Download a 3D-printable spacer / leg for Z-Turn Lite + IO Cape

(click to enlarge)

Even though I find Myir’s Z-Turn Lite + its IO Cape combination of cards useful and well designed, there’s a small and annoying detail about them: The spacers that arrive with the boards don’t allow setting them up steadily on a flat surface, because the Z-Turn board is elevated over the IO Cape board. As a result, the former board’s far edge has no support, which makes the two boards wiggle. And a little careless movement is all it takes to have these boards disconnected from each other.

So I made a simple 3D design of a plastic leg (or spacer, if you like) for supporting the Z-Turn Lite board. See the small white thing holding the board to the left of the picture above? Or the one in the picture below? That’s the one.

If you’d like to print your own, just click here to download a zip file containing the Blender v2.76 model  file as well as a ready-to-print STL file. It’s hereby released to the public domain under Creative Common’s CC0 license.

The units of this model is millimeters. You’ll need this little part of info.

I printed mine at Hubs (they were 3D Hubs at the time). Because I bundled this with another, more bulky piece of work, the technique used was FDM at 200 μm, with standard ABS as material. If you’re into 3D printing, you surely just read “cheapest”. And indeed, printing four of these should cost no more than one USD. But then there’s the set-up cost and shipping, which will most likely be much more than the printing itself. So print a bunch of them, even though only two are needed. It’s going to be a few dollars anyhow.

Even though these spacers aren’t very pretty, and with zero mechanical sophistication, they do the job. At least those I got require just a little bit of force to get into the holes, and they stay there (thanks to the pin diameter of 3.2 mm, which matches the holes’ exactly). And because it’s such a dirt simple design, this model should be printable with any technique and rigid material.

Wrapping up, here’s a picture of three printed spacers + two of the spacers that arrived with the boards. Just for comparison.