GoKawiilAfter making my keyboard holders I did some other laser-cutting projets. Here’s a bit of that journey.
From Cuttle to OpenSCAD
I designed the gen1 holders using Cuttle. This was a great way to start with laser cutting and parametric CAD: being able to switch between “move control points around” and “write logic in the node tree” helped me build up intuitions about how the piece is made. I wound up getting a Pro subscription for a couple months, and was happy with the value I got.
But I wasn’t happy with the ownership I had when using Cuttle. Cuttle lets you export (as SVG or other formats) designs, but I didn’t find a way to export the parameterized design. If Cuttle-the-service goes away, I’d be stuck without a way to use new parameter sets. That also applies to “giving the design away”: if I want to give away the parameterized design, anyone who “takes” it has to go through Cuttle.
So one Sunday, I opened up the OpenSCAD tutorial and got to work. Why OpenSCAD? Mostly, I remembered its name before I haven’t used FreeCAD, so I can’t offer a comparison. (I’ve also used TinkerCAD for some basic designs, but TinkerCAD doesn’t seem to support parametric design.)
I’ve found OpenSCAD, especially the language, confusing to work with at times. But for my level of project and interest, it’s fine. And it’s libre and gratis, so, it’s hard to complain!
Project: cable box
My partner asked for a box to hide the tangle of cables on her desk. She gave me a small sketch: approximate width, approximate hole sizes, etc.
This was pretty easy to put together in OpenSCAD. Holes get constructed from overlapping circles and rectangles, finger joins are added or removed rectangles.
The box was functional, but pretty plain: the large front and rear faces, the most visible parts, were just plain wood. To add a little pizzazz, I constructed a cat’s head silhouette from an ellipse and two triangles, then randomly scattered them as cutouts across the front and rear faces.
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