The hinge on this one by Frank Davies is pretty gorgeous.  Shallower slope than is absolutely necessary to get it to print, but I’ll bet it looks a bit better than it would otherwise.  Boxes like this are really easy to scale in software, which will probably make this into one really commonly-printed item.

Massive bonus points, of course, for having it actually printed out and working.  Neat!

I have been a long-standing fan of Evil Mad Scientist Labs Candyfab.

Of course, who WOULDN’T be a long-standing fan of a machine that prints fantastical sugar sculptures in three dimensions?  And because the sugar acts as a build base and support material, this can print some really wild shapes.  I’ve seen pipe-frame dodecahedrons, trefoil knots, even linked chains of sugar!

They’re not the sturdiest sculptures in the world, obviously, but 3D printing you can eat certainly takes care of the problem of recycling– you use it as people fuel!

If the EMS Labs CF6000 does get made into an inexpensive kit (it sure looks like it could get into the MakerBot range) I can imagine bakeries making use of Thingiverse to print sugary oddities, much to the delight of their nerdier clientelle.

The Wireframe “Draw type” can be terribly useful for building complex objects, since it automatically culls all co-planar face edges, which is to say that flat areas are drawn as though they were single complex faces instead of the cluster of simple faces they really are.

This has one obvious benefit and one subtle one.  The obvious one is that you can see what the heck you’re doing when looking at a complex mechanical design.  The less obvious one is that when something is wrong with your mesh, wireframe mode will often draw a big bright white line where otherwise Blender might not give you any clue that skeinforge wouldn’t like a mesh.

Take these two objects:

One of them skins, one of them doesn’t.  Blender’s solid mesh vier renders them exactly the same.  However, switching to wireframe mode makes it pretty obvious

The cylinder on the left will not slice in skeinforge and in fact will spray errors like the dickens.  The one on the right will slice with no problems.  Both look identical in solid view, but here in wireframe, Blender knows that the top faces are not truly coplanar (they have infinitely thin slices in them) and so does not render them as a single face.  I purposefully generated this particular example by extruding the cylinder on the left with the “individual faces” option instead of the “region” option, but this and a number of other operations in Blender (including booleans on some kinds of meshes) can create invisible but lethal (to skeinforge anyway) kinks in the mesh topology.  In predominantly flat geometry, as is common with mechanical designs, the wireframe draw mode makes these errors stand out like a sore thumb!

Now, my glowing statements about wanting to give free designs to the community all leave out the general economics of design.  The conventional wisdom outside the open source community seems to be that you can’t make money off it.  Inside the community of course there are lots of ways people are making money off it, from promotional use (getting consulting jobs by demonstrating competence in the open source world, aka getting paid not to talk about what you’re doing) to product identification, where people are in the business of making the things they design because people are interested in buying from the originator of the design rather than a copyist.

My earlier discussion on non-commercial licenses sounds quite a bit different from that, and this is in part because I see Thingiverse as potentially the beginning of a new model for commercial digital design: the Collaboratively Licensed Artifact.  (I will refrain from creating a Three Letter Acronym of this for now.)  These artifacts can flow fairly naturally from the organization of Thingiverse: one designer combines other designs, which are a heterogeneous mix of other commercial and non-commercial licenses, to make a product released under a non-commercial license, and sold as a complete artifact or licensable design.

Artifacts of this nature would require some form of contract negotiation, perhaps also through Thingiverse (although maybe we’d want someone like the Creative Commons to help us with the contract stuff.)  A properly executed example of this pattern would mean that the end designer would be paid for commercial use of the finished design (or sell copies directly), then pay all the contributors down the line as per the agreed royalties.

So what would this mean for Thingiverse?

I think what would happen, if this model got off the ground in a big way, is that the design economy would begin to stratify somewhat, but in a fairly benign way.  First, you’d have some designers who are designing for the sheer hell of it, and who recklessly stamp “Attribution – Share Alike” on everything they do.  The quality of their designs would vary from jaw-droppingly excellent to utterly useless.  (As I’ve said, we’re going to need better search functions the more designs show up.)  Next, there would be people who aren’t trying to make a living out of design, but who would rather it show up as a net positive on their balance sheet, and so are doing some casual amount of non-commercial licensing.  Their designs might in many ways form the bedrock of the more commercialized sectors of shared digital design.  With the pros borrowing from them (and sometimes even giving them a few bucks in royalties!), there would be some pretty popular designs in this arena.  Then you’d have the pros.  There wouldn’t be many of them, maybe only one or two at first, but they’d be doing this as their day to day job.  They’d draw together a fistful of existing designs and crank out two or three models of powerful usefulness and keen design a week.  Possibly making use of a pay download feature, (in my rosy scenario, no DRM of course) they’d be selling designs and perhaps printed products, based in part on non-commercial licensed designs which they pay royalties to use commercially.

This economic system, if it could be made, would result in a really dense profusion of downloadable, printable objects, many of which would be both useful and beautiful.  On average, the quality of free designs would be less than the quality of pay ones.  The gap in quality would determine the price of those designs.  There would be outliers in quality, leading to endless discusion about how “The new Hamilton Hedge Clippers are just the old HC1.0 design with some damn gears stuck on ‘em, don’t bother,” and so on, but on the whole I think the system would be worth it.

And maybe it’s just me but if I ever heard this sort of software-industry-inspired discussion about physical artifacts I think it’d pretty much make my year.

It’s been way too long, but I finally got a free day to sit down and hack on the ‘verse. Here’s what I did today:

* small tweaks/improvements to the publish system.
* fixed a bug where you could see unpublished content (oops!)
* new derivatives now default to original license (thanks TMR)
* when you publish your thing, it gets bumped to the top of the newest things. (thanks TMR)
* some tweaks to the rendering system which may or may not make it better.
* cleaned up ‘made things’ / ‘instances’ page and added comments
* new email notification when people comment on the object you’ve made
* new email notification when people have made one of your objects.

Lots of little tweaks this week. Hopefully next week I’ll have a chance to work on some fun features I’ve been wanting for a long time.

Lots of cool stuff on Thingiverse this week, but my pick for coolest thing was easy this go ’round because of how very cool it is.

I mean, that’s an air-powered motor. Advanced mechanical designs like this are going to become more common as Thingiverse expands, and as they do, complex systems will increasingly be built using designs like these as the underlying components.  Exciting!

(Photo by furiousgeorge81)

I’ve been changing most (if not all of) my licenses from non-commercial to simple attribution on Thingiverse.  I’m doing this because I’ve changed my mind about what sort of designs I want to contribute to the community.

One of the awesome things about the Creative Commons is it makes it really easy to have an open design which still can bring its creator money.  If I design a part under a non-commercial license, and someone wants to make money off it, we can meet and arrange licensing fees for commercializing that product.  In the mean time, the license explicitly allows them to download it, play with it, and make their own versions to see if it needs tweaking to work in their application.  In doing so, they add value to the design, creating intellectual property which they in turn can release under non-commercial license, getting the same benefits I got from my design, and earning (upon three-party negotiations) both of us more money in licensing fees.

Non-commercial licenses, paradoxically, are a great way to make a business out of digital design.  (This all assumes everyone plays by the rules and is honest when making derivative works and so on, but I really think it can work.)

But presently, my motives for producing items on Thingiverse are very different from all that.  I’m making models as a form of charitable contribution.  I’m donating time because I want this community to be enriched.  I want to give shapes and designs and usable things to the group, and I want them to be able to sell them.

To me, for now, it makes sense to give my time to this community, because I’m getting to be involved in something exciting and new.  Every design which is open enough to download and print (non-commercial or not) increases the effective value of digital fabrication.  But every commercially-free design does even more.  Designs under simple attribution licenses give owners of digital fabrication technology a source of income.  They can print out and sell these things.  They can add on to these designs, make THOSE designs non-commercial, and then get royalties for their addition to my work without worrying about contacting or paying me.  Like in the story about teaching a person to fish, I’m excited by the prospect of doing the absolute maximum amount of good when I put out designs for now.

There’s actually an interesting point brought up by my sentiments here, having to do with the supply and demand of design, but I’ll go over that in another post.

Precision mechanical CAD tools come with a wide variety of snap tools.  Blender is relatively light in this department (its primary users are animators, not engineers) but there is a snap menu and it can be pretty useful.

The snap menu is in the object menu in object mode, and in the mesh menu in edit mode.  It can be summoned in either mode by pressing shift-s, however.  Here are your available functions:

Selection to Grid – In edit mode, each selected vertex will move to the nearest grid node.  In object mode, object pivots are positioned to the nearest grid node.  The grid in these matters is defined as whichever grid is visible in the current view.  This means that zoomed well away, the grid might be one meter spacing, and zoomed in it might be one millimeter spacing.  This can be irritating, but it’s better than nothing.

Selection to Cursor – In edit mode, selected vertices move to the cursor position.  In object mode, selected objects move so their pivots are centered on the cursor.  (The cursor is that little life-raft looking thing.)

Selection to Center – Again, affects vertices in edit mode, objects in object mode.  Moves all selected items to their geometric center.

Cursor to Selection – Moves the cursor to the center of the selected objects.  (If one object is selected, cursor moves to it.)

Cursor to Grid – Moves the cursor to the nearest available grid node, again dependent on which grid is the smallest visible.

Cursor to Active – Moves the cursor to the active object.  This is the most recently selected object in the case of multiple selections.

These snap commands are a lot more limited than many CAD tools, but they’re enough that an experienced user can recreate many of the more advanced functions with some slight of hand.  For a great example of that, see rab3D’s tutorials on Blender for Precision Modeling.

(Photo by Zota)

It pleases me greatly to see how en vogue the expression “From the bottom up” has become lately.

It’s everywhere.  In political movements with the excitement in grass roots organization.  In the arts with participatory forms and guerrilla artwork.  In engineering, with both the Maker movement and soon with personal fabrication spreading to the living room.  One by one, disciplines of human endeavor are being democratized, jerked summarily from the clenched fists of hierarchy and heaved, sometimes with great fanfare and other times as one might chuck a boat anchor, into the sea of crowdsourcing and participatory work.

There are, of course, Royalists everywhere.  Their arguments are rational and they have lots of supporters, particularly among those who worry about the problem of quality vs. quantity.  If one surveys the landscape of any arena experiencing a democratizing influence, the Royalists make the same essential argument:

We are being flooded with terrible ideas, poorly conceived and poorly made, and no one will stop to listen for opinions worth hearing, or look for ideas worth having.  What we have to gain is only more ideas, not better ones.  What we are losing is institutions which stem this tide of bad ideas.

The Royalists argue that democratizing a field removes the disincentives for bad ideas while not doing anything to benefit good ones.  My counterargument to this comes in two parts.  First, I argue that selecting good ideas is problematic, and second, that the problem of having too many ideas, both good and bad, is manageable.

Good ideas are hard to spot at a distance.  There are lots of classic examples, from the discovery of vaccination (would YOU have been the first to intentionally infect people with a disease?) to that great photo of the original Microsoft team with the heading “Would you have invested?”  Bad ideas are everywhere, and even a cursory glance at modern network television will prove decisively that having an institution to narrow down the chosen ideas does not necessarily eliminate the bad ones.  Choosing ideas is difficult.  I would argue that we have little to gain from having fewer people deciding which is which.

And I do not believe the argument that we will lose good ideas in the coming sea of both good and bad ideas.  We will all need to become fishers for ideas, it is true, but one of the all-time great ideas of our age has been the very idea of advanced search capabilities, and thankfully this one has managed alright.  In the end, we will need institutions to find ideas, rather than institutions to kill them.

Once we have the former, I think we’ll do just fine without the latter.

I’m documenting my MakerBot build over on my Flickr stream– So far it’s been a heck of a build!

I don’t have my XY stage or belt tensioners yet, so I’m diving into the circuit builds.  Today had a few major distractions so I only got my first stepper driver and the Arduino sheild put together.  I’m on an older gen of electronics so some really wild times are being had!