Openspin is a design environment for customized rotating parts: bearings, cv joints, & fundamental components. It can be used for millions of outcomes, but we start with a parametric design and good documentation. Let's allow hardware to become as versatile and useful as open source software.
More Open Source designs made by DM & SCUTTLE team:
CAD files will be uploaded on grabCAD instead of here on gitHub. User interface, search functions, and revisions are better supported for CAD on grabCAD while documentation is better supported on GitHub.
It is sensible to add features for variations of the bearing, but it's not sensible to pack them all into one design file.
Example variation with flange
In one variant, we may need the bearing to be mated to a round tube with a permanent bond. This feature can be an optional addition (to be suppressed or unsuppressed to achieve new configurations). But, with each potential use case we branch into hundreds of possibilities wherein design intent may change, and the appropriate parameters and dependencies may also change. With some community feedback, we can release a set of template bearings, each with parametric addons, so that we don’t get overwhelmed by hundreds of features in one design.
This note (2024.10) is a shoutout to Daniel for publishing models and demonstrations with a 3D bearing before I started. Daniels designs sparked some ideas for me and I started by printing his model. By 2024.10 I rebuilt the bearing a few times and made improvements. Not performance improvements, rather improvements to make the design teachable, a little more easily modified, and a little more parametric. One of his coolest parametric features was the automatic adjustment of ball quantity. The designer changes the diameter, and ball quantity updates to fit the new bearing. Here is his info.
Daniel published a few youtube videos that show the look, feel, & durability of some of his printed bearings.
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