What are the fastest ways to create the following STLs and eventually print them

3D Printing
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1

What are the fastest ways to create the following STLs and eventually print them all?
I am producing 150 unique 3D-printed items for my wedding reception in late July. Each guest will be getting one of these but with a different word (Faith, hope, love, forgiveness, etc.) on it as a thank you. I’ve included the link to the base that I have in thingiverse. I am trying to use OpenSCAD to speed up the process but is there a way to link my excel spreadsheet to OpenSCAD to read the word, insert it into the favor, combine, and then export to STL? Thanks in advance.
http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:66519

2

Maybe script with a .batch file on windows or BASH on linux if you know how, you can pass parameters to openscad using -D
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/OpenSCAD_User_Manual/General check the section at the bottom

3

The basic form would be:
openscad -o favor_James_Love.stl -D ‘word=“Love” name=“James”’ favor.scad

You can either produce that command line from within your Excel file, then copy that column and paste it into a text file to make a .cmd script, or you can export the Excel file to a CSV to read into some other scripting language to create and execute the commands.

4

Thanks for your help but I’m still having trouble. I’m able to open openscad from the command line but when I input the line it doesn’t produce anything. Here’s exactly the line I’m using:
openscad -o favor_Desire_Love.stl -D ‘word=“Desire”’ weddingfavorFinal.scad

And I’ve tried doing it from: C:\users\Chris_Reyes\ as well as the folder where weddingfavorfinal.scad is but with no luck. Any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

5

Hey, Chris. I sat down and hammered through the issues, and I’ve got it working. Got a minute to hang-out, and I’ll help you get it working on your end?

6

The issue is that you are running on Windows, and windows has a flag in the file saying whether it is a GUI app or not, and for GUI apps, it does not connect the STDIO pipes.

Install Python, and use this script, modified appropriately (tweak of @nop_head 's script on github):

import sys
import subprocess

def run(*args):
print “openscad”,
for arg in args:
print arg,
print
log = open(“c:\downloads\openscad.log”, “w”)
subprocess.call([“c:\Program Files (x86)\OpenSCAD\openscad.exe”] + list(args), stdout = log, stderr = log)
log.close()

if name == “main”:
run(’-o’,‘test.stl’, ‘’’-D word=“Beauty” ‘’’, ‘weddingfavorFinal.scad’)

Check the openscad.log file for the output, and once you get it working, you can go on to reading in a list of words and calling run in a loop to produce the whole list of stl’s. (Hopefully google won’t smear the file too badly.)

7

Thank you so much. I just installed Python but I’m at work. I’ll ping you once I run the script. I appreciate the help.