Every 3D printing hobbyist using up a spool of filament has thought about what to do with the empty spool. It is quite sturdy and just FEELS useful for something more than just thrown away.
This repository has my suggestion on what to do with them: use an empty spool as the chassis to hold 3D-printed trays organizing small parts. The concept is not new and has been done many times. But this particular take on the idea is mine and shared with everyone under MIT license.
The challenge is to make trays that fit a spool. Dimensions vary between filament manufacturers, and even within the same company's filament product line they may change their spool supplier for any reason. So there's no one size fits all, thus an ideal situation for parametric CAD system such as CadQuery. It is parametric CAD using the Python programming language. This storage system started as a CadQuery learning/practice exercise but it turned out well enough to have graduated to its dedicated project repository here.
r2s4.py generates CadQuery geometry based on provided dimensions.
single_wedge.py uses r2s4.py to generate a single tray. This file was used
for interactive development using CadQuery's
CQ-Editor.
geenerate_all.py uses r2s4.py to generate a large number of STL files based
on lists of parameters defined within. This file is intended for command line
execution.
The expect usage pattern is for the user to clone this repository and edit
generate_all.py replacing my spindle spool dimensions. Then in a Python
environment with CadQuery installed, run python generate_all.py to generate
organizer trays with specified dimensions.
If you prefer not to run CadQuery on your own computer, use someone else's computer a.k.a. cloud computing. As of this writing the easiest way to go is to use Google Colab, which is a web-based Python interface very similar to (derived from?) Jupyter notebooks. Process is very similar to running the sibling project Storage Grid so I won't duplicate information here. See Storage Grid README for a walkthrough and adjust as needed for R2S4.
- This repository is originally created with CadQuery version 2.4.0.
- Interactively created with CQ-Editor version 0.3.0dev.
- Running under Python 3.12.2
- CadQuery was installed with mamba 1.5.9 via conda 24.9.2
- Running within an x86-64 virtual machine running Ubuntu 22.04.5 LTS
See my online project notebook New Screwdriver entries tagged with 'r2s4'