Celebrate Pi day with an Easy As Pi Puzzle

3D Printing
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Another 3D model I did for my favorite mathematician.

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Is there an easy way to turn an STL of tiles into a projection so that you can cut this design with a laser cutter? Or would I start over in inkscape to do that?

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I am so please to help you since you helped me so much with my K40 control panel wiring last week. I downloaded the STL file from Thingiverse, imported it into Sketchup, set the view to “Parallel”, removed some interior lines and exported it as a DXF file. It’s attached here.
EasyAsPi.dxf (39.5 KB)

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Thank you! I checked the DXF into git so that it lives next to the original. Now if anyone here wants to laser cut the tiles, or for that matter cut them on a CNC router, it will be easy.

(One of these days I’ll actually get a laser cutter and start making use of the random bits of knowledge about them that I’ve been picking up over the past year. This would be so much faster to laser cut than to 3d print, and that’s also true of some of the other math models I’ve done for my family mathematician. :slight_smile:)

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I just found OpenSCAD documentation on projection — now I can go back through my other math-teaching-tool projects and add an option for projection and instructions for how to use projection for the ones that are flat tiles.

Here’s the example code I added to my pi puzzle model:

// To print, render the puzzle and export to STL or AMF
puzzle();
// To laser cut, comment out the line above, uncomment the line below, and render the puzzle and export to DXF or SVG
//projection(cut=false) puzzle();

I honestly had no recollection before of the “export as” functionality in OpenSCAD; possibly I had always either clicked the icon in the action bar (when I first got started) or (always recently) used the F7 shortcut. I was stuck in my workflow.

Thanks @dwburger for getting me to look into this and learn something new. :slight_smile:

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But what if you are in a country that does their calendars mm/dd/yy?

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With any luck, international travel restrictions will be lifted by then.

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