Quick and dirty 5 minutes craft: Draw a rough shape, define the contact surfaces & load, click run, and get the optimized shape. The last step is converting the output to a printable shape and running one more simulation to double-check it is strong enough.

This particular holder is a filament spool holder designed to be loaded with up to 5.5kg of filament (1x2.5kg, 3x1kg).

  • marcos@lemmy.worldEnglish
    3·
    9 months ago

    I imagine the “optimized” there means it has the maximum weight support with the minimum amount of filament.

    This shape certainly beats a triangle with only the walls or with just a bit of infill. And it surely takes less filament than one with near to 100% of infill.

    • PlutoniumAcid@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      9 months ago

      I don’t follow you. Look at the photo, the thing is made of triangles. It’s the best shape. So I wonder, why use more than just one? Why make the shape require more than one triangle?

      • marcos@lemmy.worldEnglish
        3·
        9 months ago

        Hum, ok, I misunderstood you.

        Your 1 triangle will need the inclination similar to that middle segment of the bottom side of the piece. I will be huge.

      • beeng@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
        1·
        9 months ago

        More than likely the static supports used in the software were in the locations you see now,1 for spool and other’s bellow on the rail. They said “draw a rough shape” as a step, so that dictated the shape.

        If the static loads were placed at even height you would end up more triangle like or more of a truss. Depends shown many iterations were used also.

        • EmilieEvans@lemmy.mlOPEnglish
          1·
          9 months ago

          In a broader picture: See it as a demonstration of what all those nice tools in the CAD package can do. In this application with a little bit of thought could come up with a similar or better solution but for an I don’t care design approach the output is already good. A proper design approach would be putting thought in in where to place the contact surfaces relative to the spool and then run this software or go a step further and allow a different software to also change that parameter. Keep in mind those simulations are computationally expensive. Complex/advanced questions might take days to solve while a simple question like this is less than 1 minute.

          The load was in the circle/groove facing down.

          The other constrain was the faces contacting the 3030 extrusion being fixed and a keep-out zone was defined around those to ensure no material there was removed.

          Otherwise, it was just a flat slab as shape.

          What at first surprised me was how this part works: There is a point defined by the lowest/left triangle (tension & compression) on which all the weight rests. The remaining structure is is a cross beam (top mounting point to spool) to support it (tension) and the structure on which the spool rests (compression).