Purpose
The purpose of this 3D rotation is to improve your skills of how to use Inventor and the 3D printer. The options were to choose between making an object that could hold 4 toothbrushes, earbuds, your phone or 50 coins. The dimensions of the object had to be less than 5" x 5" x 5". My first thought was to create a basic 2.75" x 5" cylinder with four .75" mini circles inside of that. Once I realized that it had to be somewhat creative, my plans took a little bit of a turn. I still stayed with the original idea, cut out some circles on the side, some rectangles to shrink the volume and smoothed out the corners for some style. I also added a little hole in middle for floss picks as well. This was all completed on Inventor, followed by the correct steps on MakerBot, then the execution of printing it out.
Sketch
Recipe
After I finished a rough sketch in my designer notebook, I opened up Inventor and started my 2D sketch on an XY plane. I started with a pretty basic design with a circle that had a diameter of 2.75 inches and four little circles inside of that, each with a diameter of .75 inches. Once I extruded all of that is when I started to get creative with designing the toothbrush holder. I cut 3 holes in side of the cylinder and also cut rectangles in the side to reduce the volume of it. Finally, I rounded out the edges for a little bit of style. After I completed that, I then had to set up my print in MakerBot. I saved my 3D print file to my flash drive so that the file will show up when I put my flash drive in the 3D printer. Then, I opened up my file on Makerbot. I first had set the scale of my object to 1000% because originally it was at 100%. My object was already centered so then I prepared my print on print preview to make sure that everything was ready to go. At last, I picked my color, uploaded my file to the 3D printer from my flash drive and then waited for my project to finish.
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Summary
What I learned while doing this 3D print rotation is quite honestly how to improve my skills with inventor. I also was challenged in how to as creative as possible which was actually pretty fun at times, but as well a struggle. Out of the rotations so far, this one was probably the least overwhelming. I felt like basically from day 1 of the rotation I was going to be in pretty good shape and I ended up being pretty good. I got my object printed out in the second class period, which left my a good chunk of time to complete other tasks once I was done. This project will end up probably be my favorite when it's all set and done, so I would definitely do this again if I the opportunity to.