Just in time to have printed ahead of time for Father’s Day, it’s a tie-related gift, to improve the storage of previous tie-related gifts!  Of course I also recommend something more along the lines of a nice home fabrication system but if you’ve got one to make this on that might be a little redundant…

Gigapixel imaging via CNC is one of those great ideas on which I love seeing new permutations.  This one has files to generate the GCode to drive a MakerBot as a CNC micro-imager.  There’s also an image sorting script.  Neat stuff!

One thing this has me wondering about though, is there a way to use the redundancy of taking many, many images to improve signal quality?  Perhaps to such a level that you wouldn’t need an especially good camera even?  Sources of error: spherical deformation of the lens, scratches, dirt, other obstructions on the lens or in between the lens and the CCD and noise.  CCD noise: filterable, particularly if you have lots and lots of images to calibrate off.  Obstructions: as you move, you’d see the image around it, same for spherical deformations.  Focal length– with a really large number of images, maybe you could work something out.  Better yet, take the sweep at different heights, then you’ve got a 3D pixel cube from different Z-values…

Dangit I knew there was a reason I almost went into signal processing…

So I can’t say Autodesk 123D is a slam dunk, but I think I might use it every now and then.  I like beveling everything off with fillets, but I get annoyed with “classical” SCG technique.  It’s not as simple as unioning everything, so it’s yet another skill type, different both from OpenSCAD and Blender.  But its big problems (for me) are mostly to do with things it inherits from its parent company:  It requires 1.5 gigabytes of hard drive space to install, is a bit on the slow side, and view rotation is clunky at best.

However, it does have going for it that you can lay out shapes on 2D planes, build them into 3D objects, assign planes to the resulting geometry, draw shapes on those, etcetera, quickly and fairly painlessly, once you get the hang of it.  And as I said, I can fillet everything, which isn’t always all that important, but does look really awesome.  And so far the .stl exports I’ve been getting have been clean.

Depending on how serious Autodesk is about courting the free end of the market (obviously in hopes of reeling in paying customers in the long term), this may be a blip or the beginning of something really nice, but either way, this is the sort of attention I like to see the community getting.

Bre Pettis’ appearance on the Colbert Report has sparked a real burst of creativity centered around everyone’s favorite post-post-ironic polemic bloviator, Stephen T. Colbert!  We don’t get too many floods here, but this arguably qualifies!  Now obviously some of these were done ahead of time for the show, but a lot have shown up since then and the numbers keep on growing.  Will the number of Colbert face mashups come to compete with the number of Bre Pettis face mashups?  Only time (and my obvious baiting of the Colbert fandom) will tell!

Woa, how did nobody tell me about this one?  This is awesome!

I just noticed the first versions of exports to Thingiverse showing up, and while there’s nothing really earth-shattering evolved yet, this is still in the breaking news section– you can bet I’ll be watching this to see what evolves!

Ted Lin brings us this wicked minecraft pickaxe, which would be cool even if he hadn’t also included the OpenSCAD file, which is arranged to make further voxel-based prints easy!

Unlike with 3DTin, this variant has beveled edges on the voxels, rendering them much more obvious.  When you’re going for a voxel aesthetic, this can really add some authority to the look.  It’s certainly paid off on this groovy pickaxe!

Autodesk 123D is in public Beta, and the ad copy around it has a pretty resounding Maker-Friendly feel, they’ve put up some example files, there are frequent references to “print ready” design, AND there are links to 3D printing services.

The industry would seem to be paying attention to the home-fabrication revolution.

It’s not open source, but it does seem to export to STL, so at least it will be compatible with Skeinforge.  I’m downloading it as I write this, and will be back with my thoughts on this new tool after I’ve had a chance to kick the tires.

Via: Blendernation

Children’s building toys are one of those things that pretty much beg to be remixed via home fab– why not add to the already-broad possibilities by combining them?  This application in particular speaks to some deep, primal inner-child-builder in me because I always was dismissive of wooden trains precisely because they wouldn’t readily interweave with my massive lego dioramas.

Here we have more evidence that, as it gets easier to make anything, everything, in culture and in the real world, is remixable.

When a maker’s description of something this gorgeous is “This is just me learning my new toy,” I think you kinda have to say there’s a heck of a lot of enabling going on.  Also that Gary Henthorne is either an understated or blindingly awesome guy, possibly both.

So over the next few years I expect there will be quantum shifts in the way personal manufacture works, and along with them Thingiverse’s content will expand in character.  Already the things you see on Thingiverse usually are no-support printable, are virtually always manifold, and are generally scaled properly.  This is now the ground state.  I have not forgotten that it was not always this way.  I uploaded this without irony, after all:

Woefully unprintable (never was printed, either), won’t interface properly to any motor around, and I was one of the responsible ones!  Times have changed, though, now it’s almost expected that you at least offer some advice to get things printed, and on many if not most of the new things, you can find at least one picture of the thing already made, which are often gorgeous:

But what’s coming is new technologies.  What’s coming are the powder printers, and beyond them, the deeper leveraged systems that get us access to the realms of the very small and the very large builds.  There are designs for bigger CNC tables here already, as well as DIYBio to get us access to the very small world of genetics.  The infrastructure of Thingiverse isn’t intrinsically limited to squirting or cutting plastic with nozzles and lasers, it’s general, and it can handle powder-native designs like this one easily:

And when things start showing up that are really wild, it’ll handle those too.  (Although of course, a flexible model that harkens to the shape of C-60 is pretty wild if you ask me…)