I’m noticing a lot of really wild stuff being mashed up using OpenSCAD on any manifold mesh. Pretty neat and weird!
A big part of what makes OpenSCAD such a game changer is the remix capabilities. The STL loading capacity allows you to combine this with the ubiquity of STL files (and their many different origin stories, from humble Blender subsurface jobs to complicated generative jobs) to get some really impressive stuff!
They say that sharing is caring. If that is the case, then I believe that auto-sharing is auto-caring!
Thingiverse can now automatically post to Twitter whenever you upload a new Thing, make a copy of somebody else’s Thing, or whenever one of your Things is featured! We’ll also show your Twitter username on your profile if you like.
Getting everything set up is easy! Just visit your profile, click on the “edit my profile” link, and look for the new Twitter section. Clicking the “Sign-in with Twitter” button will run you through the process to authorize Thingiverse to tweet on your behalf. Once you’ve done it, you’ll see something like this:
For the curious, the automated tweets look something like:
@schmarty: I made a Thing on Thingiverse! http://thingiverse.com/thing:1046 #thingalert
Enjoy, and be on the lookout for new features like this in the future! If you have any questions, feel free to drop us a line.
Breakout Elements by Michael Rule
Tons of great tutorials from MakerBlock, plus the tutorials I’ve already done, lead me to post this, the OpenSCAD Tutorial Roundup Post.
MakerBlock’s Series so far:
My Series so far:
Surface detail from subBlue on Vimeo.
Tom Beddard’s website SubBlue has this and other amazing fractal awesomeness which he’s concocting with specialized fractal geometry software. I’m really hoping this exploration tool he talks about shows up and exports to STL, because while these would be super-challenging to print with any level of appeal on a home 3D printer, they’d be great stress tests, and uploaded to Shapeways or similar you could get a nice high resolution powder print…
Loving the beautiful print photos we get lately! George Hart’s designs are excellent already, but putting a cupcake on top, well that’s just excellent.
There’s been quite a bit of buzz lately about 3D Tin, a browser based, voxel modeling program. Its super simple interface combined with STL export have made it into an intriguing tool for beginners and professionals alike. We’re particularly happy with it because the STLs it generates are ready for 3D printing and of course the program itself is completely free. If you haven’t tried it already, its worth 15 minutes of your time.
We sent the creator, Jayesh Salvi a gushing email about how much we loved it, and he wrote back asking if we would be interested in integration. It was like a match made in heaven. This weekend, we hacked a simple upload API into Thingiverse. The first site to support this is 3D Tin (it’s live, so go ahead and try it!)
If you are a website owner and you would like to add you own Thingiverse implementation, its super easy. Check out the API docs and start posting to Thingiverse today! This API is just about as barebones as you can get, but it does allow you to get your stuff onto Thingiverse in a simple, painless way.
So there are a lot of things awesome about this. First, sweet wheels. Second, excellent documentation. Third, controlled via smartphone, which is neat not only in that the maker got it working, but that this is so common these days. Sensor/Thought bundles. Computronium ingots. Seriously neat stuff.
The Geohashing site (how awesome, by the way, is geohashing?) as of this writing has a photograph of the Geohasing Coin on thingiverse! That’s super-awesome and makes me proud to be a nerd.
One of the things I don’t think a lot of people saw coming in this new “information age” is that instead of causing us to all clamp our faces into computers and become more isolated, it seems very often the result of all this information technology is to empower us in the real world to do strange and awesome things, like meeting up at a randomly generated location to hang out, without prior communication of any kind.
Or building machines that turn information into stuff…
In the tutorials so far, we’ve got some basic CSG working, it’s time to start using the more powerful tools that combine the CSG toolset with a programming toolset. First, constants. Constants are defined in the same way as variables in C or Java, although they don’t have types since they’re all floating-point numbers:
x=20;
sphere(x);
translate([0,0,-x*1.7])sphere(2*x);
A word of warning though, these aren’t variables in the classical sense. If you want to change them halfway through a file, you’re out of luck. A second declaration will overwrite instances of that variable, including those earlier in the file. The following code:
x=20;
sphere(x);
x=10;
translate([20,0,0])sphere(x);
Will actually produce two spheres of the SAME size, 10. (This doesn’t apply to the arguments of modules, however, so if you need to reproduce the same object with different parameters in the same file, you can use those.)
Another great tool is the for loop. For loops are another staple of the programming world, and in their simplest form you can use them to drop down the same shape repeatedly with some (or many) parameters changed as a function of the “iteration variable”, in the case below, i:
union(){
for (i = [0:19]){
rotate([0,0,i*360/20])translate([-50,0,0])sphere(10);
}
}
The above loop sweeps the sphere around in a circle to create a ring of spheres. For each value of i from 0 to 19, a new sphere is placed with a different rotation. (The translate step moves the sphere so that the rotate step is rotating it around a point 50 units off center.) Neat, huh? This is a great tool for adding details like ridges, or for creating mathematically defined shapes.
With different notation, the for loop can also be given a sequence of discrete values:
for (i = [3, 5, 7, 11]){
rotate([i*10,0,0])scale([1,1,i])cube(10);
}
Here, we rotate and scale a cube by a set of primes.
The for loop works in OpenSCAD with the CSG toolset, so you can union or difference objects generated by for loops to create complex structures. (You can use intersections as well, but you’ll have to use the workaround described in the documentation.)
Have I mentioned lately that it’s getting hard to pick out a single thing even over an interval of a few days as “the cool one” lately? I mean, I was excited about how in the early days a week would see the accumulation of a dozen things and one really neat one, but now that happens on an almost daily basis!
Also they’re getting more impressive. I mean, Issy has a fair bit of “vitamin” components, but seriously, LOOK at that cute robot face! How can you not love that? It’s builder has a great blog on sensors and other robot topics full of awesome pictures and videos of laser navigation stuff too!
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