The Cosmic Core Mini Bin

I saw a planter that I liked and wanted to make in to a little trash bin for my work bench, but wasn't happy with some of the overhangs. A played around in Fusion and came up with a shape I liked, but thought “everything's better with LEDs, and I've got some old Glow in the Dark filament to use up.”

And thus, the Cosmic Core Mini Bin was born!

(thanks to Gemini for that name 🤣)

It's actually pretty simple. Two prints - one in an opaque for the shell, one in a translucent Glow in the Dark (I finally used up the last of my Hatchbox) for the can. 

Well tuned filaments and profiles are necessary as the spines are tall and ideally should be printed hollow with two walls. Softer filaments or poorly tuned material profiles may cause wobbling and failure (I had two prints in Prusament Mystic Green PLA that clogged and failed).

There's a 5mm hole with a 10x2mm opening in the back, you can feed your LED strip in from the back. The can will fit if your LED strip is less than 1.7mm thick (it's like 1.668mm clearance). While a 10mm wide strip should fit, an 8mm strip is best. I used a random brand 2385 SMD strip off of Amazon that I had laying around and it worked great. You'll need 240mm (~9 7/16") worth of LEDs. I threw some rug tape on the bottom of it and it was done.

Clearance between the shell and can is very tight. If your printer does not have a history of highly accurate prints, I suggest shrinking the X/Y dimensions of the can by 0.5-0.75%!

And that's it! Slide the can in shell, plug it in, and load it up!

Optimized print profiles are available over on Makerworld. There's a lot of tuning that went in to these to get the material usage and print time down without sacrificing quality. If you make your own version from the F3D, I strongly encourage reviewing these settings when slicing your own!