Book Image

Simplifying 3D Printing with OpenSCAD

By : Colin Dow
5 (1)
Book Image

Simplifying 3D Printing with OpenSCAD

5 (1)
By: Colin Dow

Overview of this book

Want to bring your 3D designs to life with OpenSCAD, but don’t know where to start? Simplifying 3D Printing with OpenSCAD will teach you the key skills so that you can focus on your ideas, not troubleshooting your 3D printer. With the help of this book, you’ll build a solid foundation in 3D printing technology, the software used for designing your objects, and an analysis of the G-code produced by the 3D printer slicer software. You’ll also get to know your 3D printer and find out how to set up a printing job effortlessly — from configuring the parameters to build well-defined designs. Consider yourself a practical learner? Use real-world examples such as designing and printing a 3D name badge, model rocket, and laptop stand, to dive into the world of 3D printers build your skillset. By the end of this 3D printing book, you'll be ready to start designing and printing your own 3D printed products using OpenSCAD and being your ideas into reality.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
1
Part 1: Exploring 3D Printing
5
Part 2: Learning OpenSCAD
9
Part 3: Projects
13
Part 4: The Future

Creating our own OpenSCAD library

One way to turn our desk drawer code into a library file is to add it to our OpenSCAD installation's libraries directory. We can open this location on our computer by clicking on File | Show Library Folder... in OpenSCAD.

Before we do that, we should take note of how we will be using this library. If we were to simply copy the code as we left it in the Using the BOSL to design a desk drawer section, we could see the whole drawer with the sliders generated. This would happen when using an include statement for importing:

include <desk_drawer.scad>

This is due to the non-module code at the end of the file that creates the drawer and the sliders we added in the Using the BOSL to design a desk drawer section. We will, however, be able to change the size of the drawer and sliders, as we will have access to the non-module variables declared at the beginning of the desk_drawer.scad library file. This may seem like the way we should approach...