In the United States, Flag Day is celebrated on June 14. It commemorates the adoption of the flag of the United States, which happened on that day in 1777 by resolution of the Second Continental Congress. The United States Army also celebrates the Army Birthday on this date; Congress adopted “the American continental army” after reaching a consensus position in the Committee of the Whole on June 14, 1775.
Happy Flag Day! June 14th is an American holiday that celebrates its flag. Usually, this isn’t a major holiday, but I thought it’d be interesting to make a flag for Flag Day. I remembered there was something called the Cicada Design Principle, that I wanted to try, and I thought I’d apply it to making non-repeating waves to a flag.
The Cicada Design Principle is a way to make seamless non-repeating backgrounds (for all intents and purposes) with just a few parts and some prime numbers.
The Robo-Raven, as the solar-powered, remotely piloted surveillance aircraft is called, was designed and built at the University of Maryland’s Maryland Robotics Center — an interdisciplinary research establishment in the university’s A. James Clark School of Engineering. The center posted a video of a test flight this week.
The Robo-Raven “already attracts attention from birds in the area which tends to hide its presence,” said John Gerdes, a mechanical engineer with the Vehicle Technology Directorate at the U.S. Army’s Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland.
Seagulls, songbirds and sometimes crows tend to try to fly in formation with the robotic bird during testing, but birds of prey, such as falcons and hawks, take a much more aggressive approach, he said.
“Generally we don’t see them coming,” Mr. Gerdes said on the center’s website. “They will dive and attack by hitting the bird from above with their talons, then they typically fly away.”
The Robo-Raven’s wings flap completely independently of each other and “can be programmed to perform any desired motion,” enabling the bird to carry out aerobatic flight maneuvers, such as diving and rolling, never before possible.
Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!
Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!
The Adafruit Learning System has dozens of great tools to get you well on your way to creating incredible works of engineering, interactive art, and design with your 3D printer! If you’ve made a cool project that combines 3D printing and electronics, be sure to let us know, and we’ll feature it here!
With the hoards of MakerBot Customizer items and a huge influx of new users, the Thingiverse is expanding at a more rapid pace than ever before. And they just hit the 100,000th Thing milestone, per the MakerBot blog:
We just marked a major milestone at MakerBot with the 100,000th thing being published to Thingiverse! We’ve seen quite an explosion of uploaded and published 3D designs to Thingiverse since we launched the Customizer App in January of this year. Just take a look at how the numbers of available 3D designs on Thingiverse have been rising steadily – from 35,000 items on Thingiverse in January 2013 – before the Customizer was launched – to 60,000 two months ago, and 80,000 a month ago. And now, 100,000+ things!! And, downloads are more than 21.1 million!! That’s a lot of designing and printing of 3D items. The Next Industrial Revolution has begun.
The honor of becoming Thingiverse’s 100,000th published thing goes to Thingiverse user jg952 for the “My Customized Message Keychain.” We think this is great – and we can’t wait to see the numbers of published 3D designs expand even further. Check out all of the interesting 3D designs on Thingiverse at Thingiverse.com and give some props to Thingiverse user jg952 while you’re at it.
Organovo has announced that they have successfully printed samples of liver cells that are partially behaving like actual liver cells. Via CBCNews:
The company’s researchers used a gel to build three types of liver cells and arranged them into the same kind of three-dimensional cell architecture found in a human liver. Although not fully functional, the 3D cells were able to produce some of the same proteins as an actual liver does and interacted with each other and with compounds introduced into the tissue as they would in the body.
That means biomedical researchers could potentially use the tissue to test drugs or investigate the effect of certain diseases.
Organovo’s researchers are not the first to apply 3D printing to biomedicine. Doctors at the University of Michigan last year used a 3D printer to build a synthetic trachea for a child with a birth defect that had collapsed her airway, and as scientists and engineers get more familiar with the technology its uses will no doubt grow.
The whining of the turbines in the 3D printed pneumatic rotary tool might make your teeth hurt. When [Axodus] tipped us off about it he mentioned it sounded like a 747 taking off. But we hear a dentist’s drill when watching the demo video.
Richard Macfarlane published his design if you want to try building one for yourself. But you will need to do some machining in addition to printing the enclosure and the pair of turbines. The shaft of the tool needs to fit the bearings precisely. It accepts a center blue spacer with a red turbine on either side. This assembly is encapsulated in the two-part threaded blue body which has a flange to friction fit with the shop vacuum hose. The business end of the machined shaft was designed and threaded to accept the collet from a Dremel or similar rotary tool.
We wonder how much work it would be to re-engineer this to act as a PCB drill press?
Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!
Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!
The Adafruit Learning System has dozens of great tools to get you well on your way to creating incredible works of engineering, interactive art, and design with your 3D printer! If you’ve made a cool project that combines 3D printing and electronics, be sure to let us know, and we’ll feature it here!
There are a number of 3D printing related book projects out now or soon to be released (including mine here), and I’m thrilled to share Joe Larson‘s book trailer for MakerBot Project Blueprints (Packt). I’ve enjoyed Joe’s designs since my days as MakerBot’s community manager — especially “Alot of Plastic” and “iArmchair” — and I welcome another author sharing awesome 3D printing projects for novices and experienced users alike!
I’ve written a book! MakerBot Project Blueprints will pass on my masterful knowledge of making things for 3D printing to you. 9 awesome projects give you the knowledge you need in an exciting and fun way at your pace, as opposed to the dry technical discussion by an expert going too fast you’d get elsewhere. Don’t go get help from them, get Makerbot Project Blueprints available on pre-order now.
As a special incentive if you order pre-order now you’ll get the raw chapters before they’re even finished, as we work on them, so you can start learning now.
Go to Packt to find out more. Follow my Blog for other cool 3D printing things I’m doing.
Andrew talked with Bart Veldhuizen, Shapeway’s Community Manager about how Shapeways was started, the production and the available materials for designers. What does Shapeways think about desktop 3D printers? Shapeways keeps a good relationship with desktop 3D printer manufacturers, said Veldhuizen, Shapeways’ production scale is different, and they serve different markets so Shapeways doesn’t see them as competitors. On the contrary, desktop 3D printers are more closer to consumers, and they could help people to understand the principle of 3D printing.
For people who design something at home, Shapeways helps them to expand the complexity of their design, providing more choices for shapes and materials. “Lots of customer models are virtually assembled like Tetris pieces into a printer’s known X, Y, Z “chamber limits”.” explains Andrew.
“The amount of materials to print is endless and expanding. Nylons are everywhere, silver models are contracted out but the initial steps are printed at Shapeways, and waste materials are being stored to be recycled in the future when technology allows.” added Andrew, and designers could also just order small production runs after home prototyping….
made utilizing rapid prototyping techniques in polyamide plastic, the 3D printed bow tie by japanese design studio monocircus reinterprets the common fashion accessory, retaining a visual presence similar to that of its woven-textile counterpart. conceived in one piece instead of being fastened like a ribbon, the attachment slots right onto the button of any collared dress shirt. a checkered surface pattern creates an optical illusion, accentuating the three dimensional volume of the item.
Check out this short video from Engadget that features the trio of “laser cowboys” who are performing the 3D scanning in the Smithsonian Digitization office. This video counters some of the wild rumors that were spread in the press last year around this time and gives some great details about their process and aims. Via Cubify.
“We’re not scanning every object in the collection,” Adam Metallo tells me, offering up the information almost as soon as we set foot in the Smithsonian’s Digitization office. It’s an important piece of information he wants to make sure I have, right off the bat. It seems that, when the story of the department’s 3D-scanning plans first hit the wire, a number of organizations blew the scope of the project out of proportion a bit. And while the team’s project is certainly ambitious, it’s not, you know, crazy. It’s the work of a three-person team, still in its nascent stages, attempting to prove the value of new technologies to a 167-year-old museum affectionately known as “the nation’s attic.”
In the fall of 2011, Metallo and fellow Smithsonian 3D scanner Vince Rossi (a duo the institute has lovingly deemed its “laser cowboys”) unpacked their equipment in Chile’s Atacama Desert. “They were widening the Pan-American Highway, and in doing so, they uncovered about 40 complete whale specimens,” Rossi explains. “But it might take decades for them to remove the fossils from the rock, so we were able to capture this snapshot of what that looked like in 3D.” The tool of choice for the expedition was a laser arm scanner, which utilizes a process the duo compares to painting an object, moving back and forth across its surface as the device records the relative position of its axes.
Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!
Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!
The Adafruit Learning System has dozens of great tools to get you well on your way to creating incredible works of engineering, interactive art, and design with your 3D printer! If you’ve made a cool project that combines 3D printing and electronics, be sure to let us know, and we’ll feature it here!
I just recently started using Sublime Text 2 as my primary editor and I’ve got to say it’s really a great addition to my work flow. Not only does it have a clean look and all the features you would expect from a modern editor, but it also has some pretty crazy stuff like a built in package manager! With just a few keystrokes you can search to see if you have syntax highlighting for a particular language installed, pull up the package manager, and install it. All in a matter of seconds. It’s pretty awesome.
One of the nice things about this editor is that it’s cross platform. Last I checked it works on Windows, Mac, and Linux, there are also portable binaries for Windows (pretty handy for on the go coding). It’s always nice to be able to work in a program you’re familiar with regardless of platform, since I often switch between my Windows desktop and Mac laptop this is a big plus for me.
If you’re new to the editor, I’d recommend watching this excellent Sublime Text 2 tutorial series by the genius programmer and trainer Jeffrey Way. The tutorial starts at the basics and goes all the way through to advanced and complex workflows. I learned a lot from this series and would recommend it to anyone looking to pickup some new skills.
To augment the editor I’m using a modified version of Tony Buser’s “OpenSCAD Customizer Textmate/Sublime 2 Bundle” that includes code snippets for the Makerbot Customizer app. This adds syntax highlighting and code snippets for the OpenSCAD language which are not included by default in Sublime Text. All the credit goes to Tony on this one, he did a great job setting up the original package, I just added a few things that have changed since he wrote it….
Haptic technology like the Sensable Phantom makes manipulating 3D digital objects intuitive and responsive, allowing for a range of uses including prototyping, surgery practice, virtual sculpting, and interactive museum displays.
Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!
Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!
The Adafruit Learning System has dozens of great tools to get you well on your way to creating incredible works of engineering, interactive art, and design with your 3D printer! If you’ve made a cool project that combines 3D printing and electronics, be sure to let us know, and we’ll feature it here!
Ever since I first learned about subatomic particles and their spiral movements in magnetic fields, I could not help but be inspired. The different charges, masses and speeds determine the trajectories and create these astounding images in bubble chambers.
With the arrival of accessible 3d printing, I got to work to capture this beauty in jewelry. I wrote a piece of software that would trace possible (and impossible) orbits and trajectories in 3 dimensions. But I had a hard time choosing which models to actually try and print as the variations were endless.
Then a few months ago I got the urge to bring this project back to life and in search for a solution I stumbled upon Mixeelabs.
Mixeelabs was working on an online platform that allows designers to easily create web apps which are able to generate 3d printable models! We joined forces and are very proud to present: Quark Jewelry
There is a new radical RepRap 3D printer in town called Simpson. George Gaylord Simpson came up with the idea of Quantum Evolution, the theory that evolution can happen in abrupt burst. The namesake was chosen for the printer to signify its quick divergence from other existing designs. Nicholas Seward started barely a month ago with the goal to build a 3D printer with the following requirement:
Low center of gravity
No linear rails
Fully printable except for bearings, bolts, bed, and electronics
During the month, the design has gone from a idea through at least 7 major revisions and has produced 3 prototypes. The open style of the RepRap Project has allowed for some crucial collaboration. Thousands of people have viewed Simpson’s development forum. Many have posted ideas, suggestions, and encouragement. The project would not exist in its current state without the open source community.
Johann Rocholl’s Rostock and Quentin Harley’s Morgan provided much initial inspiration. After many different initial design iterations a novel delta architecture was selected. A typical delta robot has all the arms connect above the work envelope. Simpson has all the arms connect below the work envelope to keep the center of gravity low and to remove the need for a support structure. Additionally, Simpson drives the elbow joint of each arm instead of the shoulder joints like most delta robots. This allowed for a drastic reduction in the inverse kinematic equations.
Ilian Bonev, a professor in the field of robotics at École de Technologie Supérieure said the design was “innovative” and “truly original.”
The printer can be made from off the shelf components for less than $400USD. It has a large print volume on the order of 10 liters! Currently, Simpson is still in the prototype stage but there will be a public release of all the files on 6/15/2013. Check out the development forum for more info.
Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!
Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!
The Adafruit Learning System has dozens of great tools to get you well on your way to creating incredible works of engineering, interactive art, and design with your 3D printer! If you’ve made a cool project that combines 3D printing and electronics, be sure to let us know, and we’ll feature it here!
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