3D Printing Designs: Design an SD Card Holder

Key Features

• This book shows you how to design from a reference to physical objects that can be easily represented by simple basic objects in Blender (cube, cylinder, sphere, and so on) by measuring them
• This is the only book on the market that shows you how to take your first steps to create 3D printed objects that are able to interact with existing objects
• Learn how to utilize Blender's functionality to make your designs more precise and accurate

Book Description

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.

What you will learn

• Gain techniques to accurately measure the objects with rules, manual calipers, and digital calipers
• Break down complex geometries into multiple simple shapes and model them in layers using Blender
• Scale and re-scale a model to fit based on volume or size constraints
• See how to multishell geometries and auto-intersections using the Boolean Modifier

Joe Larson is one part artist, one part mathematician, one part teacher, and one part technologist. It all started in his youth when he worked on a Commodore 64, doing BASIC programming and low-resolution digital art. As technology progressed, so did Joe's dabbling, eventually taking him to 3D modeling while in high school and college, and he temporarily pursued a degree in computer animation.

He abandoned this field for the much more sensible goal of becoming a math teacher, which he accomplished when he taught 7th grade math in Colorado. He now works as an application programmer. When Joe first heard about 3D printing, it took root to his mind, and he went back to dust off his 3D modeling skills. In 2012, he won a Makerbot Replicator 3D printer in the Tinkercad/Makerbot Chess challenge with a chess set that assembles into a robot. Since then, his designs on Thingiverse have been featured on Thingiverse, Gizmodo, Shapeways, Makezine, and other places.