Now granted, this spinal column is designed for demonstration/instructional purposes, but when I look at it, I start to think really seriously about the scenario Bre came up with concerning making replacement body parts.

These days there are a lot of stories about replacement limbs, and increasingly there’s this air of rehabilitation rather than adjustment– missing hands and feet are replaced with tightly-wound bundles of servos and sensors, implants restore sight and hearing.  In time, between biocompatible materials and advanced electronics, we may see more developments towards home-made fixes for serious injuries.  We’re already seeing little tools such as this one developed by an MS patient to make his routine easier…

No, really, that’s a set of tank treads driven by a pair of gearmotors.  And it seems like every time I turn around, this general theme of plugging cheap motors into printed objects has some new high-water mark of amazing.  There’s probably a newer one than this already, in fact.  Yep, here’s a car thing with amazing-looking circuits and drive and stuff.

If you’ve done a lot of soldering, you know that a lot of the time, using the same tip is not going to cut it.  The wedge tip that’s absolutely mandatory to solder to a ground plane on a laptop will glob thirty SMD package pins together in an instant– and melt them clean off in another!  So you end up with a gradually-growing collection of solder tips, and eventually, you want to organize them.

This organizer is just the thing, and as it’s OpenSCAD, it can be quickly customized to your particular collection of bits!  (Of course, as xnaron warns, don’t put them away hot!)

Dave Monachello writes:

I was wondering if anyone that uses thingiverse is making anything to burningman? A makerbot seems like the perfect tool for the kind of giveawys us burners make to gift while on the playa. Plus there is a large percentage of burners that are from SF and Silicon Valley so I figured there must be some intersection no? Let me know if we can get the question out there.

Good question!  Anyone got projects they’d like to brag about?

Shiny.

One innovation I really want to see is a fully food-compatible (front to back) 3D printed plastics process.  If my ABS, extruder and build platform were all food safe I’d have flooded my kitchen with cups like this one by now.

I don’t think it’ll be too long– there’s a lot of interest in getting stuff you can use with food printed, and there’s nothing inherently toxic about ABS.  It’s mostly a processing and build “hygiene” issue…

In the comments, rohan notes that the old Blender quicktip on the modifiers doesn’t work with the 2.5 series, so I thought I’d drop a quick post to reintroduce them, as they are tremendously useful.  (Also, there are a few new ones since 2.49)  So first!  Here’s where they now dwell in the panel on the left of the start screen:

(There are, by the way, a lot of handy video tutorials on BlenderCookie.)

» Continue reading “Modifier Tools in the New Blender”

Combine the steady flow of widgets like this one with increasing availability of PCB services and training with SMD solder, and the “polish gap” between handcrafted and mass-produced electronics is gonna start getting pretty slim…

I mean really, that is a lot more like what I imagined the “real future” of 3D printed cases looking like when this all started.  Very faint ridging due to a well-tuned printer, case accents added because they’re free, and ports exactly where you need them exactly the right size, because those too, are free.  Some time rather soon there’s going to be a picture of a hacker’s instrument rack, and it’ll be near-impossible to tell which ones were bought and which ones were custom.

Strike that.  The custom ones will look much nicer.

Now Sirmakesalot is just showing off.  Which isn’t to say that I don’t vastly approve.  Whoever manages to steel-cast one of these and get it running may very well be the first person to win an entire kilo-internet.

No really, I mean, just look at that.  I can hear the syntactically convoluted but wry wit from here.