Contact Tip Research

This page keeps the open design notes for constant-area contact tips.

Goal

Explore tip designs that preserve the intended contact footprint on the model even when the support is not perfectly perpendicular to the surface.

Candidate directions

Micro-disc with short blend

• Tiny flat disc at the tip.
• Disc stays perpendicular to the averaged model normal.
• A short blend transitions the disc into the cone body.
• Angle-aware standoff can reduce resin fusion risk at steeper angles.

Spherical cap with compensation

• Small spherical cap at the tip.
• Offset and effective radius can be adjusted to keep the footprint consistent across tilt angles.
• This approach favors smooth curvature, but needs careful compensation logic at large tilts.

Shared rule

• The tip axis aligns to the averaged model surface normal under the contact footprint.

Open questions

• How much tilt should the geometry support before it needs to clamp?
• Should the visual design favor strict footprint control or simpler manufacturability?
• How should dense tip spacing interact with the chosen shape?

Next steps

• Prototype the micro-disc hybrid with angle-aware standoff.
• Compare it against the spherical-cap approach for extreme tilt cases.
• Validate the printed contact size and cleanup behavior on test models.