Ok, so I got a new toy, of course I've been busy.
First off, the fidget toy my son picked out and we printed together. You are going to see lots of that green and orange filament that came with the Bambu.
If you haven't seen these, the green part slides right through the orange part with a satisfying noise as the 3D printed surfaces rub against each other. Perfect for my sons' ADHD brain, he loves it and it blew my wife's mind trying to figure it out the first time she saw it.
Ran into my first problem. The sample pack is all on .250kg spools. These are NOT compatible with the AMS. I ordered them to have so we could play but wondered about this. I apparently didn't have the right terms in my head to google this early on because I couldn't find the info. Now that I can see the inside of the AMS and how it all works, I found out that it is indeed a problem. However, if you have a 3D printer, you can come up with solutions. Oh hey! I have one of those now. Here's my spool adapter I found and printed..
That took quite a bit of time to get printed. I kinda need three more if I want to play with multi color prints.
But first, let's learn some more stuff and start playing with the CAD stuff. I'd started playing with Fusion (apparently they dropped the 360 recently) and then before I got the printer, my Windows computer died. I switched daily use over to my Linux machine until I can build me a new Windows one. Looks like Fusion doesn't support Linux, and like most applications, is barely useable in Wine and there's a Snap version that's also a pain. Can't use the web version unless you fall into a certain category of people which I don't, so I went in search of something useable. I made it about two minutes into TinkerCAD before I figured out it wasn't going to do what I wanted it to do. Then I tripped upon OpenSCAD. Holy crap is this jumping off the deep end! If you haven't used it, it's more for technical things and not so good for artistic things, and that's because there's no graphical tools. It's all code. I like code, but not everybody does. It does have a graphical output to show you what your code is doing so there's that. It's also cool because it makes you think about what the CAD stuff is doing in the background. All the stuff Bill was talking about previously about duplicating and mirroring and such, it makes more sense now, and was perfect for what I needed to work on.
So, here's the problem. My chop saw will try to fling the sawdust up the chute and into the collection bag. But it's better if you can hook up a shop vac to it. I have a tiny shop vac for cleaning out the car, so the nozzle doesn't fit.
I once tried to wrap an entire roll of tape around the nozzle to make it work but it was a pain.
I got something simple right away but when I wanted to round the edges, it turns out that it is very hard to do bevels and chamfers in OpenSCAD. I found a guy who had written a whole library that can round any corner on any shape, so I spent some time learning how ti works and used one of his samples as a starting point
Here's the progress for my adapter. On the right is a quick print to make sure I had sizes right. In the middle is the first version and on the left is the finished product. I'm figuring out how to hide seams, because I don't see them on the downloaded models but they appear on mine. The bumps on the left one is making them random, I forgot to turn the middle one so you could see the lined up seam. The middle one I somehow fat figured the numbers for the upper hole and it was too big.
Top hole is still a smidge large, but the taper on the vacuum hose is very small, less than 1mm, so the tolerances are tough there, I'll get better but this will work.
In case you are curious about the code. Basically it uses his library to define a polygon based on points and then rounds the corners before rotating the entire thing 360 degrees to create a vase like shape. Everything is variables so I can tweak easily until I get it right.
A set of OpenSCAD utilities for adding radii and fillets, that embodies a robust approach to developing OpenSCAD parts. - Irev-Dev/Round-Anything
github.com
Code:
use <roundAnything/polyround.scad>
Thickness = 6;
IDTop = 31.5;
ODBottom = 56;
ODMiddle = ODBottom + 2;
IDBottom = ODBottom - (Thickness*2);
ODTop = IDTop + (Thickness*2);
IDMiddle = ODMiddle - (Thickness*2);
Height = 51;
rotate_extrude(angle = 360, convexity =10, $fn = 200)
polygon(
polyRound(
[
[IDMiddle/2,15,40],
[IDTop/2,Height,2],
[ODTop/2,Height,2],
[ODBottom/2+1,15,40],
[ODBottom/2,0,0],
[IDBottom/2,0,0],
]
,20)
,0.1);
Welcome to the Two Wheeled Texans community! 
Feel free to hang out and lurk as long as you like. However, we would like to encourage you to register so that you can join the community and use the numerous features on the site. After registering, don't forget to post up an introduction!
)
