Designs
I started with designing some lenses. In OpenSCAD, I developed some code that can produce a bi-convex or plano-convex lens, and an equivalent fresnel lens. Designing these was straightforward, but printing them has been complicated. In the test-prints gallery, you’ll see some of the lenses that I’ve printed in transparent PLA and PETG. I haven’t (yet!) found the right combination of settings in Cura that will print these with the level of transparency I’m looking for. These prints may also improve with some manual resurfacing, which I have not yet tried.
In a similar vein, I’ve also experimented with printing cubes that have designs embedded them (like a laser-etched glass cube). I developed a simple L-System generator in Python, and used it to generate an interesting looking tree-like shape as an OpenSCAD script.
I then was able to generate a end-mesh in OpenSCAD, for use in Cura. As before, I have not yet been able to print shapes with a very high level of transparency, so the test prints in this area aren’t very interesting. If I’m able to improve the quality of these transparent prints, I’ll probably revisit this idea in some form.
Still in the realm of experimentation, I’m working on designing a lit shape that incorporates the celestial sphere. My first idea is a simple sphere shape with a hole in the surface corresponding to each visible star from Earth.
Test Prints
Revised Timeline
At this point, I’m a bit behind per my original timeline. I’ve done a fair amount of experimentation with transparent plastics, but haven’t settled upon a set of forms that make use of light yet.
So for my revised timeline I’ll be compressing things a bit:
- I’ll be striving to finish up a design for my forms over the break.
- Next week through the end of class will remain the same — print nice-quality versions of my finalized design.