Spinning Lithophone Box

I made this for Mother's Day. It's a cube with lithophane panels. There's a base available to print if you want to make it spin.

The basic design is borrowed from Rotating Lithophane Box : 5 Steps (with Pictures) - Instructables. However, I wrote all of the scode myself.

These need lithophane panels that are 4mm thick on the borders, and about 150mm wide and about 100 mm high. In theory you can adjust the values in the scad file to make the models use different sized lithophanes. (I've not tried this yet)

In the original, he used a clock to make his turn. I opted to buy a small 12v motor from Amazon . I also put in a dimmer for the light, and a rocker power switch to turn the whole thing off and on. The whole thing is powered by a relatively inexpensive power supply. 

The lights are just a standard LED light strip that is stuck to the tower.

I used a ¼" #20 2.5" threaded rod, that I attached to the motor with a coupler. A 6mm threaded rod could also work, but I couldn't find any at my local hardware store, so I used the SAE version.

You need to print 1 of each part, except for the corner posts, of which you'll need 4.

In the end, I scaled my corner posts to 102% to make it look right.

Assembly order is something like this:

1. Put the panels into the bottom. Make sure the orientation is correct.
2. Put the corner pieces in.
3. Put the top onto the panels. At this point I had to gently tap the corners down in place with a hammer.
4. Screw the motor onto the base.
5. Put in the switch.
6. Wire everything up.
7. Put the dimmer in and screw the nut onto the face.
8. Adjust the height of the cube away from the base (described below).
9. Take the cube back off when the height is correct. 
10. Stick the LEDs to the tower and put the tower in place. This may take some finesse, and it might be better to put the tower in place first.
11. Screw the cube back on top.

When it came time for final assembly, I pressed a nut into the top. Then I put 2 more nuts further down the rod. I screwed the cube on until either it hit the 2 nuts or it scraped against the base. I just kept adjusting the height of the 2 nuts until I got the cube to be at the level I wanted. Then I tightened the 2 nuts against each other so they wouldn't move too easily.

I printed mine using Overture chocolate colored matte PLA.

• 0.2mm layer height
• 40 mm / s
• 100% infill. 

You probably don't need 100%, but when I was prototyping, I was nervous about what would happen if someone set something on top of it. 75% would probably have been ok.

With those settings, it was about 35 hours of printing all told.