3D Waveform Tutorial

thingiverse

I recently got my 3D printer, and I stumbled upon some information about 3D printing waveforms, so I decided to give it a try. I wanted to make an early Mother's Day present just in case I forgot. The waveform is of my voice saying "Happy Mother's Day Mom, I Love You". Since it's not that complicated, I won't go into too much detail, but I'll summarize the process. First, I recorded my voice on my phone and sent myself the audio via email. Then, I opened up the audio clip in Audacity, deleted the sections between my words to prevent the waveform from breaking, and shrunk it so that the shapes were more defined. After that, I took a screenshot of the waveform and loaded it into GIMP. In GIMP, I used the magic wand to delete everything but the waveform, then messed around with some coloring tools to turn the waveform black. I'm not entirely sure how I did this since I'm not too familiar with GIMP – I just don't have Photoshop on my computer right now. Once finished in GIMP, I saved the waveform as a PNG file and found an online tool that converted it to SVG. You can choose your PNG file and click convert on the website. Download the SVG file, then upload it to another site that converts it to STL. Simply select the thickness you want, download the STL file, load it up in your 3D printing software, and print it out. I hope you enjoyed this tutorial – all credit goes to the people who made those conversion sites; they really made it a lot simpler.