Book Image

3D Printing Designs: Design an SD Card Holder

By : Joe Larson
Book Image

3D Printing Designs: Design an SD Card Holder

By: Joe Larson

Overview of this book

Want to model a 3D printed prototype of an object that needs to be replaced or broken? This book will teach you how to accurately measure objects in the real world with a few basic measuring techniques and how to create an object for 3D printing around the objects measured. In this book, you'll learn to identify basic shapes from a given object, use Vernier and Digital calipers and grid paper tracing techniques to derive measurements for the objects. With the help of measurements, you'll see to model these objects using Blender, organize the parts into layers, and later combine them to create the desired object, which in this book is a 3D printable SD card holder ring that fits your finger.
Table of Contents (11 chapters)

Chapter 4. An SD Card Holder Ring

Many 3D printers can print directly from an SD card instead of being hooked up to a computer all the time. This presents a problem of transporting SD cards without tying up your hands. Or pockets. A ring that you can put an SD card in is just the thing.

While a ring you can put an SD card in is a slightly silly solution, it's an excellent example of modeling based on physical objects. Both a finger and an SD card will need to be measured, and the design will have to be modeled too:

This chapter will walk you through the process of making a cool 3D-printed project, going through the following steps:

  • Taking measurements

  • Modeling the ring

  • Testing the ring

  • Adding an SD card holder

  • Putting it all together

  • Extra credit

The challenges of matching real-life measurements to 3D-printed objects is made difficult by plastic shrinkage and inaccuracies in 3D printers' operations. I'll comment on that when it becomes important.

Some would claim that Blender isn't capable of CAD...