Square Sundial by GaryStebbins

Last crawled date: 3 years ago

This is a simple sundial with parameters used to customize it for location and size. It should work anywhere in North America, and anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere with moderate latitudes. At the extreme letitudes the gnomon may not be properly formed. I have not tested the extremes, and it is not designed (nor tested) for the Southern Hemisphere.
I wanted a sundial where the base and gnomon were printed separately so they be easy to send through the mail, then assemble. I have made and sent several to friends, using only a padded envelope for protection.
I have printed dials from 100mm to 200mm across (about 4 - 8 inches). I found that a 125mm dial is a good compromise between size and length of time to print. Hopefully the parameters and their descriptions in the code (which show up in OpenSCAD's Customizer) are adequate to design your own dial. The uploaded code creates a reasonable 125mm dial.
OpenSCAD (https://www.openscad.org/) was used to create this sundial. I have not had good luck with the Thingiverse Customizer, so I recommend downloading the program files (SquareDial.scad and WriteText.scad) and the data file for the letters & numbers (Letters.dxf), installing OpenSCAD on your computer, and creating the STL files that way.
This is based on an idea I got from Customizable Sundial, https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:51183. Thingiverse seems to be broken when I search to make it show up on that Thing as a remix. I'll fix that when Thingiverse lets me. I used the Customizable Sundial for inspiration, and copied the text module from there, which I then substantially modified (simplified, as I didn't need curved text and couldn't get it to work reliably).