What can a battery compartment cover of a portable audio receiver and seven different audio-video cable caps on a stage have in common? The answer is simple: the same parametric model! In this article, I share the original file and my small modification, which allows you to add a numerical label to easily distinguish the position of the caps.
Some time ago, I needed to recover around fifty battery covers from nearly 1,200 audio receivers used since 2020 for university lessons in a pavilion. The device is shown below, adapted to handle 10 different channels.
At almost the same time, the stage of a conference hall was equipped with a full-length staircase, with seven cable passages of varying dimensions from a previous event.
In total, eight different caps to produce and refine step by step. I immediately thought of my 3D printer and some parametric models already available online.
I easily found this model: Parametric End Cap on Thingiverse. The only missing feature was a label on the inner bottom to distinguish each stage cap. I added this code:
// Add parametric text label on the top surface
translate([outerWidth / 2, outerDepth / 2, height ])
linear_extrude(height = 1)
text(str(label), size = 20, valign = "center", halign = "center", font = "Arial");Here the final result:
Click here to see the model in a 3D view.
Leaving the label field empty, the cap remains identical to the original, allowing me to create the battery covers as well.
Below are the time-lapse of the 3d printing and the openSCAD file.
Download SCAD file: GitHub – parametric 3D models
