making your own drinks coaster to celebrate fifty years of Computer Science at Hull I’ve put the design on the web site here. It will print directly on a Bambu device. I've put filament changes in the file so that you can get a nice contrast.
You can find out more about our celebration plans here.
The two on the left are 0.2 layer height and the one on the right is 0.1
Had a happy time this morning embedding people in Carbonite. If you want to have a go yourself I’m updating the program with 3D preview. Find it here.
It did a nice job with “Nissan cube”
And this is a very presentable Twin lens REflex camear
I might even have a go at printing some of these.
It’s supposed to be a picture of a duck
I’m writing some rendering code at the moment for the Kinect Carbonizer. This takes a 3D photograph of you using a 3D sensor and then gives you a file for your 3D printer. I thought it might be fun to create a 3D preview of the object. Above you can see my first attempt. I think I need to work at scaling….
I now have no idea what to do with it….
I spent today fiddling with vertexes, vectors and triangles. Along with the odd sine wave. You can see the result above. I’m actually quite proud of it.
Printer Poop produced when switching colours
We’re having a hardware meetup next Wednesday evening at Hull Makerspace in the Central Library in Hull. We’ll be opening 5:30 pm with a presentation of 3D printing lithophanes and the HueForge program starting around 6:00 pm. We’ll finish around 7:00pm
There’s no need to book, just turn up and look interested. If you’ve got anything to show off we’d love to see it.
I’ve Cropped off the very dark areas
I thought it might be fun to make a lithophane of a colour test chart just to get an idea of how well colours are resolved and what colours you could get. Above you can see the original chart. I ran it through Colour Lithophane Maker and then printed it.
This is 0.1mm layers with a 0.4mm nozzle
This is the lithophane that I got. Quite interesting. I think it might be worth running your images through a “posterise” filter of some kind before making the lithophane.
This is fresh from the printer plate, complete with purge tower
HueForge is amazing. It lets you care 3D printable pictures from images.
I’ve mapped different colurs in the image to different filaments
The original image is on the right. The predicted print is on the left. On the bottom left you can see the four colours I’m using (black, blue, grey and white) and you adjust the sliders to determine the image colours they match. It works wonderfully well and drops out an STL file. You just have to tell your printer the layer numbers where the colour changes and away you go.
If you have a 3D printer that can print different colours you should get HueForge. It’s as simple as that.
Carbonized Duck ready for printing
Around ten years ago I created one of my first ever GitHub repositories when I uploaded the code for my Kinect Carbonizer. You can find it here. Now that I have a 3D printer that can print things in colour (and at speed) I thought I’d revisit the project with a view to making some multi-coloured carbonized images. I installed the Kinect toolkit, plugged in my Kinect sensor, downloaded the repository, pointed Visual Studio 22 at it and it just compiled and ran.
Amazing.
I had one issue, where the USB on my Windows 10 machine refused to properly recognise the Kinect sensor. I’ve updated the GitHub page with the fix for this.
You can pick up Kinect 2 (not the the original Kinect 360) sensors really cheaply nowadays. You can’t plug them into your computer directly - you need an adapter and power supply - but you can pick them up on ebay at a good price too.
Bambu Studio lets you set the colour of each layer in a print so I should be able to make multi-coloured carbonized prints quite easily. Such fun.
I thought you might like to see the original picture. I took it in Melbourne a few years ago
Most 3D printers use a print nozzle which is 0.4mm in diameter. This is a good compromise between speed and quality. But you can get 0.2mm diameter ones too. So I’ve tried printing the same lithophane as you saw yesterday, but with a 0.2 nozzle. There is a definite improvement, but I don’t think it is worth the extra six hours of printing.
This is using a 0.2mm nozzle for best results
The detail is improved, but I would have to add more layers to get rid of the sky banding. Which would make the print time even larger. I reckon a good compromise is 0.1mm layer height with a 0.4mm nozzle. And perhaps not an image with lots of gradual colour changes.
Rob Miles is technology author and educator who spent many years as a lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Hull. He is also a Microsoft Developer Technologies MVP. He is into technology, teaching and photography. He is the author of the World Famous C# Yellow Book and almost as handsome as he thinks he is.
