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 text for our 3D-printed name badge

In Chapter 5, Using Advanced Operations of OpenSCAD, we extruded text for our Thumbs Up Award design. Our focus was on creating a dynamic backing plate based on the size of the text, thus we limited our exposure of OpenSCAD's text operation to a monospaced font with default alignment and size settings.

In this section, we will look more closely at the text operation and at ways that would make our text curve around shapes. Let's start by taking a closer look at the text operation.

Understanding the OpenSCAD text operation

At the time of writing, the OpenSCAD text operation has 10 parameters that can be set. These include parameters for font, vertical and horizontal alignment, as well as the size of text and the spacing between letters. A full list of these parameters can be found here: https://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/OpenSCAD_User_Manual/Text.

In this section, we will look at using a specialized font, letter spacing, font...