A great little bit of whimsy, this little light-up birdhouse is pretty adorable.  A They Might be Giants reference, a material apology device for something a lot of us have apologized for before, and a place to put an LED make this the sort of thing that I can’t help but love.

With the number of new things per week ramping up, it’s going to get harder and harder to decide what my favorite submission for the week was.  This was a week where a fantastic pair of lasercut calipers, a sweet custom whiskey glass, and even parameterized lego bricks showed up.  I wasn’t kidding when I said Thingiverse was hitting critical mass!

I’ve noticed models showing up on Thingiverse which Skeinforge can’t handle, the reason being that there are duplicate vertices in the mesh.  This is very quick to fix in Blender, so I thought I’d jump in and list what you do to fix meshes like this in Blender.

First, start blender and delete the default cube (hit del).

Then, go to the file menu and select import -> stl.  Select your file and hit Import STL.  This will get your file into Blender for fixing.  Hit tab to enter “Edit mode” and hit the a-key to select all the verticies.  Then hit w, then 6 to remove all duplicate vertices.  This command will remove all doubled vertices in the mesh.  As a precaution, hit ctrl-n then enter to recalculate the normals of the mesh.  Hit tab to go back to object mode, go to file -> export -> stl and rename your file.

A lot of 2D CAD programs seem to leave double verts in the meshes for one reason or another– it’s a good idea to use this command after importing anything from a 2D program.

(Photo by Nicola Zuliani)

Thingiverse has embraced the notion of the Creative Commons with a fierceness that I find endlessly heartwarming.  Thingiverse members have a “default setting” for their involvement in the Creative Commons.  Attribution and design sharing are written into the code and default settings of Thingiverse, which nudge users towards greater openness and greater sharing.

When I first joined Thingiverse, I had some knowledge of the Creative Commons as it relates to artwork, but I hadn’t considered applying it to physical designs much.  The very existence of the License Dropdown hints at things to come, though.

We can no longer expect to live in a world where production is expensive.  Patents, designed to protect one factory against another, encouraging factories to pay inventors rather than making mere copies of things already made, will not work in a world where everyone has a factory.  And I think, sooner than the law is at all ready, that world will arrive.

The Creative Commons, when applied to machinery, to parts and equipment and tools and toys, will serve as an alternate understanding, and a “made law” that will let designers leverage the power of personal fabrication to improve the world, by improving the way things are made.  It will let people bring their creativity to bear on problems they face, allowing one person to improve the lives of many, with comparatively little effort.  The tagline, “wealth without money,” needs more than a machine to make things.  It needs people to design them.

Thingiverse has the right system to find the people to make these things, and to let them build a community of designers.  While the courts are still trying to wrestle with patent law as it was made to work in the ninteenth century, the content providers of Thingiverse will be creating wealth by sidestepping these out-dated concepts entirely.

The gear script is really terribly useful.  It gives you pretty much any kind of single gear you could want.  But what about rome gears?  The boolean union operation can do just that.

First a quick reminder on how to get a manifold gear out of the gear script.  First, generate your gear, switch to edit mode, then hold down alt and select an edge on those inner rims:

Hit alt-m to merge the selected vertices, collapsing the gear down to a single point:

Repeat this for the other side, recalculate the normals, and you’ve got a manifold gear.  Next, generate another, smaller gear and solidify it.  (Gear tip: two gears will mesh with one another if the adendum and dedendum are the same, and both have the same value for r/T where r is the radius and T is the number of teeth.)

Move the gears so they intersect where you want them to, and hit w -> union to create a merged copy of the two gears.  (I like to rotate one of the gears just a tad– this keeps the boolean operation from generating any zero-width faces, which can cause odd things to happen later.)

You’ve now got three objects in your scene, the two original gears and the unioned mesh underneath.  You can just hit the del key to get rid of the old parts or drag them off to the side for later use (I tend to do this to save time trying to remember what parameters I used to generate the gears.)  A recalculation of the normals is definitely in order after an operation like that, but otherwise this gear is ready to print, although a few extrude opearations might be in order to make the gear easier to interface…

(Photo by alles-schlumpf)

The MakerBot prints in ABS plastic, which you can buy from MakerBot Industries at eight dollars a pound, or about thirty cents per cubic inch.  This is less than one tenth of the cost of commercial 3D printing technologies I’ve looked at.  It’s about one percent the cost of having Shapeways do it.  (Using the Shapeways Cost Script reveals how wonderfully cheap this makes things.)

Now, these commercial technologies do buy you a few things, most importantly support materials and higher resolution.  A typical commercial printer can get down into feature sizes the current generation of MakerBot can only dream of.  But the pricing of MakerBot, and of the parts it makes, is important.

It’s important because the price difference is so very very stark.  One tenth the cost of production and one tenth the cost of ownership isn’t just less, it’s different.  A ten percent price break means you win out over the competition and sell more 3D printers.  A ninety percent price break means you sell printers to people who never would have remotely considered buying one otherwise.  Since the cost break extends to the price of material, they will also print things they never would have considered printing.

At these prices, I can think of a number of things which become cheaper to print than buy, many of which are already on Thingiverse: gear motors, plastic safety covers for outlets, pen holders (to say nothing of custom pen holders), project cases, pocket computer styluses, gaming dice, and so on.  The list is actually pretty long, I’d wager.  There is a time and energy cost of this sort of production: in most cases, models of anything more complex than the funnel will require post-processing.  I haven’t worked the numbers, but assigning a dollar value to the time one spends sanding plastics down will corrode the price break pretty readily.  But there is still a price break.

Having printed 3D objects make up a significant fraction of one’s semi-durable goods might not pay for itself very quickly, or with zero effort, but the very fact that it can even happen is a pretty meaningful change in the landscape.

Yeah, that’s a printable camera.

When I first joined up with Thingiverse, the 3D Print scene was pretty quiet.  MakerBot kits hadn’t gone to pre-order yet, and most Thingiverse users were making (awesome) laser cut designs.  I could spend a weekend bashing away on Blender and create enough new designs to qualitatively change the volume of 3D-printable items available.

Not so today!

With the first batch of MakerBot users getting ready to come online, and with the spreading buzz on Thingiverse’s excellent site organization, Thingiverse is rapidly approaching a threshold number of users where the volume of available objects dwarfs the output of any individual producer.  We’re moving into a time when many modelers collaborate and compete, creating objects which now move from being experiments to being projects.

And all this is really only the beginning; a first-tier critical mass.  This is how many content producers it takes to generate enough models to have what starts to look like a treasure trove.  The next tier of critical mass will come later, when so many users are producing models that the numbers become truly overwhelming, and only powerful search functions will be able to burrow through what is there to find things.  In that stage, modelers will no longer be trying to get a “first cut” of anything, but rather trying to make “the best”.

And a little later, of course, the most functional version of nearly everything that CAN be made, WILL be made, sometimes only a few days after an advance in printing makes such objects possible.  When that happens, most of the new models will be uploaded for being the coolest version, according to personal tastes.  When that happens, expect to see communities form within Thingiverse centered around particular aesthetic choices, into Steam Punk groups and Modernist groups and Surrealist groups.

Personally, I can’t wait to see it.

(Junk drawer by gesteves)

Thingiverse has been doing an increasingly brisk job of accumulating models lately, and some of it is really wild stuff.  There’s sanity-defying mathematically contorted teapots, a 3D scanner turntable, and an eerie computer-evolved walker, all here in the thingiverse.

But what really excites me is the bundle of everyday things.

Lately things like stylus replacements for the Nintendo DS, project cases, flashlights (just add ninevolt, switch, resistors and LEDs), and trolley tokens are showing up.  The basket of Everyday Goods a Makerbot can make at more or less negligible cost is growing.  How long will it be before there’s more than $750 worth of stuff here?

If you count multiples, we’re already there, really.  It’d take 375 Nintendo DS styluses, or 100 or so project cases or gear boxes.  The breakeven sales numbers for a hobby shop owning one of these have to be getting pretty low by now…

There are lots of ways to go from simple to complex geometry in Blender.  You can use extrude operations to add faces, subdivide to increase surface complexity, and spinning operations to create radially symmetric objects.

But what if you’re trying to patch something up?  What if you don’t want to add any points at all, but rather want to join up two objects, or cover over the surface of an object so skeinforge will recognize it as a solid object?

Enter the “add face” command.

To add a face, shift-select a group of three or four vertices and hit the f key.  Blender will create a triangle or a quad that uses those three points as its vertices.  There’s only a few cases where you’ll want to create a single face; this technique’s real power is in adding many faces.

For example, take this RepRap logo I’ve prepared on a circle suitable for, say, a cool-looking custom washer:

(To do this yourself, just start with a circle, shift-d to duplicate, scale, then reposition the points.)  If I extrude the profile I’ve drawn straight up, this will create a non-manifold object that skeinforge won’t be able to use:

There are other ways to generate this shape, but working in 2D before extruding a profile is pretty comfortable, so I’d rather be able to extrude this and use it.  F key to the rescue!

We want to infill the region between the teardrop and the outer rim, so we select vertices between them for our faces:

Repeating this process all the way around the rim turned out to be a bit tedious, but I don’t think I needed that many vertices on my circle to begin with.  Note with profile editing: most of the time you don’t really need super-fine detail to get a working design.  I’m not sure how many points it takes to get skeinforge to draw a circular toolpath around a four-milimeter hole, but I’d bet it’s not more than twelve.  Once we’re done, we’ve got a solid profile instead of a hollow one:

So when we extrude it, we’ll get a solid object:

With a little patience and some practice, fairly complex 2D profiles can be created and given faces, allowing them to be extruded into complex and useful 3D objects:

(Gorgeous photo by Boeke)

I recently went to my local hardware store for a two-dollar pair of plastic calipers and started wandering the store, thinking about what digital fabrication might do to the place.  I wasn’t walking under the assumption we’ll be able to fabricate metal soon– I was only imagining what would happen if everyone in this store had a MakerBot/RepRap.

This isn’t a particularly ambitious hypothetical.  The people in a hardware store are the do-it-yourself people.  These are people who build things, people who use PVC piping, people who own more Dremel attachments than articles of cutlery.  In short, the prime market for personal fabrication.

I looked around, ticking things off that were or could be made of plastic, and the inventory shrank.  “Lightswitch covers, gone, plastic fittings, gone, plastic calipers, gone, ABS piping under X length, gone…” and then I started filling the empty shelves in my head back up.

Hardware stores already have great coils of things.  Chains, shielded wire, nylon rope, and these all remained in my hardware store of tomorrow.  And next to them, coils of ABS, HDPE, and PLA.  Bags of support mix, maybe something starch-based, wouldn’t be far off.  On the pegboards, extruder heads of varying diameters.

Would there be RepRaps?  Maybe.  But if there were, I doubt they’d be in big cardboard boxes full of styrene packing shapes.  I imagined a moderately-sized RepRap (Perhaps a 40-cm cube build area) next to the key-making machine (which will stick around ’till RepRaps can print metal) and a stack somewhere of complete electronic boards like this one, and steppers.

Of course, my vision is almost certainly wrong.  But the really exciting thing is that it will probably be far stranger than I’ve described.