Good Morning from my Robotics Lab! This is Shadow_8472, and today, I am once again picking up the night light project. It’s been a rough week progress wise, so there isn’t much progress. Let’s get started!
The next task is modeling up the print and executing it. It took me a while, but I finally broke off the first piece: actually modeling the lamp base. The lamp I took apart is a sphere with a flattened base. I used a flattened cylinder and scaled up the proportions to the size of the base. The greater radius and height were spot on accurate on the metric system, so when it came to the curved edge of the smaller circle, I rounded to the closest millimeter.
The next challenge is refining the base model and integrating it into my house structure. The base has three screw holes I intend to use to fasten it to the cover as it prints. At some point, I’ll need to model the screw holes in. I’m just glad I managed to get it in at all. However, realized that stock Blender is not the right tool for the job.
Before my next printing project, or sooner if I really need it before then, I will want to find a plugin for Blender that adds some missing CAD functionality. Already, I have been missing the ability to measure between two points of a model, and I had to scale the models using a known size and modifier factors instead of just making something x cm tall. I will say Blender did treat me nicely when I pulled it across my second screen and set it up with multiple angles of my work. It felt good to finally have a visual of how big the base/lamp will be relative to one another.
The next major chunk of work should be modeling up pins I can attach the lamp base. I’ll likely need to underestimate a little and won’t get as tight as a fit as I did with the Pi camera because I won’t have the luxury of sanding. On the other hand, a little cleanup isn’t out of the question.
Final Question: Do you know of any good CAD plugins for Blender?