BearBook Air

thingiverse

The 10-year-old and I have engaging conversations while turning out his light and closing his door at bedtime. These talks range from dissecting the day's events to gaming and storytelling, often involving general goofiness. One Friday night, we discussed his teddy bear, which was determined to own a laptop so it could play Minecraft. By Sunday evening, the BearBook Air was ready. This model went through several iterations over Saturday and Sunday. In its first version, the parts didn't fit together despite scaling up the shells by 5% to accommodate other components: Not a bad start, but many changes were needed: * The shell's thickness was too thin to print usefully and had to be increased to 1cm thick * The initial hinge design was overly complicated and required significant simplification * The pivot attachment points on both shells needed rethinking * The keyboard, when printed, was only about 4 layers thick and needed further extrusion These changes took an hour or two, and version two was much improved. Some pieces still require post-print work to fit; the hinge needs sanding to fit properly, as does the keyboard. Overall, this weekend project was a success.