Not content with semi-consumable conveyor belts, Tom Martin found a supplier of titanium foil to produce a nigh-indestructable belt with excellent chemical, thermal, and mechanical properties!  On the belt’s page he writes:

Titanuim foil is an ideal platform material because:
1) Unlike aluminum foil it does not normally crinkle and maintains a smooth flat shiny surface unless deliberately creased. It it actually somewhat springy.
2) It is flexible like a sheet of paper and rolls smoothly through the mechanism
3) The coefficient of thermal expansion is much lower than plastic over the temperature ranges used, therefore although the plastic will adhere nicely when hot, when both are cooled the plastic shrinks more than the surface beneath it and pops right off.
4) It is physically extremely tough and will survive a lot of abuse
5) It is chemically inert and immune to solvents

Neat!

I know not everyone still uses Blender much now that we have OpenSCAD, but I still turn to it fairly often, and while making a mounting bracket for a friend (as I imagine many of us 3D printer users do these days) I found that the trapezoidal form I was trying to mold to was actually kinda difficult to describe in SCG terms, so I was worrying about the dreaded “punching a hole in something in Blender” issue, when I remembered the Solidify modifier.

The solidify modifier turns a flat surface into a solid form, non-destructively.  The great thing about this is that in the case of a mounting bracket, you can just delete faces to get holes in your bracket, no resurfacing required.  My bracket took hardly any time to model, since all I had to do was draw the trapezoid I wanted to wrap my bracket around and extrude edges, then poke holes.

Okay, I also had to scale some oddly-placed vertices to make a flat bottom for the object, but the whole process took minutes.  There are probably libraries for odd shapes like the one I was trying to make in OpenSCAD, but what I like about this technique is that pretty much all simple brackets will be very fast to model.

Two beautiful gearboxes one after the other, from different users using different approaches!  The first one, above, is a fully-enclosed planetary gearbox with a single-stage ratio of 1:246!  Properly mounted, this simple enclosure should provide enough torque to push a robot around on carpet using a cheap DC motor!   The second one, below, is a modular 1:3 rome gear that looks kind of like the one I had barely working a while back, but much, much more squared away and tougher!  Bolted right onto the side of a project this thing would not only get a lot of muscle out of a cheap motor but look totally badass while doing so!

So much lovely mechanical engineering going on!

Here at Thingiverse, we love Flattr. It’s there so that if you like something, you can sign up and click on it’s Flattr button. At the end of the month, you decide a flatrate that you want to give and it divides that amount up between all the things that you Flattr’d!

At Thingiverse we max out every month and give 100 Euros a month and split it between all the things that can be Flattr’d. This month, there are only 76 things to be Flattr’d so each thing uploaded that can be Flattr’d will get at least a Euro from Thingiverse. Woo Hoo!

Money is one of the things that motivates some people so if you like what you see on Thingiverse and you see a Flattr button, Flattr it!

Skeinforge is an amazing tool, but it’s got two big drawbacks: the complexity (both in using and developing it), and the fact that it’s written in an interpreted language (without much optimization for speed either).  These drawbacks are why myself and others are working on creating a multiplatform ecosystem of slicers to supplement it!

I think in the long run there won’t be so much as an ecosystem of slicers as maybe one or two robust solutions with an ecosystem of printer profiles ticking along underneath, but for now I think we need a lot of approaches to serve as many operating systems, user confidence levels, and developer comfort zones as possible.  To that end, let me introduce you to the two slicers I’m working on!

First, LeanSkein.  I’m kind of fed up with trying to keep both a UI and a slicer happy in Processing, so in LeanSkein the UI has been stripped out completely in favor of a configuration file which does everything and is human-readable.  The config file is also less than a page long at the moment.  You can download and print with it right now, although you’ll need to run it from Processing, and I’ve found it can be a bit iffy in the configuration department.  (Much shorter list of commands than Skeinforge though!)  I’ve got some improvements in the works, but I think it’s pared down enough that it should be fairly easy to noodle and develop on.

Second, Revar’s brainchild, Mandoline.  Mandoline is where I’d put my money on for the future of slicing, but it doesn’t print GCode yet.  It does, however, generate paths and print them to .svg files!  Mandoline is based on C++ and as such is, and probably always will be, blisteringly fast.  Since it’s C++ and not using any nonstandard libraries it should compile on just about any platform, too!

So software developers!  If you feel like doing something awesome with your 3D printer and helping the community, there are now slicers written in Processing, C++, and Python to hack on!  And with great little GCode generating apps popping up all the time, I think we’re really getting close to critical mass for a proper explosion of 3D printing software wizardry!

The color in this one is just too pretty.  The vignette works really well and I am just loving all the orange and red from the kapton and solder masking.  Particularly that reflection from the build floor.  Very epic!

Also of note, this shape is mashed up using MeshMixer, once again showing off the fast adoption times we get in this community!

Neat Treble clef! Little custom practical everyday things are important, generative art is cool, but I also love stuff like this: downloadable, printable art objects that look cool. Someone should hotswap black and white filament on this for maximum impact!

Second dual contouring remesh modifier screencast from Nicholas Bishop on Vimeo.

In Blender and other mesh modelers, boolean operations often go awry due to the way a mesh modeler processes shapes. Mesh modelers can calculate the intersection of two surfaces, but then they must choose how to draw a new surface over the result. It’s here that things usually go terribly wrong, because most mesh modelers do not add any vertices when they do this: they simply draw triangles between the points identified as the surface. When merging a complex object to a simple one, this results in dozens or even hundreds or thousands of tiny, long triangles, which in turn do not respond well to boolean operations themselves because now they are simple along one direction and complex in another.

To remedy this, Nicholas Bishop is coding a new version of the boolean operation in Blender that intelligently adds detail to the resulting mesh in boolean operations to allow it to have good topology. Maybe it’s because I’ve been paying more attention, but the new Blender seems to be attracting an awful lot of inventive programmers with great ideas in generative art and design theory!

Have I mentioned that I think 3D printed topology maps are cool?  I have to have.  Repeatedly I’m sure.

I like this one especially because it’s also a tech demo of Blender’s Displace modifier, showing you how to use Blender to create groovy topo plates.  You could do this with any image to create quick-and-dirty 2D-to-3D convertions, and you could apply these to underlying meshes to give them a rough surface.  Just make sure your bottom stays flat enough to stick to the build platform!

Thingiverse user Schorhr just uploaded a seriously dizzying array of earrings to Thingiverse!  Amazing!

We’re now into this amazing phase of Thingiverse’s development where when something amazing like this doesn’t feel completely out of place.  It’s just more awesomeness.  Many of the designs are painted– I’d love to hear from the artist what sort of paint was used that was so vibrant and clear!