This post is to brag about Asmbly’s greatest tool, the Community.
My wife and I are donating some concrete work to our son’s school, and wanted to leave our mark in it. After seeing a Facebook video of someone using a 3d printed stamp to leave their name in concrete, I knew that’s what we wanted.
I didn’t have the time or skills to design this stamp and print it. So I reached out to n9ne other than Brian @bwatt to ask if he could help out. Not only was he eager, he knocked it out of the park!
We met at Asmbly last night so I could conduct a very crude test run. The stamp worked perfect. With better concrete finishing I’m confident the stamp will give perfect results! And don’t worry, we’ll also have our son leave his hand print.
I encourage everyone to take advantage of the amazing community we have at Asmbly, even by just saying hi to a member in the shop you’ve never met.
Thanks James, I had a fun time helping you with your project. As always I deeply enjoy working with others in our community when I can. Dear Reader, If I could be of help to you, please ask.
To explain a bit about what I did…
My tool / medium of choice is 3D printing as I have a Prusa MK4 at home. And James said that is what he was expecting. Secondly you should know that I’ve been learning about AI and had gotten an account with OpenAI’s https://chatgpt.com/. In the past I have been successful with ChatGPT on a few other projects.
So I decided this would be another test of using it to generate the requested stamp. This one was a bit more challenging. The problems were dealing with fonts, text, spacing / kerning and especially draft angles. My CAD tool of choice had to be OpenSCAD, https://openscad.org/, because it could directly take the text output “program” from ChatGPT. The OpenSCAD app can then generate a CAD model which can be exported to an STL file for 3D printing. Below is the beginning of the ChatGPT session where, on my second attempt (yes, 2nd), was emphasizing what I wanted it to do. Notice how bossy I was.
So after numerous prompts in, responses out, and copy-pastes with ChatGPT I was able to get OpenSCAD to preview, render and spit out an STL file as shown below.
In the end I was successful in printing James @jamesfreeman two stamps: “James” and “Freeman”. And we met yesterday to try them out. They certainly made a impression on both James and I - what fun!
The OpenSCAD code is parameterized for both the string and size. So if you’re looking for a stamp for your next concrete job (or ceramics / clay job) I’d be happy to send you the code and help you use it.
Hello fellow OpenSCAD wizard! I am interested in the code, mostly because I want to see how it creates an acceptable per-letter draft angle! My initial thought was pretty much:
mirror() linear_extrude() text(“James”)
But of course that is just a 90 degree extrusion. I’m imagining this needs font metrics enabled, and does a more projection? Or perhaps just a larger text and a loft between them?
This is also probably the best ChatGPT OpenSCAD test result I’ve seen. So far I’ve always ended up ditching it and just writing a new one. Nice work!
Evan @flowmage, Indeed I had to enable the fontmetrics extension in my preferences for sure! You should have read my prompts to ChatGPT when it never said I needed to set the preference - grrrr. There are times I YELL AT CHATGPT - sometimes it is so stupid and at others so smart! Then to get the draft angle balanced on left and right it did even more gyrations of creating pseudo-slices, but it worked. You’ll have to read the code to find out the exact technique it used. Send me an email to bwatt@1fifoto.com and I’ll send you the JamesFreemanStamp.scad file.
