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!
DO THE MUTATION is a two person generative deisgn lab near Modena, Italy. Founders, Filippo Nassetti and Alessandro Zomparelli worked in collaboration with EDGELAB S space and form strategies to realize the mask concept. The COLLAGENE software application itself is written in Processing, a opensource framework based on Java, and uses the Toxiclibs libraries to generate the isosurface. The topographic and chromatic data of the face is first captured with a Kinect, then paths are drawn across the imported data to simulate the formation of a fiber system growing across the face.
Once the paths are traced and form tweaked, the mask is sent off to be printed. Fabrication of the pieces was completed by CRP GROUP using their Windform LX 2.0 material, a black polymide-based material reinforced with glass fibers that is used in motosports and aerospace. You can read more on the entire technique here. Though odd, the application extends beyond mask to any object; creating objects or attire made from a common material, with the designer wielding control over the form, to create a customized fit for any person….
This is one of those really cheap toys that makes more noise that it actually does things.
It has only 1 motor at the back, the front wheels don’t even touch the ground and to turn it actually goes backwards which blocks one wheel and allows only the other one to move, hence always turning in the same direction (this is sooooo annoying ! ).
Anyhow, as any father that has nothing else to do and was looking for an excuse to do something with my underused 3D printer, I set up on fixing it….
It might be worth mentioning that I used:
Inkscape to draw the gears (really great tool) and the complex shapes of the motor mounts
OpenSCAD to extrude the drawings from Inkscape into shapes and export to STL
Cura to generate the GCODE from STL and do the printing
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!
Please note that the part specifications provided by Adafruit do not cover all of the dimensions on this part, so I have used the average measurements of about 3 pieces to fill in the missing dimensions.
Have you ever been sitting there, quietly computing something and thinking to yourself, “If only this process were somehow billions of times slower, less reliable, and involved lots of physical labor”? If so, the Turbo Entabulator is the machine you’ve been looking for! While I get to spend my days working on one of the world’s fastest computers, I like to relax when I get home . . . slow things down a little. You could say I like to enjoy both ends of the computing spectrum. After my success with the FIBIAC project, an electromechanical beast chugging along at nearly one micro-operation-per-second, I opted to go even slower with this one. I also wanted to try my hand at something a little more mechanical. The result is a nearly-entirely 3D-printed, entirely-mechanical computer (for the purists out there, yes, I used lots of nuts & bolts, a handful of springs, rubber bands, and a dozen or so tiny bearings). I even printed out the punch-cards!
This machine is effectively an entirely-mechanical implementation of my FIBIAC machine. It uses the same principle for computing – a set of registers can be selectively incremented/decremented until a selected register reaches zero. I even kept the business-card sized punch cards. The best part? Zero electronics. Run the machine under water if you want, it won’t care. It’s all ratchets, gears, and pulleys. The machine is entirely driven by a central crank-shaft with a handle attached to it – want to overclock this monster? Crank faster! There is something about entirely mechanical systems I find appealing – the inner workings aren’t hidden in a nanometer-sized sliver of silicon, operating on pico-second timelines.
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!
My name is Cosmo Wenman, and for the last year I’ve been 3D scanning artwork in museums and using those scans to 3D print life-size reproductions. I’ve been sharing my 3D printable files online so that anyone can 3D print their own copies too. You can see some of my work here: cosmowenman.com. It’s been a labor of love for me. I’ve been doing it for myself, for other art lovers, and for students and educators–for anyone who’s dreamed of owning fine sculptural art, but hasn’t had the means until now.
I was lucky enough to grow up in a home filled with books of illustrations and prints which formed the basis for my own appreciation for the beauty, themes, and meaning in art. If you were lucky in the same way, and know how important that is, you’ll want to know what’s on the horizon.
Recent advances in 3D scanning and 3D printing technologies are opening up new opportunities for the average person to possess and enjoy beautiful sculptural artwork of their own. The children growing up today and tomorrow with 3D printers in their homes and classrooms are on the verge of becoming the very first generation to have an aesthetic sensibility informed by direct, hands-on access to the world’s sculptural masterworks. Their cultural landscape and visual vocabulary will be richer, more complex, and more varied than ours. Sculpture and artifacts will be able to speak to them in ways that have never before been possible.
Eventually, 3D printable designs of the entire world’s cultural heritage of sculptural masterworks will be available to everyone, and this project is my attempt to make that happen sooner rather than later.
Up until now I’ve been doing my scanning work solo, just walking into museums and scanning what was accessible. But now I’ve found an institution that shares my goal of freely disseminating art using every available tool.
The Skulpturhalle Basel museum in Switzerland has an incredible collection of more than 2,000 high quality 19th and 20th century plaster casts of important ancient Greek and Roman sculptures. The Skulpturhalle has given me permission to 3D scan sculptures of my choosing, and to share the 3D designs without any restrictions.
This is a tremendous opportunity to bring great art into people’s lives.
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!
This is a 3d printed lamp using Makerbot’s lithophane
generator and Adafruit’s 1 Watt LED. I’m making these for my wedding which
is 50 days away. Adafruit’s awesome shipping department got my order of 10
of these LED’s out the door faster than I would have expected(even for you
guys). Thanks for being so awesome,
Grissini.
For her ITP class project, NYU student/designer Xuedi Chen used 3D-printing software and chia seeds to spawn these mossy fashion accessories. Their origins are somewhat grotesque: The Invasive Growth Series was directly inspired by a parasitic fungus. The cordyceps operates by infecting an insect with spores, growing inside the insect while performing a sort of “mind control” that forces it to clasp onto a plant just in time for the cordyceps to burst through its body and grow upward. It’s pretty badass.
“I printed it on a Makerbot in three pieces, curved them by hand and joined them together,” Chen explains. “Through all of this I had this idea of growing moss on it as another level of the creeping invasive nature of cordyceps and organic growth. I guess for someone who doesn’t wear a lot of jewellery, I view them with a bit of a parasitic nature.”
3D Printing, also called additive manufacturing, is the process of taking a digital model of an object of any geometric shape and creating a three-dimensional (3D) solid object replica. A 3D printer uses rapid prototyping, a pre-production process that allows manufacturers to scale a model using computer-aided design (CAD) data, or modeling software. A solid object is created using layers of various materials such as liquid, paper, powder, or metal that form a series of cross sections. The additive process automatically fuses the joined layers to create the object. Using a 3D printer filament, commonly supplied in various colors on spools, the 3D printer is able to create a smooth extrusion, creating a shape form as the material comes through the nozzle.
Commonly used in manufacturing, machining, automotive, construction, medical, and architectural industries, 3D printers are applicable to a wide variety of fields.Education, engineering, and jewelry-making professionals also use additive manufacturing. Manufacturing, in both industrial and remote areas, can utilize this technology. For example, if new machinery is required, new machined objects can begin to take shape in minutes. Material savings can be measured in decreased material waste during the manufacturing process.
3D printer reviews can be a source of information to help consumers select and buy 3D printer machines. Some of the best 3D printers are Federal Communications Commission (FCC)-approved, and many come with design or CAD software, handling tools, and printer filament. Some 3D printers are supplied with a USB cable and a power supply cable. A 3D printer can come with a dual extruder that uses two spools of acrylonitrile butadiene styrene (ABS) or other filament type, or a single extruder that uses one spool. Temperature parameters may need to be adjusted for optimum extruder performance.
Each 3D printer has a specified build volume, layer thickness, and nozzle diameter. A 3D printer may also have a multi-directional control pad, and LCD character display screen in various sizes. Footprint, including overall dimensions, and weight are also considered in 3D printer selection.
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!
Now, take this opinion/consultant commentary piece with a grain of salt, but I found it a fascinating read to learn more about how the toy establishment might view 3D printing, an field as likely as any to be impacted by the rise of mainstream adoption of personal manufacturing.
And yet, will 3D printing compete directly with the established toy industry, or simply provide an alternative track by pressing on the areas of dissatisfaction the public already feels with the field and throw a spotlight on shodding thinking? (In particular, the toy market’s commitment to serving as the merchandising wing for vertically integrated, trans-media IP for television, film, games, and comics, rather than an expressive context of its own as you might find in markets such as Germany and Japan.)
The number of deeply talented toy designers and creatives heading out on their own to engage in the very practices this piece warns about appears to be a tremendous source for innovation and excitement in a field that has otherwise changed very little since my childhood.
Thanks to Wayne Losey from Modibot for suggesting this piece from Steve Reece:
These are very dangerous times for those with a vested interest in the status quo. The music industry has been revolutionized by digital downloading driven by easy consumer access and online portals versus physical purchase.
For those who remember the resistance from the music industry to the change, perhaps in hindsight we can reflect that they should have taken an ‘If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em’ approach….
The 2 major areas of change are 3d printing and crowd funding.
Now again, everyone knows about these 2 up and coming area, however, it appears to me that many companies have failed to understand the implications.
Just as the book industry power balance was entirely in favour of the publishers who controlled the gateway to retail/commercial opportunity, so the same effectively applies to Toy companies today.
Kindle stripped away the gatweay effect for book publishers.
Will crowd funding and 3d printing do the same to the Toy industry…?
Firstly let’s look at fundamental challenges in our industry:
1. Inventory/justifying MOQs.
2. Limited shelf space/listings at mass retail.
The first issue is a critical point, inventory represents THE biggest risk Toy companies have on an ongoing basis. But in terms of the industry as a whole, inventory risk and MOQs effectively act as barriers to entry into the industry. Combine that with limited mass retail shelf space for our Category, limited number of vendors per retailer and potentially company busting huge orders from some mass retailers, and in effect there is a bottleneck, where those who effectively control product input to retail effectively act as gatekeepers to the industry as a whole – like a dam holding back a huge mass of products pooling up behind the dam.
Anyone who has tried to open a new trading account with Walmart, Carrefour etc will understand my point here!
So here’s the critical point – by allowing (effectively) direct access to consumers 3d printing and crowd sourcing offer ‘dam busting’ opportunity to smaller players, to those with no capital, to those with low engineering/manufacturing understanding and therefore potentially can revolutionise our industry.
Although we might not think it (!), we currently have comparatively few Toys on offer versus App stores/book stores etc. This is because of the sheer risk of developing Toy products in terms of launch risk and financial investment.
BUT if you can use crowd funding to meet initial breakevens on mass produced products and 3d printing to allow more customisation and less need for robust and costly tooling etc., then you have completely changed the game! Suddenly those products that can’t hit a 50k units tooling breakeven become possible. The flood gates will open, which will open the market and lead to huge shifts in what sells and how it sells!
Frustrated by the lack of access to 3D printers at their school, three recent graduates from UC Berkeley have installed Dreambox, the world’s first “3D-printing vending machine,” on their campus. Dreambox gives everyone access to the 3D printer for a small fee, allowing them to print objects from their own designs or from an online store. The creators hope that it will help democratize 3D printing and help more people realize the technology’s potential.
Dreambox CEO Pavid Pastewka told CNet that only grad students, researchers and PHD students have access to the few 3D printers at UC Berkeley, and sometimes they would have to wait more than a month to use one. Dreambox not only gives everyone on campus access to a 3D printer, but they only have to wait about 24 hours to pick up their object.
After registering with Dreambox, users can either upload their own design or print something from the Dreambox store. Popular objects include figurines from video games and TV shows. Prints tend to cost $15 or less, and users can pay with PayPal. Within 24 hours, users will receive an email with a code that they enter into Dreambox to unlock a drawer and pick up their object.
Dreambox only prints small objects — nothing larger than a loaf of bread — with plastics. It can actually get most prints done in less than an hour, but a steady stream of orders has led to the 24-hour wait time.
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!
Here’s an intriguing material science experiment — treating PLA to make it flexible. While this line of investigation is still in the “this appears to be working” stage, it is nonetheless an interesting to check out over at Thingiverse Thing 98268:
okay, so yesterday I uploaded a video of a few parts I have managed to make into flexible pieces. So today I am giving you the how to. (I waited to make sure the parts remained flexible and to see if I could come up with a suitable way to restore the color to some of the treated parts.)
Over the past year Cubify has periodically released web apps for you to create customized designs. Some of the apps permit download of STL files for printing on your home 3D printer, and we suspect Cubify is hoping you’ll do it on your Cube 3D printer, even though the STL models could print on other printers, too. Other apps render much more complex, color objects that you can send to Cubify’s print service for production on commercial-level equipment.
But at this point there are so many apps doing so many things we thought we’d better prepare a list for you.
First, apps that provide downloadable STL for personal 3D printing:
Cubify Draw: an iOS app permitting children to finger-draw a shape that is transformed into a simple 3D object.
Party Glasses: a selection of funky glasses, best printed in the wildest color possible.
Cubify Love Notes: Valentine-ish notes in 3D form, obviously only printable in red plastic.
Cubify Pics: Upload a high-contrast picture and have it transformed into a slightly-3D shape, suitable for printing.
Cubify Rings: A wide selection of customizable ring components can be mixed together to get what you want: your own Super Bowl ring, perhaps.
Cubify Bracelets: Customized bracelets, one of the easiest and most effective 3D prints possible on low-end personal machines.
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!
When instructables user madmorrie had new door trims (interior panels) made for his 1962 Valiant, he neglected to allow for clearance for the door lock levers on the back door, so the original levers would no longer work. In the photo above you can see the end of the mounting post for the levers is flush with surface of the new panel, leaving no way to attach them.
Rather than have expensive new door trims made, he decided to make new levers. He designed the new levers with an extended splined section that could be recessed into the door trim and wrote up his experience in his instructable, Custom 3D Printed Car Parts.
It’s likely that no other 1962 Valiant owner will ever have the same problem, and that’s exactly why 3D printing is a good choice in this scenario. While 3D printing can get expensive for larger parts, when building tiny parts like these, you can save a lot of money by not paying for tooling costs….
As a guide, you should expect the following speeds for this example:
1.5 seconds in Firefox 23 (unreleased, but available at http://nightly.mozilla.org/)
8 seconds in Chrome 26
20 seconds in Firefox 19
A word about OpenSCAD in the browser
Using a remarkable project called Emscripten, we’ve converted the native OpenSCAD software to Javascript. However, please note the following:
We strongly encourage you to try out the unreleased Firefox 23 (officially due 6th August). This will allow OpenSCAD to run at virtually native speed, due to yet another remarkable project called asm.js.
If you don’t want to trailblaze with Firefox 23, it will work fine with Chrome 26 or Firefox 19, albeit about 5 to 8 times slower.
You can use OpenSCAD without logging in to view generated STLs, but unfortunately you will need to log in to download them, as due to browser security there’s no way to directly save to the operating system. The good news is we’ll keep up to ten of your most recently generated STLs.
Unfortunately, for some reason it runs so slowly in Safari 6 as to be unusable. We’re looking into it.
Currently imports won’t work – although we’re very close to getting that working too.
Please check out our FAQ pages for further information.
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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