No really, that’s printable.

So what’s happening here is a single strip of metal salvaged from a coil-powered wind-up toy is included in the “gearbox” in the jaw connection back there, and a Geneva Drive manages the intermittent rotation.  Right now, the designers are saying it rotates too fast, but their collaborators are also working on gearing it down.

There are several big innovations here which I think are going to become venerable techniques in the community: first, the salvaged metal drive spring (commonly called a Clock Spring) is a simple enough component to be readily sourced and kept in the old “vitamin drawer,” although you can also make your own.  Second, small, interchangeable gearboxes.  My original “batch zero” Cupcake never got tuned tightly enough to make small gearboxes that would work, but from here out I think we’re going to see a LOT of them, especially when you consider how you could remove the teeth and add just about any 3D printed model to these…

Perhaps the big one though is something which has happened before, but which has really been heating up lately: collaboration.  These teeth are a group project, spurred on by the MakerBotUnited competition, and the quality of the work of the first two team members seems to have attracted a third, our resident clocksmith!  (Speaking of whom I sure wouldn’t mind eventually seeing a spring-driven pendulum clock at some point…)

The Flip is being discontinued, in part due to the ascendant smartphone market, but now that Thingiverse is around, things like belt clips for it will never become unattainable.  Just download and fab.  Just one more example of the 3D printing world turning market dynamics inside out…

So following this excellent post on the MakerBot blog, I got the first few entries labeled in a new category: Negative Space.  The idea here is to upload, not things to print, but things which represent parts for building around.  Part of the work of building a deep 3D printing infrastructure is going to be digitizing the shapes of the things which are cheap, complex, and connectable.  The more shapes that become part of this library, the more quickly a designer will be able to assemble functioning projects using digitally fabricated “middleware”…

So you download a great bit of kit for your 3D printer, but you also think to yourself “but as great as just downloading a mechanical patch is, it’d be even better if there were a cool-looking humanoid thing standing at Art Deco Attention on it”.  And of course, being a highly skilled 3D modeler, you give it just that.  In fact, you do it almost instantly, because this is Thingiverse, where no sooner is something available, than it is remixable.  Sweet!

When 3D printing first started quantum-shifting down from a specialty corporate technology to a consumer technology a few years ago, making new things for them to print was no picnic.  Your options were basically Blender and AOI, (or SolidWorks if you had a job that got you access to a pro license).  And I’m not talking about the Blender we have now.  This was Blender 2.48, a mean machine that didn’t approve of users who used the GUI rather than shortcut keys and whose community was significantly less well-developed than now.

» Continue reading “Deep Infrastructure”

Adrian Bowyer, also known as the progenitor of the RepRap project, uploads this beautiful compact extruder design with a built in fan.  While it’s definitely true that stepper motors can get a bit hot during operation, the fan here is all about filament properties, as Adrian explains:

The air flows first over the pinch between the small bearing and the bolt. All pinch extruders work a lot more reliably if the pinch point is kept as cold as possible. Even slight warming will soften some plastics a bit, and then the drive starts to abrade the filament, rather than driving it.

Next the air is ducted past the motor. This is just a courtesy call really – it doesn’t touch enough of the motor to cool it a lot, and the motor runs quite cool anyway.

Finally the duct folds back on itself to cool the tops of the M3 threaded rods where they enter the drive and the top of the PEEK insulator down which the filament runs.

The air exhausts horizontally just under the fan, going in the opposite direction to the way the fan is blowing.

The RepRap project has a lot of ambitious goals, and one of the key ones is multiple print head devices.  The Mendel framework is already nominally capable of this feat, but anything that shrinks the extruder expands the printable area at a given footprint, and makes it more plausible to consider doing three or even four filaments at once…

Using an online point cloud creation tool, user pmarxx created this point cloud of a bit of statuary, which was promptly turned into a physical recreation by the community!  The tools are getting really flexible and amazing!

Tony Buser promptly tidied the model up and printed it of course:

Seems like there are a lot of videos and whatnot of various applications formerly thought of as “desktop things” being done on the new tablet form factor. There’s a fundamental problem of interface which hasn’t really been fully solved yet: 3D is more complicated than 2D, and even when this was on the desktop, your interactions are limited to a 2D screen.

Solving this interface problem has been helped along by the existing tools: mice and keyboards, which are, despite having form factors that bulge out at you in all three dimensions, are still basically 2D interaction tools. Like in this example: the user is fiddling with a cursor using the touch interface, which then allows 3D interactions.

It definitely looks a little awkward at this stage. I think to really take off, a multitouch interface is going to have to do some serious scrapping of old pointer paradigms and get into what will at first seem pretty surreal. The Blender Conference last year had a demo where a tablet’s multitouch was used as a kind of digital puppetry rig for animation, so it’s definitely being thought about. In terms of more “natural media” interfaces like sculpting, there’s certainly some obvious advantages and ways the natural motion of the hand could be incorporated in ways which, to the user at least, would feel as natural as sculpting clay, but there’s not much call for, say, hand-sculpted mounting brackets.

There’s also a bit of a problem with real estate. On the tablet form factor, screen real estate is at a premium, which isn’t helped by having the user’s opaque, starfish-like appendages blocking the screen. Maybe there’s something to the claims we’re getting from Microsoft lately that future interfaces will basically be whole rooms…

A big part of my professional training is actually in the domain of test and measurement, so when I see a stylish high-precision probe design that makes use of 3D printed parts, well that just makes me happy.  The detailed documentation on this Thing’s page is very nice, and I like the elegant use of the flexibility of the material as with ordinary tweezers.  Also of note is how with a little bit of care this design can be built to look extremely professional.  Believe me, test equipment does not come cheap in the wild, so for the hobbyist in need this widget could save a lot of time and money!

Open Source Hardware is a big idea. Arguably it’s THE big idea. We implemented a system of value-capture for ideas during that brief period where an infrastructure for replication of ideas existed, but was costly. Now with the cost of replication plummeting this system has, I would argue, already become mostly obsolete. Those open source farm machines? Way of the future right there.