Digital fabrication tools have revolutionized the way designers, engineers, and artisans express their creativity. With the right resources, you can learn to use these powerful instruments in no time! Whether it’s 3D printing or laser cutting that interests you, these articles will provide useful tutorials and inspiration for makers of all levels. Discover how digital fabrication can open up new possibilities so that your craftsmanship is truly extraordinary!
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 Boston’s 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 “the future,” 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: Don’t make parts too thin. The parts I printed tended to be designed too thin. If you […]
