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February 22 2012
Honestly, how could you NOT want a Teacup Dragon?
I mean, it’s a dragon, IN A TEACUP!
It’s even a puppet! I would gladly sacrifice a cup to get a clear path to the controls, maybe run wires to some servos or something…
Oh also this sure didn’t take long…
February 18 2012
Have I mentioned I see a lot of really amazing quality prints lately?
All the time you say? Well, only because it’s true. The game of 15 puzzle frame could totally be replaced with a bass relief of something awesome from Thingiverse. It’d take some fiddling in OpenSCAD though…
February 10 2012
Plenty of Colors
When I first got all excited about the first extruder module that had a plunger-based idler, it was because it would be far more reliable than the captive idler wheel it replaced, but there was another benefit that didn’t occur to me at the time:
It became really easy to swap out filament colors.
These days of course, you can print two colors in place, together, at the same time, but these simple planetary gears really visually “pop” with just a swapped-out filament providing any of the lovely colors ABS comes in.
February 09 2012
d’Awwww
Okay I’ll admit it, that’s one adorable little dragon. He’d fit right in with the Makerbot Castle Playset, particularly with some paint to bring out the details. What’s that you say? No dragons in the guest room? I’m sure someone could put together a nice crystal-encrusted cavern add-on for the set…
February 07 2012
Clockwork From The Future
You know, with work like this already out there, and with the advent of a print-in-place gearbox, we’re really not all that far now from a clock you print, soak, and then operate. Prospects like that kinda blow my mind. Also, they make me want to see how small I can print one of these with a powder-based printer and still have it run…
February 03 2012
Balloon Car
I loved these as a kid. The model I had actually bent the path of the balloon into place so that the opening pointed out the side of the car, presumably so the injection-molded plastic car didn’t have to have a cavity.
For a 3D printer though, that’s trivial. Awesome.
January 24 2012
Support Material.
The picture of this outstanding build pretty much says it all. Dual extrusion, with soluble support on one print head means you can do any overhang you please. Water soluble PVA is actually more expensive than the plastic you print on top of it, so when designing your support network you may want to economize a bit.
The good news of course is that modern extruder designs are very sleek and can fit onto small bots, and even at that price support is less than ten cents a cubic centimeter, and the PLA itself is less than four, so “expensive” is kind of a value judgement…
December 03 2011
Tiny Crystal Sails
Okay, okay, PLA is an amorphous solid polymer, but zoomed in (and with the really boss photography here) it looks very crystaline. Printer operators the world over are diving towards the tiny, and we’ve seen miniaturization do amazing things before. There is, after all, plenty of room at the bottom…
December 02 2011
Animatronics at Work
The distance between awesome animatronics projects is shrinking, and the quality is improving. Soon, I suspect, they’ll be just another one of the streams of stunning work in Thingiverse. But I think this one is from some time in the future, because it’s more amazing than I was really expecting.
Vogal the Dragon is a shoulder-mounted animatronic dragon with wings that fold and a head that moves. Eventually he will be autonomous, riding his owner through the conventions, etcetera… and not long after, I think, sights like him will be common. Wow.
December 01 2011
Nautilus Earrings
I love a good earring project, and these are pretty elegant-looking. Things with thin walls like these tend to print pretty well without a raft, too, since there’s not a lot of infill to potentially scrape up during that all-important lowest layer.
November 18 2011
The Exactly-What-You-Need Factor
I go on about how 3D printing and Thingiverse (and of course, the users who know their way around 3D tools) are well-aligned to provide things which aren’t just good enough to serve but which are precisely suited to their desired application, but this thing speaks for itself rather boldly.
It does what it’s for. More or less exactly.
November 16 2011
Somehow I Still Get Surprised…
Looking at the thumbnail for this, I literally thought, “oh man, that’s beautiful, no way will it print on a thermoplastic extrusion system though,” before clicking it to discover that that is exactly what has been done here.
What you’re looking at is actually the crystalline configuration of diamond, which is also the exact same configuration of the atoms in silicon semiconductors. In semiconductors, different atoms are pushed into the lattice, replacing silicon atoms, to alter the local average number of electrons, which in turn makes it possible to build diodes and transistors in high densities through a combination of technologies related to photography and, well, clay firing, which enables complex but inexpensive circuits like microcontrollers, which in turn enables low-cost 3D printers, which is where we get models like this one…
So it’s all connected really.
November 15 2011
Animatronics
This is video of a 3D-printed, Arduino-controlled animatronic tail. It’s a great example of design following nature, with vertebrae and tendons being modeled by mechanical substitutes, and while you might be able to replicate this version of the design with more traditional prototyping methods, the 3D printing makes it both easier to duplicate and easier to reconfigure. And a few of the improvements I can imagine, such as making the vertebrae interlink like biological ones to be more firmly linked to one another would be really tricky with hand tools, but pretty easy on 3D printing…
November 12 2011
Cyborg Catgirl
Thing is, I’m not entirely kidding…
The neural interface captures data from her brain and a microcontroller transmits it to the ears. It’s easy to become dismissive of stuff that’s “just X, Y, and Z hacked together,” especially if you see it happening all the time, but let’s look at this, as it is, for what it is, and that’s a neurally-linked robotic prosthesis, purely for entertainment purposes. The parts aren’t even that expensive…
November 11 2011
Okay, I’ll admit it, I had to look up what a finial is.
But I did, because this one is really pretty. A finial is basically anything you put on the top of a flagpole, steeple or other architectural structure to make it look neat. This one would have been pretty attractive in opaque plastic, but in PLA with multiple colors of LED glowing through it, it’s pretty serious.
Now of course someone has to start putting this on top of other things, because that’d be sweet.
November 10 2011
Mechanically Impressive
So leaving out the fact that a nested Reuleaux Triangle that you can fit in your pocket is something that just oozes cool and, were you to whip it out at a party (at least the kind I go to) have everyone instantly fascinated even if it weren’t something you downloaded and printed, mechanisms of this type particularly interest me because they natively react well to extruded plastic 3D printing.
Captive parts aren’t always possible in a project, when it works, it’s magic.
November 09 2011
Bitmap to Displacement
Design 3D surfaces by drawing bitmaps! The script writes directly in GCode, the native language of 3D printers, so this is definitely a time to know your extruder behaviors. Scripting directly in GCode has a lot of advantages, like simplicity, since you often can get away without really wrestling 3D geometry and mesh files.
You can also code in whatever language you like, as long as it can save to ASCII text files. This code generator is written in Lua!
November 08 2011
In the Bike Shop
Bicycle shops are already places where a pretty dazzling array of mechanical engineering feats are accomplished (after all, a bicycle shop built the first airplane), and happily this tradition continues with a plethora of bicycle widgets from the classic to the cutting edge, and from straightforward keep-it-going fixes like this one to pure artistic expression, enabled by 3D printers.
(Little wonder also that a recent episode of MakerBot TV featured a whole-bike makeover.)
November 05 2011
Pinwheel Gear!
What can I say, I’m a sucker for a pretty sprocket. And this pinwheel extruder drive gear is just gorgeous, and shows off that principle I keep going on about where making things more detailed or adding fiddly bits or cutting cool-shaped holes doesn’t really change the cost when you’re 3D printing.
The geared extruder module these gears are for also gets a fair bit of love from the community, probably because it’s such a large, inviting gear to add widgets to. (Speaking of cool things with gears, that heavy-duty-looking gear box I linked a while ago? Ended up driving a dimmer switch. Which is awesome.)
November 04 2011
Fine Bone Structure
The original model of this dinosaur skull was printed using a commercial machine with soluble supports, but the Makerbotted version looks pretty darned good. Splitting it in two pieces and printing it fairly large reportedly did wonders for the print quality. A great model, and really excellent print quality here!
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