5 posts tagged with "community"

3D Models to Print: Fidget Star Edition​

3D printing enables makers to create some absolutely amazing things. Whether for practical use or just for fun, it's always amazing to see what you can make with a 3D printer.

If you have a 3D printer yourself, it can be exhausting trying to find models on some of the popular sites like thingiverse so I am highlighting a couple of fun 3D models that I have really enjoyed printing recently.

Check out the timelapse video created using Octolapse and watch The Spaghetti Detective's viral tik tok video that got over 50 million views on its Tik Tok account to get a sense of what these fidgets are all about. Want to print these fidgets yourself? We'll show you where to get the files below so you can do just that.

The Fractal Fidget Star and its attachments​

Our absolute favorite fidget is by far the 8-pointed fractal fidget star and the attachments that go with it designed by Chuck Hilliard (known as chuuckaduuck on Thingiverse and social media). This is by far the most popular of all the fractal fidgets (maybe because it has a cool 3D printable attachment to go with it).

The fractal fidget stars look awesome in this timelapse video:

I made a giant fidget star for my grandma and posted it on our Tik Tok account a few months ago and it just hit 50 million views. Check it out:

@thespaghettidetective

Can’t wait for Grandma to see this tomorrow! #fypシ #foryou #grandma #3dprinting #granny #fidgettoys #3dnerds #3dprinter #spaghettidetective #diy

♬ original sound - The Spaghetti Detective 🍝

Where do I get the STL files?​

You can get the STL file for the 8-Pointed Fractal Fidget Star on thingiverse here or on My Mini Factory here.

Tips for printing the fidget star

• Take it slow especially on the first layer to ensure proper adhesion. We have printed these from 5-25% infill with success at all levels.

The fractal fidget attachments can also be found on Thingiverse here.

Tips for printing the attachments

• Begin with 'A1A String Attachment' to calibrate the fitting to your print. Adjust the X and Y axis in .1mm increments until satisfied with fit. Sometimes it is easier to release an attachment by pushing it through rather than pulling it out.

There's a game I like called Dark Souls, made by From Software. It's an action RPG known for its difficulty, and it has spawned its own subgenre of games, though most imitators miss the most important part about Dark Souls: Everything that goes wrong, even if it's not your fault, went wrong for a reason you can learn from and avoid the next time. Every failure gets you better at the game. 3D printing is like that. As you see above, in the prints since my successful first print, I've had a lot of print failures. Let's go into why they failed, how I know how they failed, and how I fixed them.

A lot has happened since my last post. To start, on Sunday, March 7, we finally passed the thirty million Detective Hours milestone. The Detective has kept vigilant watch over your prints for almost 3,500 years of time. While she was busy watching your prints so that you don't have to, this is:

What you've been up to​

You guys have been sharing a series of beautiful prints of The Detective on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, and we're floored by the response. Every day, there are new shares and we've got more Detective Hours to give away. Please keep it up - the usernames to tag are below, and we'll give you 200 free, never-expiring Detective Hours for every print you share where you tag Wekster and us.

What I've been up to​

Five days ago, Wekster contacted me to let me know that he had split the bust model for full multicolor printing. Below, I've included zips of the STLs for the multicolor base and the new, fully multicolor detective.

Since then, I've been trying to print her. This is how that went:

We're excited to announce that there's a new 3D-printable model of The Spaghetti Detective available for printing, designed by the great Wekster (if you don't know him, check out his stuff. He designs some of the coolest models you can print). At the end of this blog post, there are links to download it and information about how you can get 200 free Detective Hours for printing it, sharing photos of your prints, and tagging us and Wekster. You might even win a whole year of Pro service on us. Share and enjoy!

How the model came to be​

Two weeks ago, I contacted Kenneth Jiang, the creator of The Spaghetti Detective, and said that it would be cool to work with a 3D designer to make a 3D printable version of our mascot, The Detective. I'd been contributing code to The Spaghetti Detective infrequently for about a year, and over that time it's become indispensable to me, and I thought a sculpt would be a cool thing to give back to the community that helped it grow. Kenneth liked the idea and told me to run with it.

I reached out to Wekster and told him what I had in mind (a stylized, film noir-style sculpt of The Detective herself, with a silhouette similar to the logo), and he liked it and agreed to try. A few days later, he sent a concept he was toying with:

I was blown away; I couldn't look at TSD's logo anymore without seeing that haircut in her silhouette.

A couple prototypes and about a week later, he had a beautiful little bust that was support free, had the eyes and hat ribbon separated for multicolor (so I could print them glow-in-the-dark), and had a base ready with our logo:

The print​

I wanted to print her in TSD's colors (black, white, and purple) and to make her eyes and hat ribbon glow in the dark so that, in appropriately noirish conditions, she'd look like our silhouette, a dark detective with glowing eyes and an upturned collar. For this, I chose FilamentPM's graphite black PLA for its dark glittery intrigue, Fusion Filaments' beautiful Plutonic Purple HTPLA for the bust (printed at a high temperature for extra sheen), and MatterHackers' blue glow in the dark PLA for the glowy bits. This is how she turned out:

The free Detective Hours​

We will credit 200 free, non-expirable Detective Hours to anyone who prints out The Detective, post a picture or a time-lapse of her to a social platform of your choice (twitter, facebook, or instagram), and tags us and Weskter.

Here are the links you need:

The Spaghetti Detective twitter | Wekster's twitter

The Spaghetti Detective instagram | Wekster's instagram

The Spaghetti Detective facebook | Wekster's facebook

And make sure to check out Wekster's other stuff on patreon

The most exciting news​

On March 20th, we will choose one print at random that we've been tagged in and upgrade the TSD account of whoever printed it to a free Pro account with UNLIMITED Detective Hours for the next 12 months. If you win and already have a Pro account, you can choose to gift this to a friend or a fellow maker.

Just give me the model already!​

Base

Singlecolor Bust

Multicolor Bust

The model was created by Weskter and is under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

The Spaghetti Detective came out of beta about 1 year ago. Since then, The Detective has watched more than 19 million print hours for the 3D printing hobbyists. That is on average 49,625 hours a day!

And sometimes next week, we will cross the mark of 20 million watched print hours.

Those who joined TSD family early enough would probably remember we had a celebration (socially distanced and perfectly safe😉 ) when we crossed 10 million hours back in April. We will do a similar one this time too. This means the chance to get 50% discount off Pro account but you need to work for it. We will make the rules simpler than last time: