Mini dome with pins - Icosahedron

thingiverse

This is an icosahedron dome designed to be made with drinking straws or other hollow tubes (pipe, straw, bamboo etc.). This is a minor derivative of http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:26860 A quick and dirty hack to use pins for hollow connectors like straws/pipes/bamboo See the thingiverse page for instructions andhttp://desertdomes.com/pictures/dome/2vdiagram.gif for assembly. Look out! If you print too many connectors you may find yourself under attack from alien pentacles and hexapods (see pics of the invasion i had to fight off). Hint: the one with the extended proboscis is the leader! Instructions I made some small changes to the mini dome so that I could build it with drinking straws. Before printing: measure your straws inner diameter and change the scad files: sd (last line) is stick diameter, set this to slightly less than the inner diameter of your straws/pipes/bamboo. 4.3 works for my 5mm straws with my reprap. Compile (F6) and export stl. Print one and test that the straws fit snugly, adjust as needed. When they fit adjust both scad files. You need 20 x Hexa-connectors 6 x Penta-connectors I used slic3r to print these on three plates. There is some bridging so it helps if your printer isn't awful at bridging but it needn't be perfect. 35 x long straws 30 x short straws I had bendy straws so I cut the long ones just below the bend. My printed connectors are approx 2.5cm point to point and my long straws 16.5cm. So I entered 2.5+16.5=19 intohttp://desertdomes.com/rev2calc.html as my A length. The page says B is then 16.8 so I cut my short straws at 16.8-2.5=14.3cm. It turns out I'm human so after all those calculations I just eyeballed my short straws as approximately 2cm shorter than the long ones! :-) For assembly follow this diagramhttp://desertdomes.com/pictures/dome/2vdiagram.gif or use my main picture. Green and blue are the long connectors A, red and pink the short ones B. When assembling the X on top of the six-pin connectors indicates the four pins that use the long A connectors. The pins are slightly tapered to ease printing and straw insertion. Note on license: I chose the same license as the immediate predecessor to this derivative, IANAL, let me know if I should've chosen something else.