For the first assignment of the semester, we had to create an “impossible” object, which is an object that is only easily produced with 3D printing. Additionally, the dimensions had to be small enough to fit inside of a gumball capsule.

I chose a couple of different designs from mathgrrl on thingiverse but I decided to go with the rhombic dodecahedron because it was very challenging to create an object that moves or hinges and be small enough to fit inside of a gumball capsule.

Initially, when using the 3D printer OS slicer, I realized that I could not use the supports generated from that program since they were to close together and too thick to be broken off of the object.

To combat that, I made my own supports with meshmixer since I could easily pull them off as they were less dense and more spread apart

I was able to print all 3 of them with FDM printers. The cost was about $0.12 per piece and it took 1 hour to finish. So a total of $0.36 and 3 hours to make.

To create the SLA, the print time was about 6 hours (including printings and wash and cure time) when creating both objects on 1 platform. The SLA looked nice but the supports were harder to clip off and you could see where I clipped them off, unlike the FFF prints.