3D Printing is a fairly new and exciting technology that is taking the world by storm. It was first developed in the 1980s, but humanity is now at the point where it is becoming more and more easy to print a myriad of different things. From simple items like a hair comb, all the way to printing human organs and body parts, 3D printing has come a long way and people are creating even more and interesting things each and every day.
That is pretty much the reason why I took this class. I wanted to learn how to create things on my own, and get more insight into how and why large corporations manufacture products the way that they do. I have gained some valuable insights along the way that have given me a better understanding of production and using 3D printing. We started out using a pretty simple software called TinkerCAD, which uses geometric shapes to mold your design. From there we used 123D design, which is pretty similar to TinkerCAD but is a bit more precise. Next we used OpenSCAD. I did not like OpenSCAD at all, I found that it was quite difficult to maneuver and I had trouble visualizing in my mind what my design would look like before it actually appeared in front of me.
One of the best parts of the 3D printing class was that we were given “class challenges” that we needed to complete. Over the semester we were given three challenges and I am choosing to write this blog about the second class challenge, the CIT Swag Challenge.
JMU CIT logo
The Center for Instructional Technology held a conference during the semester and it was the class’s job to make “swag” for the event. Swag means “stuff we all get” and basically it is small trinkets and fun objects that the people attending the event get to come away with. One of the parameters of the challenge was that the swag had to have the CIT logo on it. Some groups made key chains with the logo on it, some made Duke Dogs with the CIT logo on them, just to name a few of the objects. My partner Sophia and I decided to make an iPhone 6 case with the CIT logo on the back of it.
The actual design of the phone case was quite simple. We found an already-made iPhone 6 case on Thingiverse (an open database with thousands of 3D printing designs that people all over the world have made) and we tweaked it a little on TinkerCAD so that it could fit well and was still easy to be mass-produced for the event. Next we had to get the logo on it so we found a website that converts pictures to SVG files. SVG files are a type of file that the printing software recognizes and so it was a lot easier than designing the logo ourselves. After converting the CIT logo into an SVG file, we placed it onto the back of the iPhone case in TinkerCAD. Then we were ready to print.
Sophia and my iPhone 6 CIT case
The real challenge came in printing the design. As we soon discovered, the iPhone 6 is just a bit too large for the Afinia printers. It was just barely outside of the confines of the platform. We then had to use the MakerBot printer. We had never used it before so figuring out how to use it was a challenge but nothing that we could not handle. After a little while we finally finished our design and it came out really well!
Overall this was a fantastic challenge and I learned a lot more about 3D printing because of it.
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