Of the reasons I think that in the long run we’ll all get local manufacturing, the practical little life-hacks are pretty prominent.  Maybe not right away.  But soon.  Not because of easy-to-open bottles, but because they’re one of an infinity of little nice things you get when you can make anything on the spot.

This is the sort of thing that really raises the bar, and once again it’s an OpenSCAD creation, and this one in particular really begs for some remixing.  How about a chess set like this?  How about a cribbage board?  Bass-relief snakes and ladders?

I love the little drawer grip on the underside, and the logo.  Both add a lot of character to an iconic, self-contained design.  Speaking of self-contained, the entire thing is organized to fit on the build platform simultaneously with the playing pieces.

MiseryBot recommends that one try to remember when it was cool to have a box with little pieces inside it, and when that fails, get a kid to do it for you.  It’s perhaps a sign of my immaturity (even now at the ripe old age of b10000) that I succeeded this task immediately.

Specifically, I want to get this set of astronomy data from the awesome 2MASS survey and convert it to a point cloud, then use a density function to put a mesh over the surface.  The result would be a density-based map of the matter in the “nearby” universe.  (Radius of survey: 380 million light years)  I could even do it from the raw image data if I really had to, stretching some coordinates over it in, say, Processing then using the hue to draw distance…

Might not get to it.  But it would be awesome.

One of the coolest things about this one is the title.  Glasses for Everyone.  Of course, for it to really be glasses for everyone, we’ll need to get those parameterized, and maybe introduce them to a 3D scanning system.  Ideally of course, you’d hold your old pair in front of the Kinect, turn ‘em over in your hands a few times, and have the lenses extracted and the design mold itself around them.

Thing is, besides the issue of glasses being transparent (dunk ‘em in talcum powder?), it’s pretty much a current possibility.  I can think of a few other roadblocks (you need to ensure the design is compatible, point clouds are unreliable and noisy, Kinect reacts badly to thin shapes as well as transparent ones), but the baseline technologies are all there.  The universe of tools is just exploding, and with OpenSCAD and other scripting options, designs themselves are being imbued with more and more intelligence…

This is pretty amazing too, Bezier surfaces in OpenSCAD!  One of the fundamental primitives of 3D (although less well known than the basic solids), this shape lends itself well to more organic-looking curves and form factors, and with the wealth of scripting and repurposing skill around here, I’m sure we’ll see this used in some pretty clever ways soon!

Okay that’s just a really NICE print of the OSHW logo right there.  That’s an emblem with some geek cred right there, let me tell you.

I was pretty happy with the logo choice as this was my favorite and the one I voted for.  The logo invokes the Open Source Software logo while also being really clockwork-looking, two things which I’m also very into.

Macouno has set up an svn for the Entoforms stuff, and another coder has started a really excellent blog on the deeper mathematics involved in “growing” these shapes!

Super-late post on the super-neat option of bezier surfaces in OpenSCAD here– William Adams is extending OpenSCAD to create a whole new set of options for modeling in text!  Bezier surfaces are one of the fundamental (if less well-known) primitives of 3D modeling, so this is definitely about more than being able to make wavy surfaces (although the wavy surfaces will doubtless be many and beautiful).  Sweet!

I always love seeing new circuit boards.  This one in particular has a really tidy and small form factor that’d make it a good nervous system for compact projects.  I am just gaga over the layer with the OSH logo and the web address too!

Entoforms are the eerie, complex and organically inspired works of Macouno, who does a lot of work in generative art.  His web page has a scripts section where he’s uploading lots of useful widgets, so I’ll be keeping an eye on this project for sure!

Macouno is also crowdfunding an art project with them, and as part of the project he will also open source the generative scripting for creating them!