Quick OSH Decoration

prusaprinters

<p>Mosquitos. A blight on Christmas celebrations throughout Australia. While retrieving the box of decorations from the darkest bowels of the shed I happened upon the accumulated pile of offcuts from the annual maintenance of the flyscreens. Always looking for the slightest excuse to break-out the printer and put the offcuts to good use it occurred to me that this was a good chance to try a print-on-fabric (well flyscreen at least) design. The black nylon mesh of the flyscreen camouflages well against the dark backdrop of the Christmas tree. &nbsp;It takes just over 20 minutes to print this decoration on a Mini+.<br><br>I started with Inkscape to produce a simple 2D design incorporating the Open Source Hardware logo as the central motif. Then I imported the resulting SVG file into OpenSCAD and extruded the design. I used PrusaSlicer to prepare the design for printing and to add a pause halfway to allow the flyscreen mesh to be inserted into the print.</p><h4><br>Printing Instructions</h4><p><br><img src="https://media.prusaprinters.org/media/prints/106400/rich_content/f87b8c72-00d7-4d67-8dad-883d510cfe1a/quick_osh_bauble_strip.png#%7B%22uuid%22%3A%22fb5b1ca7-0860-48dc-be8f-4ed986666085%22%2C%22w%22%3A1103%2C%22h%22%3A1065%7D"><br><br>The printing process is pretty straight-forward. Prepare the print bed as per usual (I just use a thin layer of glue stick) and hit the start-button. When the print pauses use painters tape to anchor the nylon flyscreen in place. I found that taping at the top and bottom was sufficient to keep the mesh taught and prevent it from wrinkling and catching on the print head. Then continue the print. When the print is complete remove it from the print bed and use a craft knife to trim off the excess mesh. I found nail clippers worked well to remove any remaining strands. Then attach a loop of a suitably shiny thread and you're good to go! I had quite good results with a generic shiny gold PLA.<br><br>Merry Christmas.&nbsp;</p><p>BTW The original source for the <a href="https://www.oshwa.org/open-source-hardware-logo/">Open Source Hardware Association logo</a> is CC-SA, so careful to abide by that if re-using the design.&nbsp;</p>