My adventures in 3D printing: Golomb ruler

At work we’ve got a 3D printer. In this series of posts I’ll share some of the designs I’ve made.

At the start of the Summer we (I) bought a new 3D printer for the department, a FlashForge Dreamer. It’s got two extruder heads, so it can do two-colour prints.

To test that out, I designed this Golomb ruler. It’s a straightedge with marks at 0, 1, 4 and 6 cm. The idea is that you can measure 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 or 6 cm by lining up against different pairs of marks. I recently did a silly Twitter thread on this subject.

As you can see from the photo, two-colour printing isn’t quite as straightforwared as it could be. Because both nozzles need to stay hot, while one colour was printing the other just oozed out and made a mess. There are some settings on the printer you can change to try to reduce this, but I haven’t got the hang of it yet.

You can download .scad and .stl files for the Golomb ruler at Thingiverse.