Hello, 3D Printing Friends! Today on the BV3D Channel we'll learn
how to design a little thing in Tinkercad, to hold another thing.
Stick around and we'll get into it, right after this! I'm Bryan and you are watching BV3D!
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Okay, so today we're going to design and print a holder for these cheap combination
thermometer and hygrometer things. So sometimes it feels really humid here,
and I wanted to have a better idea of the temperature and relative humidity levels in
various rooms in the house. Now, I have this one analog thermometer hygrometer thing, but
it's kind of big and it takes a while for it to do its thing when moved from one room to another.
Well, then I remembered that Repkord uses a round hygrometer thing on the Repbox,
so I did a quick search for something like that on Amazon, and I ended up buying a
four pack of these things for about $16, but you can find other ones on there for less.
Anyway I got these because I liked the look of them. They're round,
not rectangular like most of them, and to me that just looked better. So they come with
extra batteries and peel-and-stick circles, so you can put them wherever you want. And while
that may work fine, they're clearly designed to mount into a cutout in a panel or something.
So I wanted to make something these would snap into, that would be a little more decorative
than just being stuck to the wall. So I grabbed my calipers, and then it was off to Tinkercad,
where I took some measurements and made a "hole" piece to make the appropriate panel cutout shape.
Now, this consists of a cylinder that's 42mm in diameter and 20mm tall. That
20mm tallness is the default for the cylinder. I just changed the X and Y values to 42 because,
not only is 42 the answer to the great question of Life, the Universe, and Everything, it's also
exactly one millimeter larger than the actual diameter of the back part of the hygrometer.
Then, to accommodate the snap tabs that hold the hygrometer in place,
I added a rectangle that's 43mm wide by 6mm deep by 20mm tall. So, by grouping those two "hole"
parts together, I have something that will cut an appropriately-sized hole in... well,
anything ELSE in Tinkercad. The "anything else" in this case should be some flat surface
that's between about three and four millimeters thick.
I thought it would look kind of like a bit of art if I put the hygrometer in a four-sided pyramid,
kind of like that all-seeing eye or whatever you call it on the back of a dollar bill.
Only in this case it would be the All-Seeing Hy...grometer.
So out comes a four-sided pyramid, and I'll scale it up to 94 by 94 by 94 millimeters. Now,
I really only want the square base and one face of the pyramid. I'm going for a
minimalistic art piece here. So what I can do is duplicate the pyramid,
and then move it up about three millimeters and move it back about six millimeters,
and turn that duplicate into a "hole"-type part, and then group them together.
And when I do that, I get a shape that suggests a four-sided pyramid, but
it's really just a square and a triangle.
Okay, so I have a cool shape, but now I need to use that cutout that I made a few minutes ago.
So I'll select it, and copy it to the clipboard. And now I'm going to
show you a cool trick in Tinkercad. I'm going to change where the workplane is.
Normally it's just flat on the bottom where you expect it, but Tinkercad has this cool
feature that lets you put the workplane on any face of an object. So I'll drag a
workplane out onto the triangular face of this thing that we're making. See what it did? Now,
any further objects that get added will be flat relative to the workplane's position.
So since I copied the cutout to the clipboard, when I paste it... Boom! Now it's perfectly
angled to rest on that triangular face. I want to center it horizontally on that triangle and
I can use the alignment tool for that. I'll select both objects. click the Align tool, and then click
here to center them. And then I'll click away from those objects to dismiss the align tool.
I'll adjust the vertical alignment by eye. There, that's about where I want it. And finally,
I need to actually cut this shape out of the pyramid. So I'll select it, and then I'll use this
cone-shaped control to push it down through the triangular face just far enough to cut the shape
out. And to complete the cut, I'll select the pyramid and the cutout, and group them together.
It might be a good idea to return the workplane to its usual place,
so drag a workplane item out to where the workplane usually lives, and it'll reset.
Okay, so now export this to an STL file, slice it up, and print it out.
I'm using PrusaSlicer for this, and I actually want to print it on its side to increase its
strength. So after dropping it onto the plater, I'll click the "Face Plant" button,
and select one of the sides that doesn't exist, and it'll flop over like this.
I'm also going to turn on supports "on build plate only," and then slice it. And it looks like this.
I'm going to print this in a silk gold PLA because
I think that'll look nice with the black ring around the hygrometer.
So here's a time lapse of it printing.
And here's the finished product, ready for the hygrometer.
So I'll snap that in, lining up the tabs with the notches here on the round cutout,
and then I can just rotate it a bit until it's lined up and level.
There! Now I have a fun way to display the hygrometer and thermometer.
Plus it's open on the back, so there's plenty of airflow, which means it'll be able to
quickly sense the temperature and the relative humidity. And I think it looks pretty cool.
Oh, if you find that it's hard to rotate the hydrometer after snapping it in,
try unsnapping it, and then line it up level and snap it in place. Personally, I found that it's
more difficult to line it up level and snap it in, but your mileage, as they say, may vary. If you
don't feel like flexing your skills in Tinkercad to design one of these yourself, I have two
versions of it up on Printables.com. One version is the one that we just designed, and the other
is one that I spent a little extra time on to add a curve to the front of it, so you can see there.
So you can download and print whichever one you like best,
or of course you can completely design one of your own.
Well, 3D Printing Friends, that's about all the time we have for this
episode. And now that we're at the end, let's go print something cool!
Hey, real quick before you go, I wanted to say. "Thanks! for being one of the Super Awesome People
who sticks around all the way to the end, and thanks for all the likes, comments, and shares.
And an especially big thanks to those who directly support what I do. You're all wonderful for
doing that, and I really appreciate it. If you liked this episode, a thumbs up would be great,
and if you'd like to help support the channel, check the description for ways you can do
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and it's an excellent way to help keep me making these videos for you.
Well, that's it for this one. Thanks again, and I'll see you next time, here on the BV3D Channel.