3D Printed Christmas Present

 

Challenge:To produce a unique Christmas themed decoration that was suitable to be hung from a Christmas Tree.

Background: Its festive season here in New Zealand and as the New Zealand school system runs from February to December we are nearly finished another year with four weeks to go! We've a range of students who have been in the classroom for two years and who are moving onto our senior school.

As we have detailed in earlier posts on this blog related to the project theme.    In this instance following the work on our virtual Christmas trees the students have followed it up by creating a decoration.   In this instance a present was created.

The original design was shown left.   It is a straightforward design, once our school technology matrix had been applied to it the student thought about additional design elements that could be introduced.   The first was the personalisation and the date which were easily added by the student putting both in the top right and bottom left corner.

The other feature can be seen in the top left hand corner of the first design.   This is the new insert for Tinkercad designs which is the 'picture icon'.   It allows a digital image to be introduced into a virtual design on the Tinkercad dashboard.

This design feature while it does enhance the design in the main design space it does not translate to a print or AR/VR as in both cases it is not appearing for the transfer.   When we had a discussion about this with the students in the classroom the idea was raised that the image, which is in this case a photograph of the subject, it could of course be created using the Roland Versa Sign Maker (as a sticker) and then this sticker could be applied to the creation in the appropriate location.

Level of Difficulty: Low/Medium.   There is nothing that was a huge challenge to the student involved.   The ribbon or the top of the present was located in the main Tinkercad design page and obviously the shape of the present and the creation of the ribbon was achieved easily using basic shapes.

Resources used to complete this project: iPad, Tinkercad App, Bambu H2D Printer, Orange Bambu PLA, Tinkercad main design library,

Size: The print measures 80mm across at the front was 50mm long and had a height of 20mm.    

Cost: This project to print used 31g of regular Bambu PLA to complete - this had a price point of $0.51c.

Timeframe:  To complete this print the printer was running for one hour and one minute, so just under an hour of actual printing time.   The sticker from the Roland Versa Sign Maker would be in the ten minute range.

What we would do differently/Next steps for the students:  The student other than the obvious inclusion of the photograph or sticker has no intention to change the print moving forward form this point, the student could have potentially looked at the ribbon positioning but otherwise was extremely happy with the project and the outcome.