My tallest print and first truly openSCAD designed - Miele Vacuum Bag Holder

Forum regulars will know that I’ve been investigating openSCAD as my future 3D printing CAD program. I did create a small clip for my Ender 5 cable mgmt, but this is what I would call my truly design-thru-print openSCAD project.

To go along with the floor brush and air-powered hand vac attachment holders, I wanted 2 boxes to hold the vacuum’s dust bags. I wanted them to be able to hold the box the bags come in, even if I didn’t keep them in the boxes.

Another must have was that the boxes had to be designed from the ground up to use 3M Command Strips to hold them to the back of the vacuum cleaner closet.

A really nice to have was to safe on filament, and make the holders lighter, by incorporating cutouts in the design.

This is what I came up with:

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It took surprisingly little ‘code’ to create this.

I rendered the design & exported an STL of it.

Here are 3 overall photos of the print:

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The walls are all 1.5mm thick.

Here is 1 more shot:

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I took this one to show how the design was adapted for Command Strip use. The notches at the top are to allow access to the Command Strip pull tabs, so the box can be removed if desired. The solid areas under the 2 notches are to provide maximum adhesion area for the Command Strips.

Here are a couple of shots of the boxes installed in the vacuum cleaner closet:

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FYI, all 3 models were designed specifically so they can be printed without supports.

Hey! Well done!

Nice, how long did it take to print one basket?

About 12 hours.

PLA , PETG , Nylon , CF ?

Nicely done. I have been coding for over 40 years, yes I started in the days of the dinosaurs, but I just cannot get into openSCAD for day to day projects. I personally use TinkerCAD for very simple stuff and FreeCAD for everything else.

I do value the ability to distribute a design that supports the customizer option of openSCAD.

One of the reasons I’m interested in openSCAD is that it almost does the parametric part for you: declare some variables and they automatically show up as parameters in the Customizer pane. BTW, as I think I mentioned a while back, my 1st professional computer program was written in 1965.

Yep. The customizer integration is very powerful. Going to see if FreeCAD can export to openSCADS. Then I could design with a traditional CAD program and still use customizer. Might make an interesting video.

I’ll save you the trouble: the answer is “yes”. In fact, I’m using it to move my F360 models over to openSCAD, because there is no common format between F360 and openSCAD. FCAD can take in F360 DXF and export openSCAD. I believe FCAD even has an openSCAD workbench.

Given the application (indoors, great flexibility not required, fixed installation) I just used PLA. I am, however, less & less inclined to continue with PLA. I’m thinking I may just switch to PETG for the bulk of my prints, using other filaments, such as TPU, for special situations.

As a small followup, here is a capture from the openSCAD Customizer window, showing the way I cut out the notches and diamond shaped holes. The red color indicates shapes that were used as cutting tools,so they don’t become part of the finished model, much the same as other CAD programs such as F360. They were generated using 2 For loops that call 2 slightly different modules (in openSCAD, a module is what most programmers would call a subroutine).

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Wow! I’ll try it. And because you “code” it, this makes it interesting!

Really nice, but not the way my brain works.

I am a software developer myself (I am part of a team coding their own operation system for ppc macs, that is not linux, mac or windows based.), but bringing a programming language, 3D space and something I want to create but cannot see together is something I can´t deal with. :smiley:

BTW: I would have used a honeycomb pattern for the sides to increase the fanciness and reduce the overhangs even more. :smiley:

Fanciness was not a design criteria. It wasn’t even on the nice to have list ? I really added the diamond holes to save filament and weight, without compromising functionality.

I’ve found openSCAD works for me because I can “compile” the code and the results appear immediately in the Viewport.