Open Prosthetics on Thingiverse
Over at Makerbot Industries, Bre Petis has taken an interest in using a Makerbot to print designs from the Open Prosthetics Project.
3D Printing & Imaging
If you’re a maker, 3d printing is an incredibly useful tool to have in your arsenal. Not only can it help bring your projects to life faster, but it can also offer unique results that would be difficult (or impossible!) to achieve with traditional methods. In these blog posts, we’ll provide you with some essential information and tips regarding 3D printing for makers—including the basics of how to get started, plus creative tutorials for spicing up your projects. Whether you’re already familiar with 3d printing or are just starting out, these resources will help take your game-making skills even further!
Letters from the Fab Academy, Part 5
In this periodic series of “Letters,” Shawn Wallace, member of AS220, the Providence, RI community arts and technology space, shares his experiences with the Fab Academy, a distributed learning collaborative, built on the infrastructure of the Fab Lab network. — Gareth Interfacing microcontrollers and applications By Shawn Wallace The Fluxamaphonic, a physical interface to a […]
Have you customized your MakerBot chassis?
MakerBot has provided CupCake CNC chassis DXFs on Thingiverse and their own site for some time now, allowing you to cut out your own chassis if you have access to a laser cutter. You can even order the parts from Ponoko if you don’t. What I want to know is, what have people done with […]
Socolar-Taylor aperiodic tile models on Thingiverse
So the bragging rights I mentioned in Monday’s post about the newly-discovered single shape that tiles the plane aperiodically go to mathematician and artist Edmund Harriss, aka Gelada, who produced these beautiful renderings of the Socolar-Taylor tile in Blender and uploaded printable 3D models to Thingiverse. There’s more info and images on Harriss’s blog, Maxwell’s Demon. [Thanks, Edmund!]
Visions of nomadic fabbers
Mobile Manufacturing Unit — This corporate factory tours the country, setting up in cities for a few months at a time. As the population welcomes a new source of goods, jobs and manufacturing techniques, it is celebrated as an event. Self Replicating Street Stall — The street Genie can print any product you might think […]
Printable MakerBot Dremel mount
Thingiverse user Webca’s Dremel attachment is output on a 3D printer in three parts and then screwed together. Plus, it’s strong enough to hold the actual Dremel instead of requiring the use of a flex-shaft.
World’s first aperiodic tiling with a single shape
The problem of tiling a plane has fascinated builders and mathematicians alike since time immemorial. At first glance, the task is straightforward: squares, triangles, hexagons all do the trick producing well known periodic structures. Ditto any number of irregular shapes and combinations of them.
A much trickier question is to ask which shapes can tile a plane in a pattern that does not repeat. In 1962, the mathematician Robert Berger discovered the first set of tiles that did the trick. This set consisted of 20,426 shapes: not an easy set to tile your bathroom with.
With a warm regard for home improvers, Berger later reduced the set to 104 shapes and others have since reduced the number further. Today, the most famous are the Penrose aperiodic tiles, discovered in the early 1970s, which can cover a plane using only two shapes: kites and darts.
The problem of finding a single tile that can do the job is called the einstein problem; nothing to do with the great man but from the German for one– “ein”–and for tile–“stein”. But the search for an einstein has proven fruitless. Until now.
