2024-01-07 - (fluffy) bird's house

about a week ago my sons saw i was preparing a workbench on balcony, so that i have a spot for doing work that's more dusty (eg. cutting) or smelly (eg. painting / coating). they got turbo-charged into woodworking for the weekend. ;) they decided to build small birdhouses for their small, fluffy birds. after a rough design according to our little customers' requirements, we bought some wood and in no time kids were cutting it into pieces of a predefined length! there was however a challenging part - due to expected house size vs. physical space for it, we had to do root at ~ random angle, that's not only hard to cut but also challenging to secure in place, to the rest of the house. to make things “easier” chimneys were also expected to be present. ;)

cutting part we skipped, and just cut in straight pieces. mounting brackets i took upon myself. i decided to print these on 3D printer, to make sure they match exactly what is needed.

the question remained - how to get a sample of all needed angles? the problem was that all wood pieces were hand-cut (in parts by small children), and thus “not exactly uniform”. ;) it was also necessary to compensate for screw holes locations.

i therefor decided to make a reference template, by using flatbed scanner to get a soon-to-be-house all captured. because of the size of wood pieces (1cm high and 5cm wide) to was not possible to close scanner, so there are some random light reflections coming. yet the core elements is clearly visible.

after post-processing and removing all the noise + binarizing the image, PNG was there!

the next step was to covert it into an SVG and import into OpenSCAD, as a template for creating all the elements. with this, creating proper brackets and hole locations were trivial.

the nice part about having a parametric 3D model, is that it's easy to customize… and that was a thing, as one son wanted to use screws while the other felt like hammering it with nails. ;) so i printed in 2 variants as different holes for screws and nails were needed.

mounting was a blast and really easy, as elements naturally fit into locations. in case it was ever needed again, fluffy birdhouse is now preserved on github. ;)

btw if you're interested in other techniques of combining real-world objects and 3D prints take a look at 3D printing enclosures entry (it's focused on PCBs, but some tricks are more widely available).