Lithophane Cube Maker

A lithophane is a picture made of thickness. Print a thin plate in white plastic, thick where the photo is dark and thin where it is light, and it looks like nothing at all until a light goes on behind it. Lithophane Cube Maker builds a lamp out of five of them — four sides and a top — with a frame, a lid, and a hole in the floor for the cable. You choose the photos and the size; it hands back files ready to slice.

The fifth panel is the reason it exists. The best-known lithophane box generator stopped at four sides when this one was started, and the top it has added since sits behind a payment. Here every panel is free, and so is everything else.

Most of the work went into not wasting a print

A cube takes most of a day to print, and a second attempt costs another day and another spool. That cost shaped the tool more than any feature did.

• Test pieces before the cube. The fits that depend on your printer — how a panel slides into its groove, how firmly the lid grips the posts — are cut out of the real parts as small pieces, five sizes side by side on one plate. An hour of printing answers what a failed cube would have.
• Nothing that cannot be printed. An earlier lid clicked shut on ridges a tenth of a millimetre tall. Slicers dropped them or drew them as a single line. The lid now holds on with printed pegs, or with magnets if you would rather glue them in.
• A setting that breaks the cube says so. A wall too thin to print, or two parts asked to occupy the same space, is flagged before you export. Behind that, the tests build the whole cube for random combinations of every setting — thousands of them before a release — and fail on any part that comes out leaking, overlapping, or impossible to assemble.
• Panels print standing up. Lying flat, thickness can only change a whole layer at a time and gradients come out banded; standing, it comes from the nozzle’s much finer sideways steps. The files are exported upright, so this happens without anyone having to know it.

Your photos stay with you

Reading the image, building the geometry and writing the files all happen in the browser. There is no server to send a photo to — which matters for an object people mostly make out of family pictures.

Where it is

The geometry is tested; the fits are being printed now, and the defaults will move to whatever survives the printer. The code is MIT-licensed, and a report of how a cube printed on your machine is the most useful thing anyone can send back.