Many small bowls for collecting things

thingiverse

This began as an endeavor to master the art of using OpenSCAD. I had envisioned crafting a simple little dish tray for use with my numerous games. It rapidly evolved into a flexible yet surprisingly compact program capable of producing a wide variety of bowl sizes and shapes by adjusting just five numbers: number of sides, size (width) of the bowl, height of the both, angle of the sides, and curvature of the side-bottom connection. I started off with a square-shaped bowl featuring 4 sides. Then I thought, what about a 3-sided bowl? It was easy to adjust for that, and soon I was experimenting with bowls having 5, 6, 8, and more sides. And then figuring out how to create any arbitrary number of sides! The program file is available here, allowing you to load it into OpenSCAD to set your own parameters or use some of the samples I saved off. In version 2 of the program (.scad file), I refined it a bit and updated it so you can incorporate it into your own program and call the many_bowls() module with multiple parameters. I've already discovered that having numerous bowls in existence within a single program can slow things down significantly (I created a single-unit piece featuring four bowls arranged in a 2x2 square). The great thing is that the "design" of the bowl is a simple stick-curve-stick to define the shape, then everything else is manipulating it into revolving around a circle/triangle/square/etc to form the bowl. It wouldn't take much to alter that basic shape, and we'd have an entire new collection to work with. I'm still pondering how practical it will be to program a design versus graphically manipulating or creating one, but I'm already seeing the versatility of programming it. Make a general design, and with only a few parameter changes, you can create many different styles with minimal effort.