Hollow Polyhedra - Archimedean Solids

thingiverse

Archimedean Solids printing preceded Catalans; however, it wasn't feasible at first. Creating an openSCAD polygon requires a list of vertices and triangles. The netlib library lacks Archimedean vertex or face information. Wikipedia provides Archimedean vertices, prompting a code revision for vertex-only input. A two-step process was developed: producing scaled vertices mimicking a cage molecule in step one, followed by input into a molecular modeling program. VMD from the University of Illinois displays a wire frame model with labeled vertices, allowing users to manually identify faces for the second step. The process is possible to automate but only 13 solids were involved, so existing code was used instead. Observing wire frame models inspired using Buckyballs to create ball and stick and wire frame models of all Archimedean Solids. The complete set of hollow Archimedean stl files are in 'hollow_archimedean_stl.zip', while the scad files for production can be found in 'hollow_archimedean_scad.zip'. Although errors may occur, all 13 models produced attractive results with a maximum dimension of around 50mm. Six favorites were converted into stl files: cuboctohedron, trunc_octahedron, rhombi_cuboctohedron, icosidodecahedron, trunc_dodecahedron, and trunc_icosahedron. Printing on a Thing-O-Matic with a smooth heated surface and Kapton tape required no external support due to the large faces of Archimedean Solids. Rafts were used, ensuring all models printed in under 2 hours.