Transcript:
Cool. Hey, guys, it’s! Devon here with make anything. And today I’m tackling one of the more popular requests on this channel, which is a 3d printed phone case in this day and age, most of us carry cell phones just about wherever we go, and they’re not exactly the cheapest piece of hardware, so it’s very important that we protect them, so I’m not surprised that a lot of you want to see a 3d printed phone case. Well, just a couple weeks ago. Gearbest sent me this one plus 5 smartphone, so I can do just that. If you’re not familiar with oneplus, it’s a really cool brand. They’re building high-end phones that compete with the Flagships of Apple and Samsung and Google, But it’s a much smaller company, so they’re able to listen to their customers and really put in all the features that we asked for, and the result is a really nice phone. It’s snappy. It’s got an amazing camera. It’s got fingerprint sensors and all kinds of good stuff. I’m really loving this phone, but I hate to admit it. Within the first week of having this thing actually dropped it and got a little nick in the corner, so I definitely needed the phone case as soon as possible. So in front of me is the result of this project, a ton of phone cases and no. I didn’t just want a crazy amount of variety, that’s. What the last four for? But the other ones are all prototypes phone cases that didn’t quite fit perfectly. And when you’re making something like a phone case, it has to fit perfectly, so that’s really snug and actually protect the phone feels good works. Well, it’s not the easiest thing to design, so there’s a lot of iteration, a lot of prototypes that go into making this final thing. This one plus five is quite a beautiful phone. It’s got some really subtle curves and some nice details that make it really beautiful. It’s really comfortable, but it’s not the easiest phone to design for. That’s why I think the iPhone 4 was one of the more ingenious phone designs because it was so simple, literally just a rectangle with rounded edges extruded upwards. It was super easy to design accessories for and I think that gave them a one-up over the competition. It’s so easy that they would have more accessories and that’s. Something that customers are looking for now. This phone isn’t quite like that. It’s got all these small, subtle details, and that’s why I had to create all these iterations to really get a perfect fit. Now if I went through the design of every single iteration of this phone, I might lose a lot of interest out there so instead. I’m kind of gonna look back at my final design and run through that and show you guys what went into making the final phone case that fits like a charm by the way. Hear that snap. This is no joke! I’ve made a real good phone case, so let’s get right into it. My initial instinct was to use my flatbed scanner and get reference photos that way. I use this very often when I’m building around existing products because it scans in to scale and it gives nice clean images. I could also use this contour, Gage, which is a fancy little tool that just lets you copy the contours of objects. However, initial instincts aren’t always the best idea because with something like a very popular phone, there’s much easier ways to get reference images. If I just use Google Images, I can get hundreds of professional images of this phone, including some perfect top side left right front back Orthographic views, which are especially useful for this project. So I’ll just save these and bring them right into Adobe Illustrator, where I will create a rectangle that matches the dimensions of my phone, which I’ll measure with my digital caliper. Then I can size the images to match that rectangle to make sure that my images are perfectly to scale. I’ll do that for all my six views, and now that I have them to size. I’m gonna start creating the line work that I can use in my model, so I’ll use the pen tool here in Illustrator and just trace the outline of the phone and adjust things to make it as perfectly matching as possible and I’m also gonna trace out any of the main features like the cameras and anything that I need to be aware of when I’m designing my phone case once. I’ve done that line work. I’ll export each individual view as a DXF file, which I can import into fusion 360 when I’m exporting a DXF. I just want to make sure that the checkbox is marked for. Exports selected are only that way. It’s just that selected view that I chose, and then I’ll also make the unit So that one inch equals one unit that makes things really easy to bring into fusion using this import. Dxf prompt, So I’ll go ahead and bring in the reference for the front onto the front plane and one thing I didn’t show. An illustrator was creating this little T in the center of the phone, which is a reference for the center of the phone. That way I can use point to point move and center that right across the origin so that all my drawings will be aligned around that origin, so I’ve got my front view on the front plane and I’ll just go ahead and bring in the right view on the right plane and the top view on the top plane that way I have this perfectly lined up reference line work now. I went about a few different ways trying to design this phone for reference. But I’m just gonna go ahead and skip through my footage and show you what worked because there’s a lot to go through. So what I did here was go ahead and use a symmetric extrude of that top view, and I’m gonna extrude that just up to the point where it reaches the corner of the phone, because basically, this whole section of the phone is just that extruded shape next. I’ll go to the right plane and I’ll do the same thing. Extruding that right profile, just up to those corners. Now the two extrusions should line up, but you can see that one is a little thicker than the other, and that’s just because I made a mistake when tracing things out in Illustrator, so after I fix that up, you can see what it looks like here, and basically we have the whole phone now, except for these little corners, what we’ll do for the corner is use the loft tool and I’m gonna loft between these two faces, and that’ll instantly just connect the two with this straight connection to correct that I’ll switch to Tangent mode, which will bring up these little arrows that I can pull to affect the tangency weight, and basically I can pull those out until they closely match my front view [Music] we’ve also got a note that there’s a bit of an edge transition between this curve where this line actually swoops up like so, and luckily, fusion 360 made it really easy to just drag that edge and just like that it already looks just like the edge of the phone, instead of repeating that loft on all the corners, I just ended up cutting my phone into quarters and then mirroring that one-quarter to create the whole phone again. I combined my four shapes and just like that we’ve got a really accurate representation of my oneplu’s phone here in fusion 360 If we zoom in on these corners, you’ll see that there’s a little bit of bulging near the bottom there that shouldn’t be there. But overall, it’s pretty perfect and for our purpose. It should work just fine, so the next thing. I’m going to do is switch to the patch environment and I’m going to use the offset tool to offset all the surfaces on the phone. So I’m gonna do a point. Two five millimeter offset, which I’m gonna subtract from my phone case and that point to five millimeters, gives us a tiny bit of clearance so that the phone will actually fit inside, so I’ll offset the top as well and then I can use the stitch tool to connect the two into a single solid body at this point. I was trying a lot of different things, and my process got pretty messy, so I’m just gonna switch to my very final model and kind of run you through that you can see how the timeline on the bottom has all those steps highlighted red and yellow Because I was pretty sloppy with making this file since I was doing so many iterations, it just wasn’t worth my time to make sure that everything was done super properly. I just wanted to get things to work, but anyways. What you’re seeing up Top is that I offset the surface of the phone again. Another one point two millimeters. And that’s gonna create my actual phone case, so I did that, and then I also did these extrusions that go straight down rather than following the curve of the phone because I wanted to make it very easy to 3d print once again, I did a loft to turn that corner, and then I mirrored that corner of the phone case in every direction to give myself this whole case. So basically, at this point, I took that model of the phone with the 0.25 millimeters extra thickness, and I subtracted that from my outer form, which is the case, and that leaves me with this hollow part. Then I just extrude cut through the top to create an opening for the screen, and then I’ll cut away from that A little bit further just to really make the case as minimal as possible. I rounded that out with a little radius, but you can see that the edge of this case is still slightly taller than the screen itself, and that should protect the screen When your phone is lying Face-down on a table. For example, the next thing I did was apply this giant chamfer along the bottom of the phone. It looks a little nicer this way, But with that 30-degree overhang, It’s still no problem on my 3d printer. I’ll around that edge out just a bit, and then I’ll start putting in the holes for the different buttons of my phone, and I just used those sideview drawings that I made an illustrator as a reference for cutting these holes so that they line up with the buttons on the phone. Now you’ll notice on the bottom instead of those slots. I did this big cutout. And that serves a few purposes for one thing. It makes the case a little easier to flex and to get the phone on there. But I also had the problem where, even with this top open the phone charger and the headphone cords were having trouble fitting in with the phone. So I cut this slot all the way around the bottom, and that gives me plenty of room to plug things into the phone. Of course, we’ve also got to cut out this hole for the camera in the back and there we go as I said. This is the final iteration of my phone case, but let’s go ahead and look through the past prototypes to show you what I learnt from each one. My first prototypes were printed on the GTECH, Me Creator 2 3d printer and I printed the first one only about half way to make sure that the phone fits in the first place and the fit seemed pretty good, so I went ahead and printed it again in its entirety and that also fit quite well, but there were plenty of problems for one thing. The phone case was just a little too thick. It was especially a problem on the sides because I wasn’t able to hit the buttons without really sticking my finger through the case. Also, the lip on the front of the case wasn’t quite high enough, so you can see the screen actually sticks out more than the case, and that means it wouldn’t be protecting the phone if it fell down face-first. Also, I wasn’t particularly, we pleased with the look of this first giant chamfer that I did. I was just trying to take away as much material as possible, but in the end, that wasn’t the right solution. Here’s my next iteration where I took the walls from 2 millimeter thickness down to one point. Two millimeters. There was quite a bit of stringiness and my models weren’t coming out to clean but honestly. I think that’s just the result of this me. Creator – printer. The case itself looked a lot better than my last iteration. Notice how I changed the edges here from that big chamfer to this more subtle inward slope, it looked alright at first glance, but it ended up kind of messing with the holes of these buttons, creating this kind of ugly space underneath the phone. It’s just not a very nice looking gap because of that. I decided to try a different approach. This next case has an even one point two millimeter space around the entire phone, which gives it a contour much more like the phone, but in order to deal with those subtle curves. I had to print the entire case upside down with a lot of support material that means a little more post-processing and quite a bit more material used so while the case fit really nicely and looked really nice. I decided it wasn’t quite worth the trade-off, so I went back and redesigned that edge infusion one last time to create the chamfer that you saw earlier on, you can see. I also went pretty crazy with the design, making this Saturn pattern and those angled lines were actually created in my slicer because I printed this without top or bottom solid layers, allowing you to see that Center infill. It looks pretty cool, but all these cutouts ended up making the phone case a little bit too flexible so that it can’t properly hold on to the foam For that reason I printed out this second version of the same phone case, just with a more subtle design and this worked really. Well, all the holes were in the right position. Things looked good, but there was just a little bit too much clearance for the phone, so it shook around inside of the case, just a tiny bit rather than redesign the case. I just shrank down my entire model 0.3 percent and with that the fit went from really good to perfect. Now the phone doesn’t in there at all. Now that I perfected the dimensions. I could play around a bit more with the design. So next thing I did was create. This make anything branded phone case. I had tried to layer swap, but I swapped out the layers a little bit too late, so I just took some acrylic paint, squeezed it into the design and then take a paper towel and rubbed away the rest. That technique gave me this rather interesting end result, But I personally prefer the second attempt where I actually did. Swap out the filaments at the right point for my final design. I wanted to try out my brand new palette plus from mosaic. This is a really cool machine that will take multiple colors of filament and splice it up into a single strand of filament. So that you can print multicolor parts on your single extruder printer. I use that to print out this little bear, which was actually created by Stanley Donwood for a Radiohead. I usually create my own designs, but I really like his work, so I just decided to go with that. The bottom here is a little smudged because I printed too close to the build plate, But overall it still looks really good to clean it up a bit. I decided to sand the bottom here until it’s more smooth, and that actually ended up, giving me this really nice, soft matte, look and feel. So there’s my final foam case. I got the holes in the right position. Everything fits snugly. The edge of the case is just a little higher than the screen. It’s everything that I wanted it to be, and some people might think it’s silly that I printed all of these in PLA, but it just prints really easily, and I’m using matter hackers Pro PLA for all of these cases. So that means they’re a little bit more sturdy. Alright, guys! I hope you enjoyed that video. I’m super stoked with how my phone case came out. I wasn’t sure I’d be able to get it this thin and sleek and still protecting the parts that I wanted to, but it. It’s here, it’s awesome, It’s 3d printed, and I’m gonna use this everyday well. This one or maybe a different one, hey! I love the idea that I can take the same base model and print out a bunch of different kinds of phone cases super quickly and easily, and now I can be that much more unique. Walk around with a different phone case every day. It’s pretty cool stuff. I’m very happy with how it turned out and yeah. I hope you enjoyed it. If you guys are in the market for a new phone, definitely check out this 1+5 I upgraded to it from my Nexus 6p and I’m really loving it. It’s super fast. That’s always important to me. The battery lasts all day and takes great pictures too. A lot of bonuses, so I have a link in the description for a discount from gearbest limited-time You can put in the coupon and get a nice cheap, but really good phone, not only. Will you have a good phone? But then you can download these cases for free from my mini factory. Comm also linked in the description. I’ll put up all my different designs for you guys as well as a blank one. So you can design your own, so that’s cool. Check it out my mini factory, alright? That was a fun one until next time. I’m Devin. This is make anything, don’t. Forget to stay inspired, you you.