I enjoy creating things, both in terms of programs, scripts and automation as well as more physical things. In 2014 I took a woodworking class from IsGood Woodworks in south Seattle and created this table.
It was a fun group class where we took a pile of lumber and turned it into these tables. We would work as a team to create all the parts to the table, then we select our favorite pieces and assemble our own table.
Around the same time I started getting into 3D printing and designing. The stuff I create is very utilitarian rather than some piece of art. I work with simple geometry to create object that help me around the house, organize things and keep things where they belong. Here is one of the first things I created, this is designed to keep my handheld radio in the cup holder in my car.
I started out buy cheap Chinese printers and went through two of them before I realized that they weren’t worth it and bought what is widely considered the best 3D printer in the industry Original Prusa i3 MK3 3D printer from Prusa Research out of the Czech Republic. That printer served me well for number of years until November of 2023 when I retired it and upgraded to Prusa MK4 which is an amazing printer.
I do all my design work in an open source design software called OpenSCAD, where you design objects by describing them with a geometric math formulas. Designs in OpenSCAD resembles programing. You can check out all my OpenSCAD programs in my GitHub repository here https://github.com/siggib007/OpenSCAD.
Using 3D printers is a multi step process. First you have to get your hands on a STL file, either by creating yourself or download them from sites like Printables or Thingiverse. If you create in OpenSCAD, you first create an scad file then convert that to an STL file. Once you have an STL file you need to run that through a program called a slicer, which converts the STL file to a format specific to your printer. Slicer generates a file called gcode and you send this file to your 3D printer.
I’m working on uploading my designs to Printables but you can also all my STLs here