Building 3D structures around objects

Jigita is a project that builds 3D printable jigs to help solder electronic components onto PCBs. The underlying techniques are flexible enough to be used for other purposes. E.g. the project has a demo that shows how to create gridfinity bins to hold allen keys.

Building structures around 3D objects is intutively an offset operation. While a 2D offset is popular and well understood, a 3D offset has a lot of gotchas. The details of the pains can be seen Github issues of popular open source projects such as openscad and manifold3d.

A full 3D offset is not required for all applications. Due to its 3D FDM printing roots, Jigita takes a 2.5D approach. It creates offsets using a 2D sliced stacks along the Z axis, and then creates geometry from the 2D slices, stacking them back to build 2.5D objects. This technique is surprisingly effective, and generic.

This talk will briefly go over Jigita and the problem it solves, and then dive deeper into how the 2.5D technique works. The project internally uses mesh based methods, using openscad. If there is time, then we will look at alternate implementations based on creating "solids", using build123d.

How slicing (an operation used in 3D printing) can be used to make 3D objects that enclose other objects.