Hello Kitty Cup V2

Premise

A very, very, very long time ago, I had the idea of printing a Bulbasaur cup holder in high school and one day, someone asked me to make a cup holder, but with a Hello Kitty model. That first version was posted here:

https://www.printables.com/model/139895-hello-kitty-cup-holder

At the time, I jested that if one day someone were to print this in full and use it for what it was intended for, I would come back around to this model and re-design it properly... alas about 2 months ago from this post, someone actually did it! So now I gotta bite my cup and seriously design this properly.

This design also marks my graduation of my Master's degree as well; it was the first design I made that wasn't engineering related! I made this in jest of my original thought but also for myself... it's been about 6 years of designing things not just for engineering but also designs that I could never imagine without the skills. Re-doing the process of making this cup that used to take a whole year and now only takes a week or so shows quite the difference between the first design and this one!

…except that I had this mostly finished in the backlog for another couple of months and now I kinda just want to push it out there at least so if anyone wants to create a adapter for this cup, they can! 

Printing Tips

Since this has more thought put into it, printing it needs some form of supports if you want it to look nice. 

Choose the cup that fits your handedness (unfortunately, didn't have the time or energy to make it interchangeable, sorry!) and add supports to it; ideally this should be tree supports. Try not to go too hard on infill; focus on wall thickness as water or liquids getting into the cup is probably not a good idea (can go with 5 or more). The insert can have more lenient print settings as it doesn't need as much material as the actual cup itself.

TLDR:

• 10% Adaptive Cubic (Gyroid is excessive here, don't try it unless you like the weight)
• 5+ Wall Thickness
• Tree Supports (there'll be a lot of it)
• Lots of Material (unless you scale it down)

Design Details

It still has the same dimensions of the cup (since I still have the design file, nice) so it should still fit 16 oz cups. However, since this is a serious design, I've now added an insert so you can now fit soda cans in this! Plus it matches the shape of the original Hello Kitty design, so it looks like an extension of the cup. If you'd like to fit other cans or drinks in this, I've included a STEP file so you can add your own inserts.

Also to calm the people who notice something off, apparently the ears are not symmetric... that means the cup cavity looks not centered but trust me, it is centered to the bottom of the model where Hello Kitty is sitting. I am truly sorry.

Since this is now here, I do want to give some advice for people who are looking to do something similar:

• The process for translating an STL to CAD is to use FreeCAD to get the STEP file, and then import it in CAD software.
• This design used another model for the Hello Kitty design. It also has 213234 faces, which is a lot for a normal parametric CAD software to handle. If you're trying to work with any model like this, you should decimate the number of faces before attempting to turn it into a solid in FreeCAD.
• To quickly summarize the steps:
  • Import STL in FreeCAD
  • Change workspace to Mesh Design -> Meshes -> Decimation (reduce number of faces)
  • Change workspace to Part -> Create shape from mesh -> Convert to solid -> Create a copy (refine shape)
  • Export to STEP and import to any CAD software

Happy printing!

Turned it into a cup…. again!