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 makersโincluding the basics of how to get started, plus creative tutorials for spicing up your projects. Whether youโre already familiar with 3d printing or are just starting out, these resources will help take your game-making skills even further!
Erik de Bruijn is working on adapting his Ultimaker 3D printer to act as a pick & place machine. Assembling medium quantities of PCBs was never within the reach of a home based manufacturer. It requires expensive equipment, but most of these parts can actually be 3D printed, and you can use your existing 3D […]
MINIMALS, which is currently being exhibited at Bostonโs Axiom Gallery, is a work by my friends and labmates Jonathan Bachrach and Jonathan Ward. In the academic world, they both research “digital assembly,” or the idea that in โthe future,โ we will be able to make anything out of reusable, discrete blocks of interesting and varied geometries […]
Instructables user dnewman used his EMSL Eggbot rotary plotter to print an accurate nutrition label on the side of a raw egg. A delightful and otherwise fairly useless thing to do. I heartily approve. [via adafruit]
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: Donโt make parts too thin. The parts I printed tended to be designed too thin. If you […]
