12/13 (for Dad)
This is mostly an experiment in printing mathematical curves with my Rostock.
I used Processing and the Modelbuilder library to generate an STL file representing the surface. Many thanks to Chris for the inspiration and starter code!
My code (and the STLs) are here. Although it was written to make this one curve, it would be easily modified to generate other surfaces.
To make a printable object from that surface STL, we need to fatten it up into an STL file describing a closed volume. That is (it turns out) easily done in Meshlab.
Just start a new Meshlab project, import the single-surface STL, and choose Filters / Remeshing, Simplification, and Reconstruction / Uniform Mesh Resampling.
Set Precision to 0.5 (I'm doing this in mm),
Offset to 0.75,
and check 'Clean Vertices' and 'Multisample' and (crucially) 'Absolute Distance'.
It may take a few minutes to run, but it will make a 1.5mm thick solid by displacing the original surface by 0.75mm in either direction.
Then export the resulting STL, and print it! This one was (just about) self-supporting, so I didn't need any ugly support material.
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