Middle section of Ciclop camera holder

thingiverse

This is a remix of https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1613839 which itself is a remix of https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:740357. The first thing slices a large camera holder component into three pieces for easier printing on small beds but only provides the top and bottom sections, leaving out the crucial middle section that I'm remaking here. How I Designed This Thing The original part appears to have been cut at Y=-50mm and Y=37.5mm. I grabbed the original STL file and attempted to slice the mid-part between those planes. I knew very little about mesh manipulation tools, so it took me a while to find a way to do it. Details for posterity: OpenSCAD: Almost worked but was getting annoying assertion errors on final export. Could not fix them and gave up. FreeCAD: Could not find a way to close the top/bottom of the mesh after cutting it with planes. Meshlab: Almost worked; I produced the mid-section by diffing the original part and the union of outer hulls (produced by OpenSCAD) of the top and bottom sections. The mid-section was merged with some tiny diff artifacts left from the top and the bottom parts. With those artifacts, the part was still too big for my print bed. I could split it into connected components and clean it up, but I found a simpler Blender-based solution sooner. Blender: Finally, I produced the part in Blender. Its UI is overwhelming, but I managed to subtract two carefully placed cubes from the original part. Yay!