Koch Snowflake Ornament

thingiverse

Koch Snowflake Ornament This Christmas season I'm excited to make a special gift for relatives and friends that echoes the charm of handcrafted crochet ornaments I've received in years past. A sturdy and quick-printing design is essential, not to mention something with mathematical intrigue. Inspired by SimonFront's innovative use of the fractal, particularly how multiple iterations can be combined into one cohesive design, I revamped his concept for optimal printing on FDM printers that can quickly produce high-quality designs. As these objects print extremely fast, it makes sense to make plenty and share them this festive season! They should scale easily in Cura if you wish to create a flurry of various snowflakes. Each item consists of a series of stacked Koch Snowflakes featuring distinct numbers of iterations from n down to 1. "Koch 3", for instance, has three iterations at the bottom, two in the middle, and one on top, creating depth, interest, and preserving its shape. I employed glow-in-the-dark filament for printing these objects, with "Koch 3" and "Koch 4" being depicted here. Although it's simpler to identify the pattern in "Koch 3", "Koch 4" appears more plushy. The former has become my customized Christmas ornament this year. The potential drawback is that if you try to create "Koch 5", you might not get an appealing result unless you increase its scale or use a thinner shell size for printing. I invite anyone willing to undertake this task to share their creation's photograph with the community. To gain a deeper understanding of the Koch Snowflake fractal, kindly visit Wikipedia at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Koch_snowflake Print Settings * Printer: Rapid Lite 200 v1 * Rafts: No rafts used in printing * Supports: The use of support materials is unnecessary in this design. * Resolution: Prints with a precision of 0.2mm. * Infill: No infill used due to the desired smooth finish of the model * Notes: Sliced using Cura and utilizing "Spiralize the outer contour" and "Only follow mesh surface" features. The development of this Koch Snowflake Ornament design was an exciting project for me. The first step involved writing a code in LOGO, the classic programming language. Then, I transformed that code into Python script to harness the built-in turtle graphics module to draw these intricate curves and save them as SVG files. You can view how this worked with some illustrations here: https://youtu.be/fxdeNtVfa2E Using svg2pdf and pstoedit software, the next step was to convert those SVG files into DXF that can be seamlessly integrated into OpenSCAD. There I imported each of these files one by one, fixing their aspect ratio as needed, then extruded them accordingly. To make the most out of this quick printing process (it only takes 6-7 minutes for "Koch 4" and 3 minutes for "Koch 3"), I custom-modified Cura's gcode to allow my Rapid Lite 200 v1 printer's extruder and bed heaters to remain running at the end of each print job. This adjustment enables me to rapidly produce multiple prints of different flakes in no time – with up to eight "Koch 4" snowflakes possible per hour if done correctly. Please remember to turn off these hot ends when leaving for extended periods. You can use and share this design freely under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike License. However, keep in mind that special licensing requests can be considered at any time, and sharing a credit would not only honor the spirit of collaborative creativity but also add significant value to future enhancements!