I recently celebrated my five-year anniversary with my girlfriend, and I wanted to make something special to give her. The result was a kind of mechanical box… object.
Opening the box reveals a platform with five holes evenly spaced around the center. If you hold the box and rotate the bottom, two things happen:
- The platform lowers, revealing five heart-shaped beads on individual axels
- Each heart rotates independently around its vertical axis
At first, I tried making all of the parts using FreeCAD, which I really want to like, but it proved to be far too unstable for me to get vary far. Progress stalled for a bit, but then I decided to just do everything in OpenSCAD instead, which proved much more straightforward. This is definitely the most complex thing I’ve tried with OpenSCAD so far, and I’m happy to say that it worked out great.
To see the box in action, check out the youtube video.
You can also view an album of the build and finishing process
Finally, for the more technically inclined, all the OpenSCAD code is up on github
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