Parametric Rotary Memory Aid

thingiverse

Purpose ------ Whose turn it to take out to do the thing today? Whether the thing is leading-the-meeting or taking-out-the-trash, it can be hard to remember whose turn it is to do a low-saliency task. This little device makes it easy to remember, and it's durable enough to knock around in my backpack while I move from desk to desk. Parametric CAD Model ----- This is an OpenSCAD design, and it's set up to be easy for you to put your own text on it. In my case, it's the names of my team members - but it could be anything that you use on a rotating basis. I found that curved edges print best for something like this (I print it standing up), but curved edges taked longer to render in OpenSCAD. I've set the $fn to something that has a nice balance between rendering-effort and render-quality on my gaming PC (2023), but you may want to adjust this depending on where you need that quality/speed to be. In this design, $fn is a parameter you should tune just like any other. Customizer ----- This design is perfect for the Thingiverse Customizer, except for one thing: the customer doesn't support changing string arrays. You'll need to run this script in OpenSCAD to put the names of your crew on this device. Hopefully, Thingiverse will add that feature soon. Also, after many iterations, it's now safe to turn up `$fn` to `$fn=360` on most desktop PCs, if you have a few minutes and want a really high-resolution mesh. I've set the default `$fn` to something that's a good tradeoff between rendering-speed and quality so that the script should run reasonably well on most PCs and in the customer -- but feel free to turn it up if you want a smoother mesh. Printing ----- I've printed most of these out of tough PLA with a 0.10mm layer height on a Prusa i3. The kerf is customizable so if you're using a different printer, a different filament, or a different layer height you can adjust those just like every other parameter of the design. Also, I prefer this design with very tight tolerances so that the setting doesn't change when it's riding around in my backpack. The tradeoff is that it's difficult to free the rotor when it first comes out of the printer. The tolerances are a tunable parameter so, if you prefer a looser feel, you might choose 0.40mm kerfs.