Sometimes you want to show the things you make without any enclosure, that makes it easy to explain things to some people, however, many people don’t like to see wires, breadboards and things like that, specially domain or business oriented people. The first impression is important, you are starting to create a new experience, a new relationship. If you have just one chance it is important to make a good impression. I have many kind of devices, each of them went through a continuous evolution and one thing I had to learn is to design physical things.

 

To create physical things you have to imagine them, draw them, design them in some digital tool and then materialize them, in my case, many of them went to a 3D printer and by the way, some of them can do a great job. If you don’t need huge quantities for your creation, some printers and materials can achieve great results for final products, even using flexible or transparent materials.

 

For now, I would like to share with you one thing that was quite good to me: openScad.

 

openScad is an open source software (see the links section) that will allow you to create digital 3D models. When you enter the world of 3D design you will find out that there are two main kind of designs, one is called organic and the other one is called mechanic. Organic design refers to designing things with soft lines and details, Jaguar figures for instance. Mechanic design has more to do with square things, sharp angles (not always), holes and everything you would see on mechanical things like Cameras, Laptops, etc. openScad is suitable for mechanical designs.

 

The great thing about openScad is that you can do those designs by programming modules you can reuse in the future, in the long term, you could find that approach more productive than using an interactive (and expensive) tool. The software is attractive to me thanks to the syntax style, which is not that far from the C syntax. From now on I will be posting a few articles about openScad with one goal in mind: to help you the moment you need to create some prototype for your own device to make a good impression.