Wednesday, October 9, 2013

Day 44 - Triangular polyhedra nets

Today we used Tinkercad to design 2D nets that fold up to regular 3D polyhedra, specifically the tetrahedron, octahedron, and icosahedron which all have triangular faces.


STL file: http://www.geekhaus.com/makerhome/day44_triangularnets.stl
Tinkercad link: https://tinkercad.com/things/66ZiQ7gjVMl-day-44-triangular-polyhedral-nets
Thingiverse link: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:163459

Settings: Makerbot Replicator 2 on "Standard", which is .2mm resolution, in 11 minutes for the tetrahedron, 22 minutes for the octahedron, and 38 minutes for the icosahedron.

Technical notes: The nets are made to have .2mm (one layer) base thickness plus another .2mm (another layer) for the faces themselves, which are inset just a bit from the base layer so that fold lines develop naturally. Thicker nets did not fold very well and tended to snap along the edges.