Friday, November 4, 2016

Laser collimator collimator

I've acquired a 3D printer (a used DaVinci 1.0a, hacked by the previous user to have custom firmware), and I've been having fun with it. I still don't have the ideal printing parameters figured out, and I'm learning how to design 3D solid objects.

I've been finding graphical 3D design tools like Sketchup and Fusion 360 highly unintuitive--maybe with more practice I can improve--but I've also come across OpenSCAD where one uses a simple programming language to code shapes, and that is much more intuitive to me. Last night I designed and printed a super-simple collimator box for the laser collimator for my telescope. Rotating, drawing and dragging faces would have been a big nuisance, but it was a simple bit of code, and it's easily customizable for other dimensions of laser.