From real to imaginary and back again reversed

 
Here’s my latest attempt at replicating a real object. The original was a beautiful hand crafted copper and enamelled skull by Markus Michel.
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This was done using an iPhone, Catch 123D, Meshmixer, Blender, Slic3r, Pronterface and Smoothieboard  on my RepRap Wilson 3D Printer.
 

DomeBracket's

Must print more dome bracket’s. Well I love the newest rendition of the dome brackets with the ball and socket joint thanks to both effalo and yazzo for there work and everyone else who it wouldn’t be possible without. I’ve been making enough to do 1 dome and hopefully get 2 done sometime but sadly I’m waiting on some replacement pully’s for the Mendel. Thanks Kliment And mattymatt. I finally got a really nice pulley printed and wouldn’t ya know it’s the wrong one, well not completely wrong, it just won’t work with a stock sells x carriage. It was the pulleymod off a prusa repo and it’s slightly larger so it grips great just not for the tight radius on the stock sells x carriage. Luckily when I was on irc Kliment offered me some and the timing couldn’t be better since he was shortly receiving another shipment of as card adapters. Oh how I’d love for the Mendel to not need a computer, one day, one day. So until replacement parts arrive i decided to fire up the makerbot and put it to work. Sadly it’s like driving a bug after you’ve had a Porsche for a few months, it keeps working but it ain’t pretty, well perhaps debatable but nonetheless like the beauty of 16x microstepping and a stepped extruder. Oooo la la.

Here’s the progression of the Dome Brackets.

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1719

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3215

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:7017

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:8985

Bucky dome dome

It all starts with an idea. I was brainstorming with a friend about some personal spheres and I got the idea to use old tent poles, the fiberglass ones with the shock-cord down the middle. So a few days of research and some openscad finagling I came up with a script to generate them. I printed one and posted it on thingiverse. A few weeks late user Effalo did up a full dome and posted a howto on his blog. He then uploaded some visual improvements for aligning the struts.
Finally the idea in my mind progressed into making spheres with LEDs on each node to use for some visuals so I started off on printing the 32 nodes. Well I got to 26, enough for the dome, but realized 42 was a more realistic number. I think it stems from my data from desert domes which was more about building domes, not spheres.
So here it is, the dome that is.