OpenSCAD

It’s been a pretty busy Christmas period having moved house (again) but I’ve been making some more progress on the chassis. One of the things that has been bugging me with my current system based on Illustrator is that it is so difficult to make small changes (e.g. the material thickness) because you have to manually go and tweak all of the dimensions of all of the slots and holes to compensate. So on my normal rounds of exploring makers on the web I came across this smart bottle carrier which mentioned that it was built in OpenSCAD which allows you to make parametric changes to the design to adjust it for things like this.

A few days later and I’ve been making steady progress on getting my design into this awesome program. It’s pretty basic, but extremely powerful, especially if you can program. Some things take a very long amount of time (e.g. trying to do any curved edges!) but others, especially those that are simple repeating elements or geometrical operations can be defined easily in code are very quick.

One of the nice things about this program is that it should make it easier when I open the designs because if someone wants to cut it themselves but only has 4mm ply, they should be able to just adjust the material thickness constant to suit. It should then be possible to just export as a DXF and start cutting.

For some reason, I also find it to be an extremely satisfying process and have been enjoying it massively.