Four openSCAD bowls made from arrays of square blocks. Two are small bowls about 70 mm in diameter, one made from smiley faces, the second from open squares. A medium sized bowl, about 100 mm across, is made from a pattern shaped liked a bulls eye target. A final large bowl, at the maximum size for the printer, 190 mm in diameter, is composed of heart shaped patterns. OpenSCAD code is included. It is partially parametric and includes patterns which can be used to create additional bowls. Details about the creation of custom patterns are included.

MakerBot

MakerBot Replicator (5th Generation)

Yes

No

0.2 mm

All bowls print without support. On the makerbot printer the small bowls print in about 3 hours, the medium sized bowl in 6 hours, and the large bowl in 24 hours.

The patterns are placed on the surface of a sphere at positions which correspond to solutions of the Thomson problem. A set of Thomson solutions, taken from the Cambridge Cluster Database - http://www-wales.ch.cam.ac.uk/~wales/CCD/Thomson/table.html - is included in the openSCAD code. This allows one to keep the size of the ornament the same over the full range of bowl sizes. As the size of the bowl is increased the chosen Thomson problem solution set can be one based on larger numbers of electrons. The largest bowl can serve as a small hat.