OP here. Let me know if you have any questions, and I'll be happy to answer them.
It has inspired me to finally try OpenSCAD, and I’ve started to put together a parametric version of this: https://u.ale.sh/braunscadv1.png
Not really ready for primetime yet, just wanted to share :-)
EDIT: a quick question: would you be open to sharing your version under a more permissive license? I’d love to reuse some details if you don’t mind, but I’m not sure if I can do that with the current terms.
My experience has been that a great deal of sanding and other tool use can be needed to get to smooth results.
Did you go through a finishing process after printing to get to the smooth results you show here?
Many modern printers also give similar results, but may require a bit of tuning. Also it's as much about the settings in your slicer software, and most current ones have evolved to have great defaults and are easily tweaked.
The top SEO’d buyers guide websites are pretty useless in my experience.
That said, having owned a dozen different printers for my own business’s prototyping work, the Bambu labs are truly fantastic. I retired 3 ultimaker S7s for 2 X1 Carbons and haven’t looked back. The Bambu labs legitimately print 3-4x faster and have as good if not better surface finish. AMS system is ingenious. Only thing I did was x-y squareness/skew compensation so both printers make the same sized parts (the printers aren’t perfectly square from the factory). There are guides on how to use M1005 gcode command.
If your hobby is 3D printing, get a Bambu. If it's 3D printers, get anything else.
If you're working with more exotic or engineering materials, it can still require a bit of work to dial in. But the most common like PLA, ABS, PETG will print without issue.
Bambu does all that and more for less money. Hard to beat.
The Prusa XL may still be worth it if you need that sort of thing.
On the other hand, continuing the bed slinger line let Prusa provide an upgrade path for existing printers.
- print quality and speed is similar (new MK4S seems to be a bit better)
- Bambu's design life is much shorter (Prusas are fully repairable with parts stocked in the online shop, and every new version release includes upgrade kits for old models)
- the amount of effort/babysitting is similar
- reliability seems higher on Prusa's side (no wonder, given that they print parts of the printer on the printers themselves on industrial scale)
Also, if this matters to you, Bambu behaviour (like patenting opensource designs they didn't invent [1] and hostile competitive intelligence [2]) seems quite problematic.
[1]: https://www.mdpi.com/2411-5134/8/6/141
[2]: https://twitter.com/josefprusa/status/1706713274455081120
Got an A1 mini in the recent sale and it's been so refreshing being able to just focus on what I actually want to do, which is printing stuff.
That's what sold me on getting my Bambu, and it's totally true. No need to spend hours carefully aligning and calibrating things.
The acetone (vapour) approach only works on ABS and is pretty nasty. For PLA your best bet is sanding. You could add some putty to make it a bit easier and get better results. You will then also need to paint it. All in all if the print quality is good enough best stick with that.
We don't sand any PLA, anymore. If we need to control the surface texture, it's largely a function of the qualities of the filament and print speed.
I'm mentioning it because we were surprised how easily our molds separated when we moved to Bambu and didn't understand why. It turned out that the combination of the layer height and high print speed that gave the prints their smooth, matte finish with standard PLA also made them functionally non-stick.
We also discovered they're also at least tough enough for a car to drive over, which may have just been because of the thickness. I also sometimes print nylon and polycarbonate automotive parts for a mechanic which seem to have excellent rigidity and durability.
As FDM printing evolves the number of use cases it cannot solve seems to be shrinking. Probably we need to get into physics requirements to cover the requirements that FDM does not solve these days. Which is great, it makes general plastics manufacturing super accessible to the masses when we can arrive at this. I wish there was a general FAQ thing available people would be able to use to determine what manufacturing process would be necessary at the product planning phase. Because I feel like if people knew that they could just 3D print plastics at scale that a lot more people would be willing to innovate in the hardware space, which is a space well known as being difficult to enter and fraught with all sorts of monetary and regulatory land mines.
We do most of our bulk purchasing through MatterHackers, but I buy my own filament through the Bambu store.
If you’re using a color that already has a decent amount of yellow in it or don’t mind the yellowing polyurethane and spar-urethane are also decent finishing options. They won’t work on colors like white though, obviously. Even grey is probably going to see a little too much yellowing from those.
Tbf medium-large sized prints you can see it's printed up real close but from arm's length at 0.12 height you can't really tell.
Only thing is terrible overhangs/bridges...I need to pick up an AMS already!
XTC is a good solution for some use cases, and quite bad for others, as outlined above. For the use case in the OP, probably it would be quite nice. That use case is one that is hobbyist level of output in terms of number of units generated but also one where aesthetics are quite important if not fundamental to the overall design. For this kind of use case XTC is a good fit.
The one other thing to consider, if you design to use stuff like XTC and even the urethanes I mention above, is that obviously it takes up some amount of space. So you have to factor that into the design. Probably what I would do is take my boundaries from the original design and increase the tolerance by maybe 1mm or so for the extra space the finishing agent will take up. Because I highly suspect that if you applied XTC to the dock in the OP that the phone would no longer fit after that due to the tight tolerances in the design without that adjustment.
Also, MEK, Methyl Ethyl Ketone, apparently smooths PLA out quite well too, but if you can print in ABS I would already be doing that for finished products anywho.
MEK is incredibly strong and useful, but it is also nasty stuff[0].
Please read the MSDS[1] and handle with appropriate PPE.
[0] https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfcfr/CFR...
[1] https://www.fishersci.com/store/msds?partNumber=M2094&produc...
Question: Most docks have ample space around the phone to grip it and remove it from the dock easily. Your design encases the phone on every side. How do you get the phone out in the morning?
There are two holes on both sides (for both left- and right-handed people). All you do is push slightly, and it comes out.
You're the third person asking this, so I'll add a section about it to the blog post. Thank you again.
In practice, experience says doing this (in a robust way) is a lot harder than it sounds. ;)
Thanks, very nice design and write-up.
I’ll share the source once it’s a bit less painful to look at (right now everything is a bunch of copy-pasted spaghetti code :')
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-gwXJsWHupg
[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/3Dprinting/comments/3hewrd/has_anyo...
[3] https://old.reddit.com/r/ResinCasting/comments/9v03mp/fillin...
It’s a nice way to stop these types of 3D prints from sliding around in surfaces, without having to resort to weights or lead shot, which it way more painful to integrate that you would expect.
https://sewelldirect.com/products/airstick-microsuction-tape
Asking because I'm interested in getting one, but I know very little about them and have no idea what to research to help me decide.
Shapr3D can import and export pretty usable STEP files.
And Pinterest is great for inspiration.
The design and high quality materials were worth it to me for the same reasons you wanted this design — it is functional art and doesn’t look out of place next to my other quality items I see and use daily.
I could see paying $120 for this dock. I bet this is the kind of thing that would succeed on Kickstarter. Sure, I could print and assemble it myself but that would cost me more than $120 in parts and labor.
What about cases on your phone? I assume you need to remove it first?
> Apple fixes or replaces it for free
Where? In the US they charge $29 and up for repair with AppleCare+. $29 for the screen, $29 more if you damage the glass on the back too. $99 if you damage the camera or anything else that requires replacing the phone altogether.
Building your own, idk, mechanical keyboard? Hackerish thing to do, sure. But buying someone else's cool design is not against "the ethos", that's a silly thing to say. Supporting artisans in their craft is Good, actually, I don't see anything about this design which make it different that way.
HN revolves around YComb and finding ideas that make great products. Someone has come up with a brilliant solution and someone else is saying they want to buy it. HN isn’t about “hacker” purity, it’s about thinking through cool ideas and maybe finding a startup along the way.
If you go that route, you can use my referral code REFOUSPW7TK for 10% off. Totally optional.
You can order it in fdm or sls relatively cheap, just do a search and chuck the model at one or a few of em.
Onshape: It's public domain on Hobbyist plan, so anything I create has to be by default Public. The next plan they have is $1500 yearl
Fusion: This is the most recommended one, however it's macOS and Windows only. Their Hobbyist plan is pretty generous, but the UI is very slow on macOS and it doesn't have an iPad app.
For me, the iPad Pro is a huge enabler. I don't want to sit down in front of my MacBook because I already work the whole day. Second, with the Apple Pencil it's so much easier and intuitive compared to anything else.
The only ceveat with Shapr3D is the cost. I paid for the yearly subscription, which was around $299. And it's the cheapest of all of them btw.
Currently all your corners (excepting the ones that use Apple's supplied bezier points) appear to be tangent but not curvature continuous. As someone with the utmost respect for the learning amateur I would like to kindly inform you that having G1 corners from just hitting "fillet" is the #1 way for design cognoscenti to ascertain that a model was built by an engineer. Alternatively you could try to mimic or offset the G2 curves Apple already paid a bazillion dollars to fine tune.**
* this particular industrial designer x mechanical engineer does not use Shapr but I do see G2 / curvature continuous fillet tools exist via their support page.
** this designer also thinks Apple's and Dieter's corners are too squashed square and has been building devices with slightly sharper and more accelerated corner curvature as the world's natural bends are parabolic or catenary. So roll your own and find your aesthetic voice!*
It's possible the Shapr rendering engine is not very subtle, or perhaps the G2 math is accurate in a strict sense but the output is not very differentiated from G1. It's mathematically possible for there to be a continual change in local radius, i.e. be curvature continuous, while still having local changes be sufficiently aggressive that it visually appears discontinuous at a human scale. Each CAD kernel seems to make these things in its own way, hence different industrial design studios will strongly prefer the use of certain 3D CAD programs to make their final master models (e.g. Alias). Personally I drive CREO as for ages most manufacturers overseas used pirated copies of Pro/E or CREO and thus I could send them "native" surfaces. In that program my preferred curvature continuous coefficient range was 0.52-0.57. I don't have Shapr access handy so messing around with the coefficients and finding a result that you like is outside my domain -- and perhaps you already did!
Still, all that is on the modeling side, but the best way to actually check the visual smoothness of your corners is to use analysis tools like curvature combs to check how aggressively the model is making transitions. It doesn't fundamentally matter if you use the built-in automatic tools or manually adjust b-splines in your NURBS: the smoother your combs change the smoother your corners will look. [I checked the support page for Shapr to see if it supports curvature comb analysis and saw nothing about it, so you may be out of luck on that front until future updates.] Absent that you have to just spin the model in CAD and see how smoothly the highlights roll around and hope the built-in rendering engine is doing its job well.
One last item of subjective crit in sculpting smooth models: when applying a fillet to an edge that turns a corner, such as your interior pocket, you'll have a less visually cramped and abrupt appearance if you use a fillet chord (edge radius) that's nontrivially smaller than the chord length of the turn it has to make (corner radius). Maximized fillets that come to hard corners and make a full spherical bubble, e.g. your initial models shown in gray, generally look less natural than those that allow the fillet to turn the corner. This lets the highlight work its way around in a racetrack form instead of getting "stuck" in the extremes.
Nice work dude, I wouldn't comment if it didn't seem like you're dedicated to making continual improvement and learning new tricks.
I think the always on screen is a 14+ feature.
What case did you design it for use with?