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!
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!]
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 […]
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.
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.
Mark Fuller sent us this video demoing his 3D-printed, humane mousetrap. Love this simple gravity-powered design. Mark says he made the trap with the help of the rapid prototyping class at Pennsylvania College of Technology (www.pct.edu). The device was printed on the Dimension uPrint, in little a under six hours. Tilt-N-Trap (Mouse Trap) on Thingiverse […]
Thingiverse user themauxfaux, who does seem to enjoy his word-play, just posted these plans for a laser-cut bangle that incorporates a hollow passage, complete with air-holes, so you can display your favorite live insect specimens on your wrist.
He calls it “Putrefashion,” which I think is a tactical error. I mean, I understand: I have a hard time resisting a good pun myself, but the whole point here is to keep the critter alive. And if you were to, you know, keep wearing it after it died and started to rot, well…just…ew. Even moreso “ew” than wearing bugs around on your wrist in the first place.
Now, apart from the name, there’s still plenty to criticize here, if I were inclined to do so. But I prefer to focus on the positive, and in spite of all my little quibbles with the design, I say this still counts as a win on the basis of originality alone.
The Twin Cities hackerspace the Hack Factory is raising funds to buy a MakerBot Cupcake CNC. How? By selling raffle tickets! Borrowing a move from Providence hackerspace AS220 Labs’ MakerBot raffle, the Hack Factory will sell enough raffle tickets for two Cupcakes, then keep one and award the other to the raffle winner. Rules are […]
