Trilobites are pretty much everything’s ancestors when you think about it– fish and critters like horseshoe crabs both come from these funky, chitinous denizens of the Cambrian explosion, whose primitive eye-grooves heralded the end of the days when you could be safe from predators by not smelling particularly strong.
And now you can print them.
…and immortal. The simple coathanger is Thingiverse thing number 49(!) but is actually much older– dating back to the RepRap Model Page, created by Adrian Boyer in Art of Illusion. It still sports the classic “reprap teardrop” through holes, which these days are rarely bothered with since a modern home 3D printer can mostly manage an overhang in something narrow like a through hole, but it’s still a sturdy, functional coat hanger.
Make an it open source, and it will live forever.
This is a great photo of a great print of a great model. Said great model is a great example of mesh-blending using two great models to start with. Impressive amount of awesome in one handful there!
Building on past designs and incorporating some of the cooler things on Thingiverse (herringbone gears, printable battery cases, etc), Mark Raiser gives us this really wicked and functional driving chassis. The vitamin list is RATHER bare-bones, too!
By popular demand, Thingiverse now has a Thing Publishing Checklist!
We want each thing on Thingiverse to be as useful as possible for the community, so we’ve added the following checklist to ensure that each new Thing, at minimum:
This is a small change, but we hope it will help cut down on the number of Things that are accidentally published before they are complete.
So first, you gotta love a project that incorporates the seamless, curved beauty of 3D printed parts with homebrew electronics (which let’s be honest rarely win beauty contests), but there’s several other layers of sweet here.
Michael Coyle has included some instructions and a parts list, always a plus. Additionally, color is entirely done with green LEDs, so that in daylight, the lamp is pale and tasteful. Maybe my favorite thing though is that this lamp doesn’t just illuminate, but acts as that all-important catch-corner for the contents of your pockets!
Okay okay okay, bear with me on this one– Rotating things in three dimensions properly requires four numbers. No really. Because, well, okay it’s weird. These guys explain it better than I probably would.
You can usually get away with rotations in three dimensions around the three axes, but basically they’ll eventually line up and “lock” so that the only way to get them out is to back out the way you came. In OpenSCAD generally you’re rotating around a fixed frame so you just start a new rotate command. But now you can employ the very solution that drove Lewis Carol to satire and use Quaternions in OpenSCAD!
Am I being overly dramatic? Maybe. But for a moment look at what that is. The above is an exhibit where people discover a cluster of technological marvels they might never have even known existed, and getting to make something wonderful to take home with them.
The DIY geek goodies on this one are pretty much off the charts: Blender. Arduino. Digital Sculpt Interface. Makerbot. On about the cheapest table imaginable.
Here’s one for the mashup makers: an adapter to a common garden hose. With OpenSCAD or any other program that can handle booleans well, I can think of a lot of things you could connect to this to make the beginnings of great Summer essentials like sprinklers, water weapons, etcetera.
Come to think of it you’d probably get a pretty good stream out of just the nozzle with this tightened on there…
The who’s making what section is always awesome, but lately I’ve been seeing some really blindingly stunning prints– this castle for example looks pretty much as good as I can imagine this resolution of thermoplastic to look. Really smashing.
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