Transcript:
In this video? I’m going to show you how a 3d printed a custom USB stick and SD card holder, specifically for my desk setup to eliminate the clutter and how you, too can use 3d printing to improve your life. Let’s get started. I think I guys Angus here. From makers music, You’re a designer or photographer or 3d printing enthusiast or any of the above. You probably have tons of SD cards and USB sticks and adapters and all sorts and well for a while. My desk looked like this. They were scattered everywhere, and it made my life a living. Hell, especially if you have to find that one single. USB stick or one specific SD card with that footage on it that you need and it’s fallen behind the desk because it’s not organized. Well, thankfully, for the wonderful magic of 3d printing, you can 3d print a holder for these things and the awesome thing about 3d printing is you can download existing models, so I thought it’d be fun to walk you through how you can find existing models and modify them for your needs and then 3d print them out on any low-cost 3d printer. So first let’s go over to Thingiverse all righty, This is Thingiverse! Nevis is an STL repository. So when someone designs something for 3d printing, then they can upload the STL file, which is what you use to 3d print the object and they can share it with the world, and this is just one of many actually have a really old video here on tons of them. There’s so many around my mini. Factory is another really good one, but I’m gonna be on Thingiverse looking for a USB holder for my desk. So for the simple search term of USB holder, we have loads of variations. Think about Thingiverse. Is these files aren’t tested so some of them might be good. Some of them might be bad. It’s a bit of trial and error, but how? I like to find ones that are known. Good Is I just go from relevant to number of makes, and that’s when people say hey, I made it. It worked well, and if you go to number of makes you will find this one. So this was designed by Llano and it’s a USB and SD card holder for wide USB sticks. So you designed this to fit a wide variety of USB sticks micro SD cards if you wanted an standard SD cards or their adapters, which is exactly what I need for my new desk setup. However, he’s designed it to sit on top of the desk. Now my new setup doesn’t have much room on the desk, and I wanted to get the holder off the desk itself onto the sides, so what I’m gonna do is download his model and then modify it using Tinkercad it’s important to note the author’s licensing with these models and how they want the file to be used and modified or distributed. So under this license, you’re free to share, which is to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format, and you’re free to adapt, which is to remix transform and build upon the existing model for any purpose even commercially, which is quite nice of the original author, but under these terms. If you do that, if you do modify it, you need to also share it again under these same license terms as what? I’ll be doing at the end of this video now. Once you have your model, you could just go and print it. If it’s exactly what you need. That’s awesome, but for my circumstance. I want my USB and SD card holder to sit on the edge of the desk, not on top of it. The desk setup is very, very packed already with stuff and there’s no room to sit on top. I’d rather have it mounted to the side, which means I’m gonna go ahead and modify this file And then like I showed in the licensing. I’ll reload to Thingiverse as a remix of this original model and to modify the design, I’m going to use Tinkercad, which is a free, very accessible 3d modeling tool, which is actually it runs on the cloud. It’s web-based so you don’t have to download anything. Even you do need an internet connection, That’s pretty good, though to get it to work properly, but the thing about Tinkercad is you can bring STL files in quite easily and modify them. You can’t do that super easy in fusion 360 but there’s other software you can use such as even Windows 10 3d builder. Lets you modify and work with STL’s or you can actually use blender, which is a much more advanced program but much more capable. Whatever suits your needs, but Tikki. CAD is really easy to use, so I often use it for modifier, very simply modifying STL files so to bring them in. You’ve got an import here and then we’re going to choose our file scaling at 100% and import because the model doesn’t have any fancy curve services. It’s very low triangle count. It brings in very quickly models with lots of triangles. They’re quite large, like maybe 10 megabytes or larger. We’ll start to start to take a bit of a while to be bring it brought in so what I plan to do to. This is to get a plate and extend it out here and then put three holes in it and figure out how I can mount it from the bottom of the desk, where it’s it’s pretty much flush or a little bit higher on the edge of the desk and to do that. I’m gonna get some measurements and I’ll be right back. Okay, and we’re back. I’ve taken some measurements and I’ve got the rough outline of what I want to do. Yeah, so it’s actually a weird length is one hundred and forty nine point, one two millimeters across and the current. USB holder’s width is 32 So what I want to do is add a lip underneath, which would be 20 millimeters long so makes it 52 millimeters total and the desk. The desk thickness is 15 millimeters so needs to go under 15 across and then. I want to make that lip. Like four millimeters thick because 3d printing, you can go a little bit thicker, bit more strength, and I want three holes in it to hold in place, and each hole is gonna be four millimeters in diameter to allow for the screw, and I don’t really care where they are. As long as they’re kind of roughly in the middle and spaced out evenly, so let’s make that to start with. You need to grab a ruler and drag it in because without that, Tinkercad won’t really work Very well with dimensioning the ruler. Lets you dimension stuff correctly. You can see as I move closer to that rule. As zero point in the X&Y, you can see the numbers changes in millimeters by the way It’s how I set it up so first thing grab a box and we’re gonna do a little base bit, which will be one forty nine point one two by 52 millimeters, so one forty nine point, one two by 52 millimeters like that and the thickness was four four millimeters thick like that. Okay, and now what I want to do is align them, so I’m just gonna line the corner of each on our ruler, which is a good easy way to do it so zero zero, and this one I can. Actually you can even enter the number to move it to the coordinates so 0 and then 0 like so so first things first. I’ve got it on the wrong side, which is fine what I’ll do instead, I’ll just rotate everything around by 180 degrees and then align instead to that, so I’ll select both and rotate it around 180 and then there we go a line like that instead. So zero zero. Okay, that’s better okay now. We need to make this distance here 15 millimeters. Now it can be a little bit tricky to get dimensions off something that you know. This is like 18 point zero one millimeter’s high from the zero. That’s a bit weird, so I’m gonna drop a new plane in or new work plane, Which means that will now be zero. So work plane. Drop it in to here. See, it all shifts up, and now if I bring a ruler into this work plane and it’s like the objects, it’s now at zero for this, and it will actually show the overall distance down, so there might be a better way to do this, but we need to establish the minus-15 distance here, and you see, SS – 18 to the bottom of our plate, but actually, we want it to be – 15 to the top of the plate so to do that. We’re gonna do minus 18 plus 4 or minus 4 other, so minus 20 -, so minus 22 like that. Alright, so we can now join them together, so it’s like both and group, and there we go. So the grouping has now combined them together. They go one color and we can just put our work plane back to the bottom, which is a bit more useful like that. OK now! We need three holes, lets. Grab a cylinder. You can actually start with a cylinder hole, which is a little bit easier. Doesn’t really change much and then we need to make them four millimeters in diameter so to do that in Ticka. Cad, you change for here, you see, it’s now like an oval and then for here now it’s a cylinder again and the height doesn’t really matter. It just has to cut through everything, so lets. Just make sure it does and move it up a little bit. There you go, so it will cut through our object. We need three of these bad boys, so just copy paste and paste. Now we have three and like. I said I don’t really care exactly where they’re going to be. I just need to make sure I have four equally spaced holes, So I’m gonna put one there, and then maybe here and I can put one like here, but what I want to do is align them all and the easy way to do that is to use the align tool, so I can select all the cylinders holding shift and then a line and these three little dots here will align them all on that axis, and then I’m going to group them together so like that, So this means that when I select one, its legs, all of them like that, and if you wanted to, you can absolutely make these holes precisely where you want. No problem at all, but for my use. I don’t care! No one’s gonna see them, so I’m happy with that. I’m gonna select those holding shift and the main body and group, and now we have our modified USB holder. This is by no means meant to be a full Tinkercad tutorial. It’s more just like a quick walkthrough to show you my process, but if you wanna learn more, you can do the built-in tutorials and really good, or there’ll be some links in the video description to other tutorials in Tinkercad. When you’re done in Tinkercad, you can now export your models, so just click export and I have this shape selected, So I’ll just export that and STL, and now we can fire up our slicer. Okay, this is Kraft, where I just tested the craft, but three you can find the review here. If you’re interested in that machine, it’s really nice. High-end Jewel Extruder 3d printer. But this is a really basic object for it, and we’re just gonna be printing this off in standard settings in PLA. And I’m gonna choose to use some nice, shiny poly alchemy elixir abyss, which is like a dark, black, shiny filament quite nice and I’m gonna send this to the craft Bot 3 and then we’ll see how it goes. Attaching it to the desk is super Easy. You just line up where you and Mark three points with a pencil or sharpie and then. I’m just using a cordless drill to sort of drill some really small pilot holes where I want it and then tap the screws in because it’s just cheap chipboard on the table. It’s nothing fancy, tap them in, and then you’re basically done so. What was the purpose of this video well? I wanted to show you that 3d printing can be used to make really useful objects in bespoke applications. I needed an SD card and USB holder That was made for my desk, sat where I wanted it at the right height, and I didn’t have to design it from scratch. Someone had already done a great job. I just had to modify it and send it to my 3d printer So I could make it. You’re not gonna find something. Oh, this in the shop that’s gonna perfectly suit your need in the color that you want. It’s not gonna happen, so why settle for adapting something else that exists in the shop when you can adapt something that exists in online to be perfect for you and it actually physically make it. That’s what I think 3d printing has a lot of power and why I like to run this channel because on makers Muse, it’s my aim to empower your creativity through technology If you’re new to this channel, if you’re new to the idea of 3d printer, you think, hmmm, that looks pretty cool, but it’s. How hard is it to get into? Is it expensive well? I have good news for you. It’s actually really accessible now. So hit a subscribe button and look through my entire backlog of videos. I have videos on 3d printers that are like under 350 bucks. If not less $200 us for a perfectly good 3d printer and a whole 3d printing 101 series to get you up and running quick, smart in the wonderful world of 3d printing so guys. I hope you enjoy this video and I look for again very shortly. Catch you later, bye.