PureBox - fresh from the 3D printer

Here's a quick update about our portable water purifier project I'm currently working on.

We actually received our 3D printed prototype something like a week ago. I just didn't have the time to write about it yet. But now I do!

Ok, so we do have a name for the concept device: PureBox.

And judging by the look of the final product it's exactly what the name implies: a pure box with rounded edges. However, it's the inner beauty (or complexity) that matters in this one.

Many things have changed from the early versions. The solar panel for example is no more visible on the exterior shell and the light of the UV lamp now shines through a small triangular hole. Overall everything is now a lot more refined than previously.

some of our gorgeous plastic parts

As I mentioned earlier we used Creo to model everything. It's pretty much like any other CAD application, only a bit more advanced than the rest. I guess the main real difference is the fact that every part is inside its own individual file and everything is assembled into one main file in the end.

It's not a surprise that I took further responsibility as the main 3D modeler/visualist in the project. Even though all the decisions were made as a team it was me who created all the extrusions, revolves, cuts and features of each and every part of our model.

Behind the scenes look at our desperate workstations

We had to model all the interior details and decide how we wanted to approach making them. One thing we had to keep in mind was to make it as easy as possible to mould and manufacture even though we're only making a 3D printed plastic prototype. Technically we could print almost anything but it would not be very reasonable in the real world..

It certainly was pretty difficult to come up with all the things for the nuts and bolts while making sure that everything fits where they belong. Luckily it was pretty easy to alter the dimensions when we suddenly wanted to change things. It's very different to work with such high precision rather than eyeballing the designs when making visualizations. We went as far as arguing about the proper dimensions down to one tenths of a millimeter just to get everything right. The thing is that there's no one solution or a true value for any given thing. It's all about what we think might work and then we try it out and see what comes out of it.

I have to say that this assignment has improved my overall CAD/hard surface modeling skills a lot.

Now it seems almost too easy to just create the outer surfaces of objects when doing 3D models for illustrations, games etc.

Here's a few screenshots I took of our part files:

Exploded view of our prototype

But yeah, we managed to get everything ready for printing and delivered the triangulated STL files for printing. I was very happy with the quality of the prints and everything went surprisingly smoothly. I even tried to assemble all the components one night at home just to see how everything fits inside. And they do fit.

Testing the assembly

It's insane to think that it was less than three weeks ago when we had only early drafts for the project and now we're pretty much done with the prototype. I'll post more about our final renders and presentation sometime very soon.