Digital Fabrication

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!

CNC jigsaw puzzle parquet floor

CNC jigsaw puzzle parquet floor

My pal Angus Hines cut these interlocking wooden puzzle pieces from finish-grade oak plywood using his ShopBot, and installed them in a hallway of his Carrollton, Virginia home. The finish is Varathane High Traffic polyurethane. There are more pictures in this Flickr set. If you’re interested in the idea, feel free to contact Angus directly. I’m sure he’d be glad to cut you some puzzle flooring or other custom parquetry at his usual bargain prices. [Thanks, Angus!]

Reaction Lamp

The generative designers at Nervous System just blew me away for the 105th time with their Reaction Lamp: We created the lamp in Processing and it was 3d printed using Selective Laser Sintering in nylon plastic. We varied the material thickness to create an intricate effect when illuminated.

Rapid assembly using fabbed materials

You printed some fabjects with your 3D printer, now what? Ph.D student Jon Hiller and professor Hod Lipson of the Cornell Computational Synthesis Laboratory created this concept for an automated voxel factory. Imagine a desktop fabricator capable of making perfectly repeatable, arbitrary, multi material 3D objects with microscale precision. The objects would be composed of […]

Letters from the Fab Academy, Part 7

Letters from the Fab Academy, Part 7

In this, the final in our 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. (Links to all of Shawn’s inspiring “Letters” are available at the end of […]