Since it’s spooky season, I thought I would make some Halloween themed light switch covers. I hadn’t had an excuse to use CAD lately, so I thought it would be fitting. I wanted something ornate and not overly cheesy, so I came up with a few designs. I did a bunch of spooky things, and then edited out more and more while adding more classical elements until I landed on this design:
I ran into some issues manufacturing it. Namely, I kept having a shift happen in the CNC milling that would destroy parts of the plate. I decided that the controlled must be having problems, or perhaps some electrical interference with the stepper motors, so I switched to 3D printing instead. This seemed to be more successful, and then the same issue started cropping up.
As you can see, there is a shift in the layers. Just down by a few millimeters on the left example, but a whole centimeter or more on the right, and also a few millimeters to the left. Seems like the computer that is connected to the CNC and the 3D printer is causing both machines to have issues with the steppers. Not surprising since the motherboard that machine is built from is at least 13 years old. Back when I was a teenager, motherboards were generally considered out of date after about 5-6 years, and a long lived one might last 10, so I can’t complain too much. Looks like I’ll be computer shopping soon to try and solve this issue.