Light up Custom Designed and Printed Figure

Tinkerplay is a mobile application built for designing articulated creatures and make them on a 3D printer. This application runs on IOS, Android and Windows platform and pretty much guaranteed about the results. Tinkerplay parts are carefully designed to print without the need of external support, and as a result, it has designed with special holes and tunnels it can be used to feed wires and mount LED’s.

Jason an artistically inclined engineer based on the California, currently work as a software tool developer and product designer for the Tinkerplay has made this device. The whole idea is to design, print, and assemble a custom 3D figure and light up using LED’s. Jason has decided to give a shot and design Tinkerplay compatible torso, head and thrusters pieces. Along with it, Jason also used Tinker CAD a free web designed application used in connecting a free mix and edit in the wires.

Let’s have a quick glance on making, using the ball provided, sockets, and pelvis parts in Tinker CAD construct an electronic backpack piece. Keep an eye and ensure that 3mm LED’s would fit through ball joints, make cutouts to fit a 10mm LED in the chest and a slide switch on the bottom. Also, design for a print in place battery door for easy assembly, pull a stock head and thruster part from Tinkerplay and use it in Tinker CAD to cut holes that expose more light.

Micro-controllers are used to make LED’s pulsate, used a Teensy 3.1 Arduino compatible board to fit perfectly into the torso. A blue and white color theme has been chosen here, as it makes a nice contrast with the silver and green PLA.

Keep this is mind, when making cutouts for fitting electronic components allow at least 0.3 mm clearance to compensate for tolerances on your 3D printer. The rest of the parts were simply pulled from Tinkerplay and printed. Tinkerplay exports only 75% by default and you have to ensure that parts are printed 100%, else it will not fit the custom torso.

For Jason made piece, he printed with silver PLA on an Ultimaker 2 at 0.1mm layer height. The green coloured pieces were printed on a MakerBot Replicator 2 at 0.2mm using glow in the dark PLA.