Many small bowls for collecting things

Last crawled date: 4 years, 2 months ago

This started as a project to learn how to use OpenSCAD. I thought I'd make myself a simple little bit tray to use with my many games. It quickly evolved into a versatile, yet surprisingly still quite short, program to make many, many different sizes and shapes of bowls by changing just 5 numbers:
number of sides
size (width) of the bowl
height of the both
angle of the sides
curvature of the side-bottom connection
I started off with a square shaped bowl, 4 sides. Then I thought, what about a 3 sided bowl? It was easy to adjust for that, and soon I was going for 5, 6, 8, and more sides. And then figuring out how to do any arbitrary number of sides!
The program file is available here, so you can load it into OpenSCAD to decide on your own parameters, or you can use some of the samples I saved off.
In v2 of the program (.scad file) I cleaned it up a bit and updated it so you can it in your own program and call the many_bowls() module with a bunch of parameters. I've already discovered that having multiple of these bowls in existence in a single program can slow things down a lot (I made a single-unit piece with four bowls in a 2x2 square).
The great thing is that the "design" of the bowl is a simple stick-curve-stick to define the shape, then everything else is manipulating it into revolving in a circle/triangle/square/etc to form the bowl. It wouldn't take much to alter that basic shape, and we'd have an entire new collection to work with.
I'm still wondering how practical it will be to program a design vs graphically manipulate/create a design, but I am already seeing how versatile programming it can be. Make a general design, and with only a few parameter changes, you can make many different styles with no effort at all.