This is Hacker Public Radio episode 3,749 for Thursday the 15th of December 2022.
Today's show is entitled, Making Your Own Parts.
It is hosted by Delta Ray and is about 14 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is 3D printers are useful for making your own custom parts and I talk about
the parts I've made.
Hello everybody, I'm Delta Ray and I'd like to talk about 3D printing so I just printed
a little part that I needed to hold up a homemade pop filter for microphone arm that I have.
I just recently bought a new microphone and boom arm because I was going to do some
podcasting and I found I needed a pop filter but I don't know, I thought, why I spent
30 bucks when you can actually just use some pantyhose and a coat hanger and kind of
fashion a pop filter but then how do I connect it to the actual boom arm?
This is where the 3D printing part came in.
I could take advantage of this little gap that's in between the hinge that the microphone
goes into in the boom arm attachment, there's like a gap and there's kind of like a curve
where the screw holds the microphone to the boom arm and so what I did was basically
just go into blender 3D and then start with the cube and then we'll first of all go
back.
I do use the first thing you want to do when you do this kind of thing is you need
to be able to take accurate measurements and what I use for this is a micrometer digital
micrometer device which you can find online or you know like a probably in a hardware
store would carry them but basically it's a way of being able to take exact measurements
of something down to the hundredth of a millimeter it's basically just like has a little
fine adjustment wheel and so you can take like inside and outside measurements of areas
so basically I went in and I determined you know what the height and width need to be
of the part overall and then how far the the center of the turning access for the microphone
need to be and so on so once I had all those measurements I went to blender start with
just a cube and and then work from there you know blender is a really known for its accuracy
like for being able to make CAD stuff but if you you know if you try you can actually make
something work so if you press like the N key in blender it'll bring out a little side info
window and that will give you the ability to enter precise measurements so you can basically
click on a point and then kind of give it the exact place where you want to go and one thing
to keep in mind is that if you actually scale anything or something like that you want to
make sure that you apply all transformations to the object this is just something you have to do
before you save it and export it and try and export into a 3D printer otherwise you end up with
something that's kind of messed up the dimensions will be kind messed up anyways getting back to
it so to be able to cut complex parts you know to make complex parts you don't necessarily have to
do all the sophisticated modeling and stuff like that what you can do is use Boolean operations
to basically you know start with a cube and then cut like an arc out of it and then cut like
side notches and stuff out of it that way you can make a more sophisticated object out of just
simple shapes and so that's what I did to be able to make this little part and it took a few
iterations to get it right but in the end I wound up with something that works pretty well and
I'm going to have to put it up on Thingiverse or one of the 3D printing sites so that you know
to share it and yeah so basically it's a little piece that goes in between you know the microphone
and the boom arm attachment and then the code hanger there's a hole in the top of this little piece
where the code hanger fits inside the hole and then it just kind of sits there and holds the
the panty hose in front of the microphone and acts as a pop filter so I mean this is one of the
things I love about 3D printing sure you can make lots of cool little figures and there's lots of
stuff available online but if you need to make something that's like a one-off you have some kind of
need and you want to make something of your own that's unique or you need to replace a part that
you can't get or something like that 3D printing is something that you should look into for being
able to solve those kind of issues. One of the first uses I had for my 3D printer that I've
only had 3D printer for two years but one of the first things I did was we have a refrigerator
of course everybody has a refrigerator right but we had a refrigerator that has like shelves that
tilt off and stuff and so there's these brackets that you know allow the shelves to be
tilted up and one of them broke I can't even remember when probably like four years ago or whatever
so we've been without this bracket for a while and online this you know this bracket sells for like
30 or 40 bucks or something like that just for like a little plastic piece because you know it's
unique and they know that they they've got you but I thought well why don't I try to actually
make a part and print out in the 3D printer and you know kind of practice my skills so I mean
I didn't I've used a CAD program before but this was really the first time I really tried using
free CAD free CAD is a CAD software that is available for Linux and open source platforms as well as Windows
Mac but so I went through some tutorials learned how to use free CAD and then basically used
a pair of micrometers like I did with with this piece I just made to measure out all the pieces
of the the bracket that was still intact so basically I had to take out the shelf take out the
the the bracket that wasn't broken and then measure that and kind of you know draw out the
measurements and stuff like that and then reproduce it inside a free CAD and once I had that
inside free CAD I could just export it and then import it into the 3D printer slicing software
and then print it out so the you know sure it took me hours to actually make the part but I
gained some experience using free CAD so that the next time I need to do this kind of thing it
won't take as long and I could probably make something more complicated and that has happened you know
since I since I did this two years ago I've used free CAD more you know several times to make custom
parts and stuff and it's not too hard and you know you can use blender for the same thing
the reason why you might use free CAD instead of blender is to get more accurate measurements
to be able to go back and adjust those measurements later a little bit easier with blender you
wind up with objects that when you apply like modifications you can't undo that but with free CAD
you can kind of go back and and you can adjust measurements if you need to so that's kind of the
major difference between those two programs in terms of 3D printing but they both have their strengths
like if you want to make sculpts or something like that then blenders is the thing to use you
wouldn't use free CAD for something like that and another thing you know custom part I made was
I was I have like my own green screen for like zoom meetings and stuff like that and
I've I had these lights that I would put up behind that would actually light up in the video
and but they would be attached to my green screen and so the way I have my green screen set up is
I just you know I do everything kind of custom and on my own I just have like a a couple boards
that I set up that basically rest on a shelf and then I made a special pole that actually
holds up the board and so I want to be able to hang stuff off this off this board these clips
for these lights and so I made custom clips that actually kind of wrapped around the board
and came down and had a hook that I could put these lights on too and so that was you know an
example of where I was making custom you know custom objects for specific purpose but you know
you're making stuff that you would never find in the store because they'd never manufacture
something like that because it's a one-off thing right maybe you know maybe this pop filter
my colder could be useful for a lot of people because I'm not the only one with this microphone
this boom arm and actually it's not even the boom arm itself it's the halt the part that I
made goes with mostly with the microphone and the microphone adapter so anybody with that microphone
it would work for for those people so another thing that I made was a
I have a eight of fruit macro pad which is basically this 12 key RGB key macro pad that's
programmable and you can make a do whatever and it just acts like a little keyboard and also has
a rotary encoder and push button rotary encoder and a a little LCD screen on it but the thing is
is that the way these things are sold they lay flat and if I just have them have it up on my
desk I can't see the screen you know so what I did was I made a custom holder for the
macro pad that tilted up at like a you know 35 to 40 degree angle I can't remember what exactly
but I did this in free CAD so you know the angle would be easy easy to see and customize if I wanted to
and so I was able to make a macro pad holder that actually tilted it up and then on the bottom of it
I could just you know find some rubber feet to put on the bottom to kind of keep it in place
another option is to use like hot glue and run the hot glue around the bottom to kind so
it kind of stays in place when you when you press on the keys and it works pretty well so you know
that's another example of where you can use custom parts if if you look online at websites like
Thingiverse you'll find that people have actually made lots of custom parts and custom tools and
stuff like that one of them I saw that I don't think I've ever seen in a hardware store was a
maybe they make them but it's a drill hole dust catcher and basically it was it was a way of
lining up your drill hole when you needed like drill into a wall or something like that and it had a
little tray that was underneath it that was attached to this drill hole alignment system that would
catch the dust as you drilled into the into the wall and I thought it was pretty clever and there's
all kinds of stuff like that online so I encourage you to you know if you have a 3D printer
to try your hand at making some kind of custom part for your own needs because I think that that's
one of the big strengths of 3D printing and if you don't have a 3D printer you know you might
take a look at the options out there if you have some kind if you have ever wanted to be able to
make like you know some custom thing for yourself then 3D printing is the way to go they've become
pretty cheap and it's not too hard to get into just take some practice at the beginning to get used to
how to do things and you have some failures and everything but in the end you'll you'll get better
at it and things will work out so good luck thanks and see you next time
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