Thursday, April 18, 2013

Worms, gears and OpenSCAD - Oh My!

I've been wanting to play around with worm gears and stepper motors for awhile, and today I had some time to experiment.  I downloaded this http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:8821 from Thingiverse today and after a bit of work, got it rendering correctly with OpenSCAD (http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/OpenSCAD_User_Manual).

Initially I printed the gears the same size they were in the original file and was quite surprised by how well they turned out:



The fitted pretty well together and even turned as you'd expect.  The actual worm gear had some underhanging PLA under it's flanges, but it was better than I thought I'd get.

I then decided to reduce the size of them and try it again, this time with something I'd actually use on a stepper motor:

They came out beautifully - and don't they look cool!

When I've got them in a jig and hooked up to a stepper I'll post updated pics & video.



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