Yet another Battery Dispenser

thingiverse

Fry's sells batteries in packages of 100, but their packaging is woefully inadequate. The moment you remove the first battery, the rest reorganize themselves into a chaotic mess. I scoured other battery dispensers and found none that could hold 100 batteries; most simply arranged them in a single-file line. What I really wanted was a dispenser where I could dump batteries in handfuls at a time. This dispenser works flawlessly without jamming, but it has some notable drawbacks. It's far too tall and uses an excessive amount of plastic. I firmly believe there's significant room for improvement, yet as is, it meets my requirements. The dispenser could likely be made much shorter if the steep funnel were angled instead of vertical, but that would necessitate experimentation to determine how sharp a corner can be successfully incorporated at the junction with the shallow funnel without jamming occurring. This project consists of two or three components, depending on what fits within your build plate. To proceed, you'll need to edit parameters in the BatteryDispenserParameters.scad file and generate the BatteryDispensor.scad file twice: once with the Mirror variable set to 1 and again with the Mirror variable set to -1. This will produce the two halves of the base. If your build plate has too small a hopper, you'll need to generate the Hopper Extension. With HopperWidth set to 10 and BaseHopperHeight set to 1 (the minimum), the base can hold about 50 batteries. At BaseHopperHeight set to 6, it holds 100.