The Simplest Sphericon by Matsugawa

Last crawled date: 3 years, 1 month ago

OCTOPRINTS WAGE THEIR BATTLES TO DESTROY THE EVIL FORCES OF... THE SPHERICONS!
SPHERICONS! ROLL OUT... AWKWARDLY!
Okay, I'll stop.
I haven't yet glued the two halves of my first print together, hence no photos of it, but it's not like there's any shortage of these things out there to observe and learn from.
In my case, I learned from the one and only Maker's Muse and boy does he make mine look like crap. He also went to the trouble of making a peg for his halves to allow them to be rotated. The point is think of mine as a kind of hands-on learning exercise, hence the SCAD files being included.
The file "Sphericon Half" should be printed in pairs and then glued as needed. I would not recommend hot glue, but rather something like super glue as it makes a stronger bond with the plastic and adds minimal thickness between the halves. What I'd really like to see someone come up with is a kind of mechanical, ratcheting insert so the more complex sphericon shapes like the hexagonal type can be set to different rotations.
The file "Sphericon Solid" is more or less only here for demonstration purposes, something to rotate and turn in a viewer to give you a better idea of just how these "one-sided polyhedrons" work. It's all rather brilliant in its simplicity. If you're feeling brave, you could try printing it as a solid piece with some necessary support material, though I think the people who get the most out of it are the ones with SLA printers.
The file "Sphericon Solid" was an attempt to see if I could save myself a few extra lines of code by cutting the original diamond shape in half in Meshmixer and remeshing the opening. It worked, but it ended up being easier to just make the half in OpenSCAD and export it directly from there. Just remember, the Hull feature is your friend.
Final Note: if my "code" looks a bit inelegant, it's because I actually made the shapes on BlocksCAD and used OpenSCAD proper to export to STL. I can't code to save my life.