On thingeeverse under >lithophane lamps> there are all sorts of nice pics of them working.
Thats my daighter with her husband. My daughter is expecting sep 10.
Nice. Thanks for sharing. And it looks like you’re well on your way to an efficient lithophane process.
Thanks to your help. I am going to do a lot of them. I shall have to order more lamp lights and perhaps some more white fliament. With four lithophanes done correctly the lamp becomes very solid and will make a very good present to my family. I like its portability and the amount of light it shines. No dimmer is necessary.
I am running into another problem that I have thought about before. I print my lithophanes vertically but with a border that is 2mm thick they start wobbling at a certain height. I have just paused my print of Mona because I could see that this was a problem. I suppose I could print supports at each end and that would take out the wiggle. I would like to save the print I have paused. Im trying to think of some way I can brace it or it will become a disaster even though when I shine a light through it has done well til now.I need to get inventive and stick in some kind of support to keep it from wiggling far too much. Any suggestions would be gratefully accepted.
Try to add supports
Great to hear. Do you still plan to find a way to make them rotate?
I am in the process of doing that. My half finished Mona Lisa looks really good so I hope I can perfect my ;ithophane production method. I hope to do many of them. You can always change them around in the lamps.
For sure. And imagine this in your mind’s eye: 3 or 4 lamps, all rotating slowly next to each other, kinda like they’re dancing…
We will see what happens but ideally I would like to make a buttress support at each end that only grabs the 6 mm od thin edge I have around my lithophane. So I must learn how it can best be done.
I would like to improve the off on method they have in the lamp. This stick dropping down on to a tiny pressure switched battery operated light is not near perfect.
I need to take one step at a time, being a doddering old Joe Biden now things are more difficult than they used to be. I think it will be a piece of cake to make them rotate once I get past these other problems.
Piece of cake meaning I just plagiarize someone elses work like I always do.
I suspect a spring to hold the stick up would help a lot.
The problem is the stick gets stuck with their dimension and the lid does not direct it straight enough so that it can slide off the domed top of the light.
I have not found much online that I would want to emulate as far a making a lamp rotate goes. The one I did find was done with a flimsy clock movement. I suspect a proper geared down motor would be much more robust.
That would be easy enough to fix if the designer of the lamp would make his CAD file available.
To stabilize wobbly vertically printed lithophanes you can try just adding a brim. Here is how Cura defines a “brim adds a single flat layer around your model to prevent warping”. If a brim is not strong enough I would print on a raft. Either of these options, added by your slicer should print faster than adding supports all the way the sides of your print. The brim is the blue surface along the side of this print. Notice you can define the brim width.
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One very nice thing about printers like the Ender 5 and the Monoprice Ultimate 2 is that the print bed does not move back and forth. It only moves up and down. This is a more stable arrangement than on a Prusa i3 Mk3 or Ender 3 style of the printer where the print bed is shaking back and forth when printing a thin vertical surface.
You might also try rotating the print so the side to side movements are handled by the X-axis and not the Y-Axis which moves the bed. This will further minimize movement that will shake your print. In general, I find folks, myself included, forget to consider print orientation along the X and Y axis when optimizing their prints. We all think about laying the print flat, or printing it vertically but rotating it also makes a significant difference.
Thanks again to everyone here. I am just about to film the video about this subject and these discussions have prompted me to think about a number of important points.
That will be another trial I shall have in this excursion into the beyond.
Mr Ender I like your arduino idea. I think rotating slowly has its drawbacks. Rotating quickly at 90 degree increments would keep the lithophane square to the world and more visible instead of showing people a corner of the lamp most of the time.