03:01 <MrMobius> is there a way to export certain 3D shapes to STL without having OpenSCAD combine them even though they lay flat? on one face of a cube, I have a 0.5mm cutout for text then the text itself the exact same size as the cutout. it looks fine in the preview but just becomes one solid face in the rendering. the person who will 3D print it needs to click on the text to add color in slicer

03:15 <JordanBrown[m]> No.

03:15 <peeps[zen]> MrMobius: I would recommend to try enabling the experimental feature "lazy-union". to use experimental you need to run a development snapshot from here http://openscad.org/downloads.html#snapshots

03:15 <peeps[zen]> and then enable the specific feature in Preferences menu

03:15 <JordanBrown[m]> OK, yeah, maybe that.

03:16 <MrMobius> peeps[zen]: ok cool. ill give it a try

03:16 <JordanBrown[m]> But I would rig the OpenSCAD program so that you can run it to generate the base material, and then run it again to generate the text, and then combine those two STLs in the slicer.

03:17 <JordanBrown[m]> Can slicers really figure out what you mean if you have one STL with interior triangles that divide it into multiple parts?

03:27 <MrMobius> JordanBrown[m]: unfortunately, I dont have a dual extruder and the person im paying to do it says the price doubles if he has to combine all the tiny text from two STLs

04:06 <InPhase> MrMobius: Have you considered 3mf instead of stl?

04:06 <InPhase> MrMobius: I believe that's designed to support such things better.

04:06 <InPhase> stl is really a pretty simple format...

04:07 <MrMobius> InPhase: ya playing with combining two 3MFs exported from openscad now

07:15 <JordanBrown[m]> I don't know enough about multicolor slicing to say anything authoritative, but it *should* be easier to do with multiple STLs, because they will be cleanly separate in the slicer. If you have one STL that has multiple parts, if it works at all, you'd have to select each individual part (e.g. each letter) and set the color for it. With two STLs, you select one STL, set the color, then select the other STL and set the color. There

07:15 <JordanBrown[m]> shouldn't really be much in the way of "combining"; I'd expect that you can just load the STLs and tell the slicer that they all go together.

07:15 <JordanBrown[m]> Anyhow, good luck - multicolor support is certainly an area where OpenSCAD needs work.

07:29 <JordanBrown[m]> As I thought, importing multiple STLs to form a single multi-material object is easy in PrusaSlicer: https://help.prusa3d.com/article/importing-multi-material-model_121191

21:42 <escherial> hey, anyone have a recommendation for a simple library for creating mounts for PCBs? most of the boards i have appear to take M3 screws

21:42 <escherial> i've looked at bit at nopscadlib, and while it's impressively complete i struggle to use it

21:43 <L29Ah> the box-generating one also generates M3 mounts

21:43 <escherial> L29Ah: this is for nopscadlib, or another library?

21:44 <L29Ah> https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:1264391

21:44 <L29Ah> iirc

21:45 <escherial> L29Ah: aha, interesting

21:56 <escherial> i don't need a whole box, but i ended up looking at how they create the mountpoints and it answered some questions i had, so thanks for the reference

21:57 <escherial> specifically, i was wondering if they add threads to their design or allow the screw to tap them (seems it's the latter, no threads) and which diameter they used (seems it's slightly more than the major diameter of an m3 screw, 3mm versus 2.98mm)

21:58 <escherial> i could always use metal inserts for m3 screws, which i do have on hand and which come with recommendations for the hole size, but i don't know if i want to waste them on boards i won't be removing often

22:06 <L29Ah> plastic screws are really nice btw

22:06 <L29Ah> but harder to source than metric

22:07 <L29Ah> https://www.pts-uk.com/images/c000c000b/c000c000b.425.pozi-pan-polytech30.jpg

23:51 <JordanBrown[m]> Caution for all users of the coordinate plane: https://xkcd.com/2735/