I didn't want my design to be just pointy and triangular so I decided to add a circle in the design. I wrote down all my measurements and design in my designer notebook. In inventor, I created my shape with the line tool, then added a circle to the end of two lines. I dimensioned all of it and extruded my shape by 3.5 inches. After, I made another circle in the existing circle, dimensioned it, then cut it out of the original cylinder to create a hollow cylinder. I added a charger hole in my design, I created a small circle, dimensioned it and lined it up where top rectangle and cylinder meet. I extruded upwards from the base to cut out the circle. Once I was finished I exported the file, turned it into CAD format, saved it as an STL file, and opened it in Makerbot. I dimensioned it so it would print at the proper size, and flipped it on its side in order to print in the most efficient way. I made sure all the settings were right such as the quality, the raft, any support needed, extruder type, and the extruder temperature. Once eveything was correct, I saved the file to my flash drive and took it down to the machine. There, I inserted the flash drive into the 3D printer and found my file. I selected my file and the machine began warming up. Once it had done so, it began printing the base and gave me the information about how long it would take. My design took about 11 hours to fully print. Once my design was done printing, my project was complete.
Final Creation
Summary
In this rotation, I improved my skills for Inventor and learnt how to combine different shapes and use different tools in the software instead of just using lines to create a shape. I was able to get this project done pretty quickly because of my prior experience of using Inventor and the 3D printer. I also have very much learnt the importance of measurements, and measuring properly. The charger hole is not large enough to fit a charger through, unfortunately, but this has taught me the importance of measuring correctly. Whilst I did measure the hole, I probably should've measured the width of a charger to make sure it was big enough. Whilst the charger hole doesn't work, when flipped on the side, my phone can be charged on the stand with the wire going through the cylinder. I had a lot of fun creating my phone holder and feel very confident now when using Inventor, Makerbot, and the 3D printer.