Myself and a group of two other students, Pablo Fuster and Aniya Savage, set out to write a script that enables anyone with access to a 3D printer to create walls of their own design. The script does this by taking a 3D surface created by the user, thickening it by a specified amount, ‘cutting’ this wall into jigsaw pieces that are sized to fit on the bed of a desktop 3D printer, and finally exporting them to .stl format to be printed and assembled with ease.
The script begins by giving thickness to the surface and slicing it vertical steps.
The wall is then sliced again using dovetail shapes along the tangents of the wall.
Interlocking cylinders are added to the top of the pieces and cut away from the bottom.
This allows them to lock together like a 3 dimensional jigsaw.
The user can choose to cut the wall into however many pieces they wish, to allow for different wall or printer sizes.
