DIY 3D-printed wall mounts - part 3

It is finally here! A screen recording of me trying out Onshape for 3D CAD modelling of the wall mounts I am going to print. As you will see in the clip, I am not used to working in Onshape, I am basically learning as we go along. Had I done this in Inventor (which I have extensive experience with), I would probably have done the recording, then edit out mistakes and put audio on lastly. Since this was a learning experience for me I chose to record both screen and audio at once, so enjoy:

As you can see I did not finish the part. I figured that almost 30 minutes was more than enough in one go (actually I was amazed that I had been recording for that long, because it only felt like it was half that). This of course means that we will have to another session, and I am really looking forward to it.

In part four we will finish off the basic design by doing the cover for the screw head also, and we will refine the end design by rounding edges and making it look more "professional". Also we will have to do something creative with regards to locking the cover for the screw head in place, or else it will just slide right off the bottom wall mount once they are up on the wall.

As you saw in the clip I made the Onshape project public, so you can find it through searching for "Wall mount" in the public projects in Onshape. I have also moved the Swift Calcs calculation into the Onshape project, since that is possible now with the Swift Calcs app in Onshape.

I have also found this Onshape blog post about successful 3D-printing of larger parts (larger than the printer can print in one go) which might come in handy in the future.

I spent (or actually wasted) quite a bit of time in trying to get hold of a good screen recording software that was also cheap (read: free). After trying several open source programs and also a few free trials, I finally stumbled onto the fact that you can actually get such software as Chrome extensions! So I ended up with this one, which seems to do exactly what I need.

DIY 3D-printed wall mounts - Part 2

I had hoped that part 2 of this project would be the screen-recording of me designing the wall mounts in Onshape. However this has been a hectic week, so regrettably I have not gotten that far yet. So instead I have done more thorough preparations than originally planned. A quick, hand-drawn sketch gives you an idea of what I intend to do in Onshape:

The three views to the top and left are the wall mount itself, the two views that are sectioned off are of a lid to hide the head of the screw.

The sketch is unrefined, edges will have to be rounded and so forth. Also of note is the amount and placement of the "teeth" which I have not decided on yet. And the lid for hiding the screw heads will need some form of resistance, keeping it from sliding directly off the lower wall mount, maybe in the form of an indentation on the wall mount itself that will push on the lid and cause enough friction for it to stay in place (should the design fail in this respect, it will be quickly solved with a little dab of glue...)

I have also selected the screws for the mounts, so I know have the diameter of the hole going through the wall mount, which needs to be 4 mm. The top of the conical part has to have a diameter of at least 7 mm.

As for the other dimension, such as the thickness of 3 mm of the protruding part of the wall mount, is guess work for now, but let us have a look at some quick calculations to check if it should be enough. For this we will use Swift Calcs, the link will take you directly to the worksheet that I have shared there.

Swift Calcs is a new calculation tool, and, like Onshape, it is cloud based, meaning you can do everything from your browser (although at the moment, until the next update of the Chrome browser, it has a reduced calculation speed in that particular browser. This will apparently be corrected in the next Chrome update, due to arrive later this month). Swift Calcs is currently in the beta phase and free to use. I do not know if they have some kind of business plan for when it is ready for proper release, we will just have to see. For now, I think it is an awesome free tool, giving you great flexibility so long as you have an internet connection.

Since they are still deep in the developing stage, I have also suggested adding a "lecture mode", a sort of stripped down, minimalist version of a powerpoint presentation, no fancy animations and stuff, just the worksheet divided into segments, where a certain action (i.e. a mouse-click) will make the next segment visible, while still being able to scroll freely through the segments that have already been made visible. I think this can be a powerful tool, freeing up the person doing the lecture to actually face the students (instead of the whiteboard), gaining eye-contact and more interaction. If they decide to implement something like that I will jump at the chance of using, that is for sure.

That was all for this week, hopefully I will have gotten time to do the screen-recording by next weekend.