Modeling My Stand
When I first started modeling, I had no idea what I wanted to model. I just fired up tinkercad and start putting random shapes on the screen. I probably did this for quite a while, clearing my screen over and over again until I finally started making something that looked pretty good.
The barebones of what I modeled looked to me like an easel, or something you use as a stand for painting. After I got this idea, I fleshed it out some more and I ended up with something pretty funny looking.
In the end, here is what I made (link to thingiverse)!
Challenges
The initial challenges I had were struggling with coming up with an idea. The way I solved that was to just let my creative juices flow and start putting random shapes together in tinkercad. This is what I like about tinkercad, it is really easy to use and it allows you to form ideas quickly.
After I figured out what I wanted to do, the next challenge was scaling the thing. What I first did was look up the dimensions of my phone (145.3 x 73.4 x 8.9 mm) to plan ahead. This was by far the hardest part to keep in mind when modeling my object. I had to constantly check if the dimensions of my stand would be able to hold up the object I was creating. But in the end I was able to get the dimensions to the right size and everything seemed to be perfect... Until I went to ask for a 3d print.
When I arrived in ITLL to get my model printed I had a vague guess that my model would cost under 30 dollars. But when the tech staff helped me, and started objet studio I saw the $80 estimate and I knew I had to shrink it down significantly. This was kinda saddening because I thought I would be able to 3d print out a full size phone stand and actually use it, but it was just too expensive. And not only that, my careful measurements when I was modeling went all to waste. But nevertheless, I went back into tinkercad and made my model a lot smaller and the cost estimate was now down to $1.00. Now there's that college budget I was looking for.
Nevertheless, I had a lot of fun modeling my easel phone stand, and if it were cheaper to 3d print stuff like this, I would definitely be making a lot more.
Here's a photo of what I 3d printed:
