3D Printing a Key

In today's blog, I wanted to show you something that was a bit off the wall.  One of my students asked me how we could go from taking a photo of an object to printing a duplicate.  So, in this example, we are going to use a key.

Step 1:

One of the first things you will need to do to get this to work is a decent picture of your key.
For the purpose of this, I used PhotoShop.  At first, I had the image of the actual key.  Then I added a layer on top of the key and painted it black.  For some reason, the .gif file looks odd, but in the last step I removed the entire background just leaving me the black image of a key.  From there, I went to http://www.online-convert.com/ and turned my .jpg file into a .svg file. 

Step 2:  

Once you have your .svg file, you then need to turn it into an actual 3D model.  I used www.tinkercad.com for this.  When you open TinkerCad, you will notice an "import" button on the top right.  Once I did this, I simply imported my file.

Step 3:

If there is a tricky step, this is it.  You have to scale your key to the correct size.  I had measured his key beforehand, but you could do the same thing by looking up the key's dimensions online too.  After that, simply print your file.

I was really surprised at how easy this was.  The key worked too.  The only thing I would recommend is that if you were wanting to make a permanent key, you should probably print something besides PLA plastic.  If you are printing something quick though, it does work!

Note:  A video on how we did this is located here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vNalicZTGK4

3D Printing Teacher Project - VR Goggles & Printing Keys

In this post, I wanted to show you how we went about creating our own VR Goggles.

To get started, I want to show you how we went about making VR Goggles.

Since VR Goggles seem to be the craze right now, we decided we'd make our own.  The only thing we did not print for this project were the lenses which you can easily find on Amazon.  We bought these for roughly $.30 a set.  So, this was relatively cheap.  The students had to design a case that would fit their phone.  They had to leave their phone in the case, and they also had to do the measurements to get this to work.

I did help the students a little by telling them they could find the dimensions of their phone case online.  Of course, the students could always just measure their case with a ruler too.  The most difficult part of this was determining the space they needed in the middle of their print so they could easily see the entire phone with the lenses.  This was made slightly more difficult, because the Google Cardboard I gave them as a reference had larger lenses than the lenses I purchased.  Regardless, the entire project turned out great.

One thing to consider while you are doing this project is the amount of time it will take to print.  Most of these prints took around 16 hours.  I encouraged the students to make these somewhat hollow too since most of their designs required them to hold their Goggles in the air.  They will want a design that is durable, yet easy to hold.

Last, but not least, I had the students submit their designs onto www.pinshape.com too.  I wanted the students to see how many downloads their print would get.  I think it is important for students to see how popular their designs are.

All in all, I thought this was a very successful project.  The students seemed to enjoy it, and surprisingly, this was pretty new to a lot of the students.  I figured a lot more of them had experienced VR type headsets, but for a few of them, this was their first experience with this.






Here is a video on this project too: Printing Your Own VR Goggles