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!
Friday afternoon, I was vising my friend Amon Millner at Olin College. After finishing up, he invited me to go with him to the nearby Wellesley College and the Engineering Studio. Not knowing quite what to expect, but always interested in seeing hands-on learning spaces, I went along for the ride. What I saw took my breath away and left me speechless. It is still a bit mind boggling to consider what this lab has, and the amazing ideas that have come from it.
This codebox shows you how to create a physical zoetrope using Processing, a Kinect, and a laser cutter. The sketch will load in a movie recorded from the Kinect’s depth camera, use the Processing OpenCV library to turn that movie into a series of outlines, and save the outlines out in vector form as a […]
Austrian Kinect hacker Sebastian Pirch from 3rD-EYE in Salzburg has built a 3D modeling system using a Microsoft Kinect controller and an Arduino. Using a pair of custom soft circuit gloves to provide a mouse click, Sebastian is able to model objects in mid air, in 3D, using gestures captured by the Kinect, which are then rendered with an LCD projector. It’s a little crude now, but he’ll probably be designing flying armored suits by this time next year.
MakerBot Industries blogger MakerBlock is working on a clockwork spider, and went the route of designing his own gears. He’s sharing his observations of designing and printing his own clockwork parts on the MakerBot blog. Here’s a sample: Don’t make parts too thin. The parts I printed tended to be designed too thin. If you […]
Bart Bakker of Utrecht, Netherlands sent us these images and a link to a short piece about his mini home fab lab. He built it for around US$4K. The lab consists of an A4 Laser Cutter, a vintage Ultimaker 3D-printer, a Mantis CNC mill, and a CraftRobo vinyl/papercutter. Bart built the Ultimaker and the Mantis […]
Thingiverse user BenJackson designed a bracket and two gears that allow you to add numeric ontrol capability to your Etch-A-Sketch. What can I say? I’ve never been able to draw anything with an Etch-a-Sketch. I won this one in a Christmas gift exchange some years ago and hung onto it with the idea that someday […]
Eureka Magazine has a profile of this sweet ride, the whole thing “printed” from laser-sintered nylon powder. The ‘Airbike’ is made of nylon but, according to EADS, is strong enough to replace steel or aluminium and requires no conventional maintenance or assembly. It is ‘grown’ from powder, allowing complete sections to be built as one […]
