Pittsburgh Terrain Coaster for Brew Gentlemen

thingiverse

This is my winning design for the Beer Coaster Design Challenge w/ Brew Gentlemen. I generated the terrain of Pittsburgh including the 3 rivers and Braddock using Terrain2STL. To use this tool, I had to repair the exported terrain before importing it into OpenSCAD. The required 3.5” rounded square with 0.25” radius shapes were generated by running the OpenSCAD script my Square Coaster Blank.scad. The edit Model.scad script moves and scales the terrain so it's placed inside the rounded square. My design, coaster - final v5.stl, was exported from this script. I converted the transparent background of the Brew Gentleman logo to white so I could import it into OpenSCAD and use the color differences as height differences. The BG Logo.scad opens this modified PNG and scales it and differences it with a cube to make it printable. I printed the coaster design with two colors - blue for the rivers and green for the land. To accomplish this, I first sliced my model and then split the G-code into two files on a layer boundary (G0 Zxx where xx is the movement to the next layer height). I added a G0 Z20 to the end of the first file so it would print the first few layers (the rivers) blue. Then, I manually switched to green filament and extruded enough to remove the remnants of the blue filament. The print would then resume at the G0 Zxx code and continue where it left off. The Brew Gentlemen logo was printed in black. To add a pop of color, I used a gold Sharpie on the letters but left the border in black. I also marked the location of Brew Gentleman on the map with the same gold Sharpie. I covered the river and mountains to the highest point with clear resin and let it dry overnight. The next day, I placed the logo using a glue stick so it wouldn't move and poured more resin to the top so it's level with the brim. After another night of drying, my design was complete.