You have until 11:59pm PT on Monday, April 14th to participate in the Maker Faire Design Challenge. One maker or team of makers will win a travel expenses-paid trip to the Bay Area next month. Apply now!
Design an information kiosk and you could win a trip to Maker Faire Bay Area!
Design an information kiosk utilizing SketchUp software and ShopBot CNC machines and you could win a trip to the Bay Area Maker Faire!
The Wikihouse collaboration at World Maker Faire this year was a highlight of the event.
EagleUp is the work of Swiss design engineer Jerome Lamy. It runs inside SketchUp and requires co-installation of ImageMagick. The script will automatically generate a 3D model of a printed circuit board from an image exported by Cadsoft Eagle, then populate it with preexisting component models.
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.
Last night I was out on an adventure. In the morning, the shower curtain fell down because the pole was a bit too short. After I pulled the paper towel tube shim out, I tried to twist the rod to lengthen it. Since it was maxed out, it needed a little something special to help make ends meet.
When I went downstairs, I took a few extra steps out to the car, got the Makerbot and returned to fire up the computer with Sketchup. It took two iterations to get the dimensions right. The new part came out sized to fit over the end of the curtain rod and take up a bit of the gap.
