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)

Extra credit


In this project, modifiers were used on simple objects right up to the final object. This allowed the creation of a more complex object while retaining the editability of the simpler objects. However, leaving modifiers unapplied becomes undesirable when objects become too complex. Having to rebuild an object every time an edit is made can crash a computer.

For fun, try to see how quickly Blender will slow down, and maybe try to crash it, by making several cubes and adding a Subsurf modifier to increase their polygon count. Then Boolean the smoothed cubes together, but don't apply the Boolean modifiers. Add more and more Subsurfed cubes and add them to the Boolean object. Then start moving around and editing the cubes to see when performance becomes choppy. It may be surprising how little it takes, depending on your system:

Also, with the measurements of an SD card available, any object can be turned into an SD card holder. Why not make an SD holder key chain or an SD holder that...