3D Printed Junior Light Box House

Challenge: For student to create a light-box, a 3D Print illuminated by small scale LED.

Background:   We have had previously students dabble in working with using the 3D Printer to create a small structure.  We have also used LED lights and used the 3D Printer to make customised brackets.   You can see the previous examples of the housing attempts here from 2019.  This was a key item from our Market Day in 2019 as the LED lights could be purchased extremely inexpensively.  

We have also an ongoing attempt to use the School Laser Cutter to produce a LED light-shade.  This project is awaiting the purchase of the LED lights as the design and the boxing has been completed.   There is also an additional recent print, which while intended to be for stationary was also a house design and could be easily adapted for this purpose.  This recent print was detailed on this blog here.

The students idea was to design a basic house structure using Tinkercad and use the introduction of a series of windows into the design to allow the light to exit.   There was also a range of furniture that were designed using Tinkercad to be placed inside the house as shown in the photograph from above, left.

The student is a Y4 student who has been creating and designing for the first year this year.   

Level of Difficulty: Medium.  The student in this case has added a number of features to their print, however there is potential for more personalisation. Including potentially a name or a sign, something specific to the area.  This is an area of potential development for the student as this first print was intended as a test run to see the concept and the idea would be successful.

Timeframe: Five hours on the regulation Snapmaker settings.    As noted the student was intending to use this as a test case to see if this idea would be successful and could be developed further.

Size: The print measures 70mm wide, is 70mm long and had walls that were 5mm thick.   The roof starts at the 50mm point with some limited overhang.   The inside area of the house contains ample space for a potential LED light.   The student has mentioned once they have the light to design further housing for this.

What we would do differently/Next steps for the students: Currently the roof stands as a basic opening, one challenge we could potentially put to the student is to work out a way to have a removable roof and how this might affect the design.   The roof has a slight overhang on one side - by inverting the design and printing it from the roof up this would minimise the rafting and allow for the overhang to be created.   Other features like developing a swinging door etc would potential be worked on - as would the potential to scale this to mini-figure size to work in conjunction with Lego Figures.