Mike Kasberg

Husband. Father. Software engineer. Ubuntu Linux user.

Image for 3D Printing the Strava Logo

3D Printing the Strava Logo

27 Apr 2023

I just added a new wall decoration to my home office, and I think it turned out great!

I got the idea to 3D print the Strava logo a few weeks ago after seeing Martin Woodward’s Octolamp. I designed and printed my own Strava logo, and it turned out even better than I expected. It’s actually really easy for 3D printers to create shapes like this because it’s just an extruded 2D shape. Vertical walls with no overhangs are a piece of cake to print. And while it looks like it uses a lot of material, it actually doesn’t – the inside is mostly air, with a small percent of infill material for support. And I got lucky with the Strava logo – I printed each part separately, allowing me to print it twice as big as I otherwise would have been able to on my Prusa MINI. I completed a fun project, got a great wall decoration for my home office (fitting since I work for Strava), and the whole thing only cost a couple dollars in filament!

The Strava Logo hanging on my wall

How I Did It

I’ve been getting into OpenSCAD lately, and I wanted to continue building my skills by using OpenSCAD for this project. The only tricky part would be getting the logo into OpenSCAD. In hindsight, I probably could have found an SVG and imported it, but I came up with a different solution before I realized I the SVG would be easier. My approach was actually very simple; I just manually entered the coordinates for the vertices of the Strava Logo (measured with an image editor) in my OpenSCAD script. This was a little toilsome, but not bad since there aren’t that many points.

With a path representing the perimeter of the logo in my script, the rest was a piece of cake. I converted the path to a 2D polygon, then extruded the polygon to create a 3D object. I even added a little hole to the back to hang it on a nail. The print turned out as good as I hoped it would, and it’s now hanging in my home office!

OpenSCAD (a 3D scripting tool) turned out to be a great tool to use for this project because it makes it easy to re-create the model with any SVG. By replacing the SVG file, maybe tweaking a couple parameters, and re-running the OpenSCAD script you can generate a printable 3D model of any logo or image!

I can’t share the source for the Strava Logo specifically since it’s a copyrighted logo, but I can share similar OpenSCAD source code for the GitHub logo. (The GitHub logo is also copyrighted, but this is allowed by their usage guidelines), and Martin Woodward (VP of Developer Relations at GitHub) even shared his own similar project. Here’s my 3D Logo GitHub Repo that you can use to create a 3D print of any logo or image. (And here it is on Printables.) If you want to print the GitHub Octocat logo, that’s all you’ll need. And if you want to print any other logo, just replace the GitHub logo SVG with the SVG you want to print!

About the Author

Mike Kasberg

👋 Hi, I'm Mike! I'm a husband, I'm a father, and I'm a senior software engineer at Strava. I use Ubuntu Linux daily at work and at home. And I enjoy writing about Linux, open source, programming, 3D printing, tech, and other random topics.

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