Sanriorama

I’m well aware that I am not the target market of these characters… and I couldn’t care less. These adorable plastic peeps will get me through my 3 AM grind sessions 😍.

Just a little project I made out of the Gacha capsule toys I brought back from the land of the rising sun. It’s always fun to be prioritizing aesthetic over application once in a while.

• Wood pieces purchased off-the-shelf at Michaels, modified at home. What I found at Michaels drove my design choice.
• DIY PCB using amber colored 2.4V drop SMT LEDs with 50 Ω series resistors. Dome light diffuser used as a bulb. LED and diffuser from Digikey.
• Powered by 2x AAA battery pack (3 V)
• All electronics nicely hidden inside 3d printed Wood-infused PLA roof designed by myself.

A couple running notes:

This was the first time I printed with Wood-Infused PLA. I had first seen this material just lying around Moffett Library at Berkeley and was amazed because I thought it was pure wood. Alas, it’s just wood-INFUSED. Regardless, I thought it would work well for this project.

This material was tricky to work with. For starters, I changed my printer nozzle out from 0.4 mm to 0.6 mm in order to prevent nozzle clogging. Nozzle clogging is a particular risk with the wood-infusion because the wood has a tendency to char and create effectively a block of charcoal as a nozzle blockage. Some makers even suggest 0.8 mm to further reduce the risk of clogging. I never ran into clogging issues over 4 different prints, but I did notice I was grossly neglecting nozzle maintenance on my printer. I had NEVER replaced my default 0.4 mm nozzle since I purchased this printer 5 years ago. When I unscrewed the nozzle cover, I found myself looking at what resembled an active volcano site with the sheer amount of hard, charred, brittle, black PLA overflow from the extruder. In retrospect, I don’t know how my printer was still able to print all this time. I cleaned the extruder of gunk, replaced the nozzle with a shiny new one, and immediately felt better about my printer. Now, I’m a bit scared to uncover what else is grossly being neglected on my printer which I am woefully ignorant of.

Wood-infused PLA also tended to be more gummy during the print process, leaving LOTS of residue strings along tip paths. I am still looking for a solution to this, but it’s not a big deal as it’s just a matter of finer post-processing.

On another note: did you know that pink, single LEDs don’t really exist? Pink lights are usually the product of a white light over a pink filter or a combination of what is actually multiple lights closely packed to create pink. The reason is physic-y, and simply put, only colors on the rainbow (pure EM spectrum wavelength colors) can be made into a single light. I DEFINITELY did NOT want to use a pink lamp at first. I DEFINITELY did NOT have to settle for amber.

Lastly, one of these days when I’m bored I might improve the design of the roof to be more detailed and more accurately reflect Japanese architecture.