Makerslide: Prototyping 3D Tools Made Easier
Travis Good takes a look at Makerslide, a linear tracking and frame system for building personal fabrication machines.
3D
Interactive Still Life Tumbles When You Tilt The Frame
Neat idea, skillfully executed, from artist Scott Garner, who writes: On the hardware side is a custom-framed television connected to a rotating mount from Ergomart. Attached to the back of the television is a spatial sensor from Phidgets, makers of fine USB sensors. On the software side is a simple C application to communicate with […]
Make Ideas Real with SketchUp
There are a lot of makers who really like SketchUp’s approach to 3D modeling. Personally, I think it’s a great way to get kids hooked on the idea of designing physical shapes that they may or may not fabricate with the laser cutter or 3D printer. While it may take a bit to get the hang of scale and accuracy, once you have these habits, your designs are repeatable with a variety of CNC tools and many different materials.
By looking about on Thingiverse and in the MAKE Flickr pool, you can see that Sketchup is a fairly popular tool for many of us who like to bring our ideas onto this side of the computer screen. The Make Ideas Real with SketchUp project is looking for examples of things that have been designed with SketchUp and brought into the world. The folks at SketchUp are gathering stories with the Make Ideas Real project about how people are using the program to design the things they make.
Repurposed 3D Glasses Make for Great Kermit Eyes
Childrens’ Technology maven and playful tinkerer Scott Traylor came up with this whimsical mod for used movie theatre 3d glasses. With his simple PDF template everyone can go green in more ways than one. From his site:
3-DIY: Eric Kurland (video)
Eric Kurland makes DIY stereoscopic (3D) cameras and displays from off-the-shelf components. He runs a 3D film festival in Los Angeles and showed off his work at Maker Faire Bay Area 2011 in a special 3D village. Subscribe to the Maker Faire Podcast in iTunes, download the m4v video directly, or watch it on YouTube […]
The XKCD “Giant Head” Enhanced Depth Perception Project
Many of you will probably have seen this one from late August, already. I haven’t found any indication that Mr. Munroe has actually done this, yet, but there’s no reason the idea shouldn’t work, in principle. To do so requires a viewer with an individually addressable video display for each eye, but these are not too hard to come by. And large-parallax static stereograms taken using widely-separated synchronized cameras are well known.
Browser-Based 3D Modeling with Tinkercad
Back a few years ago, if you wanted to design a 3D object, there were only a few options. Not many of those options were free or easy. TinkerCAD appears to be one of the many new modeling options that promises both free and easy. At World Maker Faire, I had a chance to see the browser-based TinkerCAD in action. It does appear that it is easy to operate, and free, if you can get it to run in the browser on your computer. TinkerCAD requires Windows Vista or OS X 10.6, so that will work on one computer at my house and one in my classroom.
