I had the day off of work today, so I finally had a chance to work on my new coil design with connections on the bottom so it can be mounted and tabs on the top so I can mount a PCB.
After reading about other people using SketchUp, I decided to try that. I do like a lot of the features, like being able to directly manipulate the design and measure to make sure things are aligned exactly like I expect. But, I also ran into problems. I wasn’t able to do difference operations on cylinders. Difference operations aren’t directly supported anyway, but once I tried to an intersection with a cylinder so I could remove parts, things get really messed up. I also had problems with simpler shapes because SketchUp isn’t a solid modeling tool, so I wasn’t sure if things I was creating would be solid or just exterior walls.
But, SketchUp was great for being able to sketch my design so I could model it in OpenSCAD:
Once I had the dimensions all figured out, it was much easier to go step by step and add all the design features I wanted. This went much more quickly than when I tried it before without doing a SketchUp first:
I also did some research to find a company other than Shapeways where I could get it printed cheaply, but not have to wait for shipping from the East Coast. I did find Solid Concepts which has an office in San Diego! Perhaps I can just go pick it up in a day or two! Sadly, of all the materials I tried, the cheapest I could find still cost $80 for this piece, which is over 10 times greater than what Shapeways charges. A little more research and I found Sculpteo. They’re not in San Diego, but at least they’re in California. Costs under $8 and says it ships in 4 days! So, I decided to give them a try. The cheapest shipping still cost $6 but comes with absolutely no tracking information. As far as I can tell, Sculpteo doesn’t give any information about when my design actually ships (unlike Shapeways), so I just have to wait and see when it arrives. I’ll hold off judgement on them until I see how long it ends up taking…