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Truncated Icosahedron

Soccer ball shaped polyhedron made of drinking straws

hari-wigunaHari Wiguna
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60 x 3D printed vertices join 90 x 4cm drinking straw snippets into a soccer ball.I got all my knowledge about this shape from:https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truncated_icosahedron

SoccerVertexX12.stl

Standard Tesselated Geometry - 697.35 kB - 10/15/2020 at 02:38

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SoccerVertex.f3d

fusion - 108.52 kB - 10/15/2020 at 02:38

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SoccerVertex.stl

Standard Tesselated Geometry - 58.19 kB - 10/15/2020 at 02:38

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  • Learning by doing

    Hari Wiguna • 10/12/2020 at 02:34 • 0 comments

    I started with a dodecahedron.
    I made the 3D printed vertex to be a sleeve for all the straws to "plug" into.

    Then I realize that it would be faster to print and prettier too if I insert the straw into the vertex!

    I found that multiplying the object in Fusion rather than in Cura creates a more efficient packing.
    I have 12 in the model then I multiplied it five times in Cura for a total of the needed 60 vertices.  I think it took 8 hours to print on the Ender 3.

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rakelgomez wrote 05/22/2023 at 11:14 • point

With this figure I have just made a modern lamp for my son. Very interesting!

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Neon22 wrote 10/14/2020 at 21:03 • point

There's a start at a parametric openSCAD version here: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2587058/files

I'd be happy to help create a general solution given a set of angles, or polyhedron def of some kind.

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Hari Wiguna wrote 10/15/2020 at 02:43 • point

That'd be cool!
The Truncated Icosahedron is made up of pentagons surrounded by hexagons.
Angle between pentagon and hexagon are 142.62°
Angle between hexagon are 138.189685°
More info at wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truncated_icosahedron
Please let me know the link to the openscad version. when you got it working.
Thanks!

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Hari Wiguna wrote 10/14/2020 at 19:33 • point

Sure, I'll upload it to thingiverse tonight and add a link to it here.
No guarantee how well the fit would work for everyone's printer.  I suppose you could scale it until it fits snugly for your printer and straw.

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Michail Wilson wrote 10/14/2020 at 17:32 • point

Neat.  Were you going to provide the STL files?

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Hari Wiguna wrote 10/15/2020 at 02:45 • point

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4624175
PS: Neon22 is going to make an OpenSCAD version too

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