Is your plastic filament a mess?  If you just leave it sitting around you probably have had your fair share of knots and tangles.  Don’t despair, Thingiverse has solutions!

Check out this laser printed filament spool:

Filament Spindle v0.4 by builttospec

It should be noted that this is a derivative of Erik’s and CidVilas’ work.  Taking a design and making it better and custom FTW.

There’s also a spindle design that FDM  (fused deposition modeling) type machines like the RepRap and Makerbot can produce. This one is by tbfleming:

Printed Filament Spindle by tbfleming

All those rods and connectors are sort of remind me of tinker toys.

No 3D printer at all?   No Problemo!

Cardboard Spool by charlespax

Pax has an excellent design which only needs a knife and some cardboard!

We are planning on moving Thingiverse to a newer, faster server starting at 10AM Eastern time on Monday, Feb 8th. The transition should be painless, but it will probably take an hour or so for us to move everything over. Please bear with us while we do this upgrade. Once everything is done, the site should run much faster.

Now that low-cost 3D printing is really on the rise, increasingly complex projects like this stunning execution of a 2D positioning system are becoming more common.  The implications of this low-metal setup are pretty huge, especially for the RepRap, but what gets me is how this complex machine is now part of the Creative Commons.  As personal fabrication becomes more popular, open designs like this one will raise the baseline functionality of, well, just about everything.

Parametric GCoding can still beat even CSG on some specific problems, like these snowflakes!  I absolutely love that with a 3D printer you can now automatically and randomly generate such delicate and gorgeous designs!

The gang who does the Radar series over at Babelgum came by the BotCave and made this video. They used Nikon d90’s and it turned out beautiful! Go to their site and check it out big.

Another brutally difficult week to chose the best entry– Thingiverse is becoming a real treasure trove of design!

This hinge makes use of the feedstock itself as a pin.  Designs which rely on a few hardware-store-available parts to do really amazing things are great, but any time we learn how to squeak by with one less bit of external parts is a solid win.

Wow! It’s been way too long since I had a chance to do a Thingiverse Thursday. This one isn’t super impressive, but I got some things in that I’ve had on my list for a while:

* Thingiverse login / comment integration. We upgraded to JS-Kit Pro which means we can take advantage of their custom site login integration. That means that if you’re logged into thingiverse, then any comments show up as being from you. Awesome! Of course if you’re not logged in, you can post anonymously or use openid.

* New login screen. A while back, I saw this cool login idea called Chroma Hash. The idea is to give you visual feedback on your password as you type so you can make sure you entered it correctly. It hashes your password into three colored bars based on the text. No more wondering if you typed your password in correctly or not!

* Parts system update. Added a couple fields to the inventory system to let you keep track of the cost and the value of your stuff in inventory. Eventually you’ll be able to get a report of how much its worth and stuff. This is a feature for MakerBot so we can keep track of how much crap we have. Yay!

This week, a topic very near to my heart, gears.  Catarina’s helical gears from OpenSCAD are gorgeous, and fully parameterized.  As I said before: OpenSCAD is a game changer.

I felt compelled to make this week’s thing of the week (which is a bit late, yes) a tie between the two unquestionably awesome kit robots that have been built and shared on Thingiverse this week.  Each uses standard boards and gear motors to make sturdy, beautiful kit robots!

On the left we have a single-part chassis that accepts standard servos, battery pack and an arduino board– a lovely expression of the bare bones of robotics which could easily be extended in functionality by stacking a shield on the Arduino.  Neat!

On the right we have a really excellent line-follower that really shows off how beautiful and customized an object can be when digital fabrication is involved.  The creator has a lovely website with lots of beautiful documentation.  This design looks really devastatingly pro with that ribbon cable and obviously-custom plastic parts.  Awesome sauce.

Wrapping up Skeinforge Week we have a feature I wish I’d known about a long time ago: Jitter.  The above cups weren’t actually made with Skeinforge, but they’re the best illustration I could find of a big problem: the print head turning at the same point over and over again, eventually resulting in a thick, heavy seam on one side of the object.  All my dodecahedrons have this.

The Jitter setting in Skeinforge moves the stop point around randomly so the seam doesn’t have a chance to form.  Another handy feature from the BitsFromBytes Wiki article!