Tactile Solar System - Print in Place - NFC Extra

Summary

Back in January of this year I was tasked with the challenge of creating a space themed 3D print which helped children to learn braille. So I designed and modeled out a Tactile Solar System which is about the size of a dollar bill in height/width, and then has planets modeled on top of it.

I ended up printing 110 of the solar systems, and figured out a way to print 10 at a time, along with a pause in the print to add an NFC chip embedded in the print.

I'm super excited to officially share this with a Creative Commons License so that anyone can print these, and continue to improve the experience.

Learnings & Tooling

At first I was manually recreating Braille characters with cylinders, but then later learned that there's a Braille typeface. So I ended up modeling most of the project out in Spline, then adding text within Spline for what's on the front/back of the models.

Optimizing the infill, layer height, and walls on the print helped me to get an optimized print of 10 solar systems at once, at 374.89g of filament (so I could print almost 30 solar systems with one spool of filament when using the entire roll). It takes about 17hrs to complete.

Technology

I learned about NFC tags from my friend Vincent in November of 2022, and had just learned about creating negative bodies within a solid (which can then receive magnets or NFC tags).

It was a lot of fun figuring out how to configure a file to have the NFC cut, and then pausing the GCODE at the right point to insert the NFC tag and resuming the print to complete it. Bambu Studio made it much easier to be able to set pause points in prints.