Design First, Measure Second

My objects repository is full of OpenSCAD code. At the top of each file you’ll find a collection of variables in the code: the measurements of the model.

We don’t need to get bogged down with those exact values to start modeling, but we know that we’ll want to identify certain parameters to size our models. We can start banging together some shapes (with union and difference), and any time we’re tempted to guess at a measurement and plug it into the code, we want to first see if we can give it a name (a variable name, that is) and use that instead and define a rough value for that variable at the top of the file. Next we can think about that value and decide if it’s related to any other values we already have. Often, one value should be calculated relative to other values: overall_width = inside_width + 2 * side_thickness. Once a measurement is defined in terms of other values it’ll automatically update as we start providing more precise measurements.

By starting with some guessed values and later plugging in real measurements, we prove that our parametric model is being correctly calculated from the measurements. We should be able to use this code time and time again to generate variations on the model based on new measurements. Our SCAD model with all the parameters at the top is ready to upload to Thingiverse and the Customizer can let users easily provide their own measurements to generate new models from our code.