Banana for scale - Customizable OpenSCAD

DON'T PANIC, but READ THOROUGHLY THE DOCUMENTATION.

This scale comes with a Noto Emoji banana and many practical units such as twips, swallow milliseconds, 32mm miniature heights, digits and micromiles; it even features some other boring units like mm, cm, in, ¼in and the such, but just to look serious. It's highly customizable, deeply practical and widely used in engineering.

HOW TO USE

Set the banana scale in place. Set the object to scale at the side of the scale, not further away than up to 0.2-0.3 average bananas. Use another banana scale to set the object near the first banana scale if needed.

HOW TO PREPARE THE BANANA-MAKING-THINGAMAGIG

You will need to plant into the same computerized shrubbery (what IT specialists call "folder") the computery-thingie-seeds (what the IT crowd calls "files") bananascale.scad, u1f34c_bw.svg, u1f34c_bw_filled.svg, u1f34c_bw_lines.svg and bananascale.json. Make sure everything is where it's supposed to be, or otherwise you're risking a catastrophic banana mismatching failure, which sounds really bad.

Then it's all setting dials and boxes and sliders and all those other dongles the IT crowd put into things, until you get your banana scale to your liking; then press F6 and wait slightly for the machine that does “PING” to press F7 and save your banana for later.

With those UX-thingies, you can change the unit, size of the scale, definition of the banana from a single stylish profile to a high-detail picture with profile, fill and peel detailing, add or remove a ruler margin (useful for flush/non-flush measuring), set or remove up to three line subdivisions, change style and height and even make a stencil, put the unit name in Helvetica and the numbers in Comic Sans to confuse graphic designers, a couple more things that I've forgot, and overall go bananas with the scale.

There's also a PDF with more detailed instructions on how to generally use the Customizer, but it's all technical and boring and not at all banana-related.

If you set the banana profiles and rulers to "Raised" style, you can fool ClippyJo from PrusaSlicer into thinking it's a logo and set the z-based color changes automagically. If you don't have an MMU or sumthin, you'll still have to change filament by hand, because using a herring or the mightiest tree in the forest is very clumsy and uncomfortable.

WARNING NOTE

It has come to our attention that some individuals use box-shaped negative modifiers in PrusaSlicer to remove the banana, and leave the banana for scale as a simple, vulgar and boring ruler; even worse, they have been doing it even before the public publication of this banana scale. We cannot condone enough such abhorrent aberrations. Oh, the humanity.

We understand that this deranged degree of banana-lacking lunacy is hard to believe, so as evidence we provide the Exhibit A; a 3mf file made in PrusaSlicer displaying the banana-less aberration that should not be spoken of.

IMPORTANT DANGER WARNING NOTICE NOTE

Unless you use a device such as IzzitMichaela's chocolate printer, the banana is not edible. This means also that it does not follow the, ehrrm, usual recycling process of normal bananas for, ahem, composting. It's important to tell apart the bananas that are three-dee-printed from those that the-tree-printed. So you can use the recycling symbol collection in the Recymbol library to fulfill this banana lifecycle in a non-crappy-way. So to speak.

FAQ

What are "swallow milliseconds"?

Glad you asked. A swallow millisecond is a length unit defined as the average distance traveled by a coconut-unladen swallow in one millisecond. Think of "light years", but in the Arthurian age.

But what is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?

An African or an European swallow?

How is it that I've never heard of swallow milliseconds before?

Likely you're not a king and don't need to know these things. But for some befuddling reason, the Arthurian Imperial measurement units seem to be somewhat underused these days. One would think that's likely due to millenial zoomers, videogames, Brexit, supply chain problems and a wooden witch, but truly and unexpectedly it's because of the Spanish Inquisition.

How came that Prusananas are smaller than bananas?

Unfortunately, Prusa (and specifically Prusament) is seriously lacking in the banana department. They don't have a "Banana Yellow", not even a "Mature Banana Peel Dark Brown". Even worse, though Filament PM does manufacture a Banana Yellow, it's not available in the "Made For Prusa" range. What Prusament has is a "Pineapple Yellow"; and, as everyone knows, pineapples belongs to the genus "Ananas" (Ananas comosus). Therefore and henceforth, pineapples are less than bananas, because ananas = (bananas - b). Since "b" stands for "bit", Prusananas are a bit less than regular bananas. Quod Erat Demonstrandum.

Why? Just, why?

See, I had a flu-like thing that wasn't either the flu or that other flu. Feverness leads to strange things, and flu-ish-like often leads to congested Eustachian tubes and hearing loss. That's why I'm shouting in all-caps. Don't judge me!