Difference between revisions of "Two Color Archimedean Solids - 1 (Q65460)"

A "Dualstrusion" Replicator arrived Monday. I set it up on the kitchen table, leveled it - nice built in leveling algorithm - and printed a two color test cube - it was identical to the one that came with the printer - all in under three hours. Very nice! Models of the Archimedean solids are usually multicolored and make good test objects. While waiting for the Replicator I prepared a number of Archimedean solid models for two color printing. Here are four of them: 1) truncated tetrahedron, 2) cuboctohedron, 3) truncated cube, and 4) truncated octahedron Two stl files are included for each solid; trunc_tetrahedron_less_faces.stl and trunc_tetrahedron_faces.stl cuboctahedron_less_faces.stl and cuboctahedron_faces.stl trunc_cube_less_faces.stl and trunc_cube_faces.stl trunc_octahedron_less_faces.stl and trunc_octahedron_faces.stl The files can be merged and printed in two colors. For those interested in the details a few words follow: The stl files were created with openSCAD. A zip file containing the open scad files is included - 2color_archi_scad_01.zip OpenSCAD's polyhedron command does most of the work. A hollow Archimedean solid from thing:17571 has two copies of the polyhedra, an outer copy and a smaller, but otherwise identical, inner copy. Suppose we wish to extract a single face, for example a pentagonal one. The coordinates of the vertices for the outer and inner pentagons are available from the hollow polyhedra scad file. These 10 coordinates define a polyhedron that corresponds to a face. It needs to be closed with 16 triangles, see the openSCAD manual for details Often a single openSCAD polyhedron command can be used to create a complete set of faces. However openSCAD does not work with shared vertices and where they occur shifts have to be made to avoid them. A program is needed to write the openSCAD commands as there is too much bookkeeping to keep track of without help. OpenSCAD's "thrown together" command can be used to catch errors.