Some Context…
From its beginning as a thruster Kickstarter, Blue Robotics has always been focused on making marine robotics more accessible to more people. As a community of creators, developers, and users we flourish most when working together, and sharing and discussing our designs and ideas.
This forum is maintained as a unifying resource of and for everyone involved, and hopefully it has been and continues to be useful to that end. That said, not all information is well-captured in a forum format, and for years we’ve been wanting a more cohesive way of sharing community designs that others can replicate, or iterate on and improve, while making sure the original designers get the recognition they deserve.
Today we’re excited to announce that Blue Robotics is now a recognised brand on the printables.com 3D-printing designs website, and we’ve started maintaining a variety of “collections” of 3D-printable models, from us and members of the community
Shout out to @piercet for already having several creative and useful models available!
Join In!
We invite you to join in by uploading your 3D-printable designs to Printables (see details below), then sharing the links to them in the following form, so that we can add your designs to our collections and make them easier for others to find, view, and make use of:
Feel free to make multiple submissions if you have more than one design.
Discussions of 3D-printable designs are welcome (as always) by using the #3d-printed tag on forum posts, in whatever category is most relevant
Details
- The most accessible files for printing are generally
.STL
files- It’s recommended to at least provide these if you want others to be able to print your designs, rather than only take inspiration from them
- Most CAD packages can export an STL, often with an option to trade off the quality and details with the filesize
- If you want people to make your design, it’s a good idea to link to any external products the design was intended to be used with/for, including (where relevant) things like
- screw sizes and counts
- any additional tools required
- tested, working software versions
- instructions for assembly and/or operation
- The easiest files for people to re-mix / iterate on are transferrable “source” CAD files like
.STEP
and.IGS
- Most CAD packages can both import and export these formats, so they’re great for sharing!
- You don’t need to provide these if you don’t want to (and you can license your designs on Printables to not allow modifications, or not allow commercial use, if that’s what you prefer)
- It’s often helpful to share photos or renderings of your design, to help people understand how it’s intended to be used, and especially how to put it together for designs that require assembly
- If you’ve made a forum post about your project, it may be useful to link to that in your part descriptions, to provide additional context and invite discussion
- As an extra incentive to share great designs, Printables has a built in reward system that provides “Prusament” points for designs that lots of people like and download, which can be claimed in the form of printer filament/resin, printers, and a variety of other cool and useful rewards