Laptop Lithophane

The Story:

My wife is a special-ed teacher for autistic children and she wanted to make a personalized gift for her paras (classroom assistants). This was at the end of the 2019-2020 school year, so the second half of the year was remote due to the COVID-19 pandemic. I had mentioned the concept of a 3D-Printed lithophane and she had an idea to incorporate the lithophane into a mini "laptop" to represent the remote learning. We took a screenshot from one of the Zoom classes where my wife and the three paras were all in view. This screenshot was used as the lithophane (generated on https://3dp.rocks/lithophane/) and eventually became the "screen" of the laptop. The "keyboard" of the laptop spelled out a custom message to the paras. Originally the laptop was going to be static. However, I thought of an idea to use a custom hinge found on Thingiverse, slice off the holes in CAD software, and then merge the lithophane/screen and keyboard/message to the two ends of the hinge. This allowed me to print the whole laptop as one, with a working hinge right off the print bed. One more cute feature we added is that in the spot where the "Apple Logo" would go on a Mac laptop, we put the autism awareness puzzle logo.

We printed 4 "copies", each took close to 24 hours to print since the lithophane part has to be 100% infill. I was able to separate the bottom and top of the laptop in my slicer (Cura) so that the keyboard part was not 100% infill, avoiding the waste of extra filament and extra print time.)

A few months later, I made another one for my nephew's birthday. This one was simply a single picture of him as the lithophane/screen and a birthday message on the keyboard. The time lapse and bed removal video are of that second edition.