Archive for June, 2019

Reason #1 to Love OpenSCAD’s 2D Subsystem: Fillets

Wednesday, June 12th, 2019

I just designed and printed a battery holder and I’m shamelessly reusing this image from the blog post about it to illustrate fillets in 3D design:

3D-printed holder for Makeblock mBot robot LiPo battery

You might notice that the holder’s mounting bosses have nice roundy fillets that are standard in professional CAD packages and have been a wee bit difficult to achieve in OpenSCAD until fairly recently. The ability to design them now is one of two observations in the last week that have really driven my interest in OpenScad’s 2D subsystem. If you’re not interested in OpenSCAD, you’ll probably want to stop reading now. (Who am I kidding — I’m sure that the two of you still reading are interested in OpenSCAD.)

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3D-Printed Makeblock mBot LiPo Battery Holder

Wednesday, June 12th, 2019

I’ve assembled a couple of Makeblock mBot robots I picked up a few years back and intend to start programming soon. They come with a 4xAA battery holder, but I’m not a fan of single-use batteries and Makeblock’s LiPo is only $10 on Amazon [no affiliation and not an affiliate link, just a happy customer], so I ordered a couple.

The LiPo batteries came in clear plastic cases with tabs that looked like they should latch into the slots on the robot chassis, but the spacing was off. The robot kit came with hook-and-loop tape to fasten down the battery holder, but yuck. So I designed this holder, which is good enough to use after a single pass of dimensional refinement.

Makeblock mBot robot with 3D-printed LiPo battery holder

Many thanks to my student employee Kip for printing the battery holder on his Prusa I3 MK2s. The quality is outstanding.

I’ll upload the design to Thingiverse after a bit of code cleanup.

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