Expobar / Brewster [parametric] hot water shield

While this project delivers a practical shield for the coffee machine hot water spigot - it serves more as an example of a parametric design using Rhino / grasshopper.

The design builds around a (your) model of a machine's hot water spigot. You then provide curve profiles to shape each component of the design. These and model parameters can then be manipulated in real time to test a wide variety of design ideas. You can see it at work here; http://youtu.be/LFxLEmNJuBU

The designs you like can then be "baked" with a button click and exported for printing as STL's.

Source Rhino / Grasshopper files are included as are some example STLs

Instructions

The current Rhino3D files are set up for an Expobar / Brewster coffee machine, but the Grasshopper files could be applied to any type of tube shroud, provided you create a base model to work on.

To use the parametric design capability youdo need to create shells on top of your base tube model which are input by selectingboth and "adding multiple geometries" at the input point in the Grasshopper model. (It's labelled clearly) Typcially you will create these shells in Rhino3D offset by, say, 0.1mm and then again by whatever wall thickness you want for the output shroud. This could have been accomplished with some embedded VB code in the Grasshopper model, but not with native Grasshopper code. given the extra work required to do this - it was just as easy to do this manually and deliver these primitives to the Grasshopper model.

The additional model inputs are:

• a curve profile that defines the central axis of the tube,
• a curve profile that specifies the cutout for the tube shroud, and
• 2 curves that define the vertical and cross section profile of the handle

There is a grasshopper code panel that you can see in the video, that exposes most of the critical parameters. You can play to your heart's content. The Grasshopper code is modestly (ahem) documented by block naming. But of course you can use the built in debug tools to unpick how the model works (and why it has to do some rather arcane things).

The design tradeoffs are about creating an attractive but functional shroud, that clips on well to the water spigot, does not wobble or obstruct the view and prints easily. No drama!

Overall, this is really a demonstration of the power of Grasshopper; it's quite impressive, and allows you to quickly test radically different ideas.

Category: Kitchen & Dining