Om Coasters

ॐ 

Stackable Coasters with the Devanagari Om Symbol

The beautiful Om symbol (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Om) and utterance is used in yoga and other meditative disciplines and has deep spiritual meaning to many peoples. I brought back an appreciation of it after trekking to Mt. Everest Base Camp in Nepal.

The coasters are 1 cm tall, stackable, with an image 1 mm tall. Two filament changes using contrasting colors are recommended. Otherwise, good effect will not be achieved. The filament should be changed immediately after the last layer of the base, and then back again after the last layer of the symbol.

Files are provided for a single coaster (coaster_x1.stl), four coasters that fit easily on the Ender-3 standard bed size (coaster_x4.stl), and the OpenSCAD source code (see below). Printing four at a time helps because they can share the filament changes.

The filament changes should be precise. I'd recommend using a slicer feature like Cura's Pause at Height post-processing script. If sliced at 0.2 layer height in Cura, these layers are 15 and 20, and those are the layer numbers to use in two instances of the script (but be sure to check your Preview to ensure these are the right layers for yours). When I print a set of four, the first filament change occurs after 7h 33m, and the second after another 1h 50m.

Infill of 20% is fine structurally. Depending on the filament, the infill pattern may be visible when back-lit.

How I Designed This

I used OpenSCAD's import() module to load an SVG representation of the Om symbol in 2D and extrude it into 3D. The coasters are made stackable by subtracting one from the other.

To render it in OpenSCAD (version ≥ 2021.01), it's necessary to have the three files in the same directory: coaster.scad, om.scad and om.svg. Then open coaster.scad, press F5 to view, F6 to render to STL, and F7 to save STL.

Category: Kitchen & Dining