Parametric Spokes for Straw Construction Kits

thingiverse

UPDATE: The spokes are now customizer-compatible! Go nuts! UPDATE TO UPDATE: And now the flatnessFactor actually works in the customizer. Go walnuts! When I was a kid, I used to play with a construction set that consisted of straws and a bunch of round vertex-pieces with a varying number of spokes that the straws could be stuck onto. I passed many a happy hour as a young nerdling building all sorts of meshes and lattices out of them. Now I've got my own kids, and along comes a similar, although vastly inferior version that only allows straws to be linked in a cubic lattice. Thanks to 3D printing, my kids need suffer to be square no more! Instructions Measure the inner and outer diameter of your favorite straws, insert values into the openscad file, and go to town. The design is parametric, so you can choose to make as many spokes as you like. Note that the inner ring will always expand to be large enough to fit the desired number of spokes, and will be at least a minimum diameter (14 mm, in this case). Straws can also be fed into the hole in the middle, for making things like propellers. I've made a bunch of these, and will post pictures soon. If anyone else prints some of these, it'd be awesome to see them.