Home manufacturing boots you from the short-tail model of the brick-and-mortar stores to the long tail model of the web, because the things you print never sit idle, are never warehoused, and should they go unmade for months or years, never get put on clearance.  They lie in digital storage, dormant as nearly-massless, nearly-volumeless digital information.

And of course, Thingiverse will be happy to index them for you.

Here Duane (whose other designs have a similar lovely, pragmatic look) has made a key rack which conforms very neatly to the rings, lays close to flat and, being an OpenSCAD design, can be customized.  Beautiful!

Of course, with a 3D printer, “last minute” doesn’t equate to “rushed and sloppy” with quite the same dreadful certainty that it does with many other DIY projects, so just in time for a few weekend print runs before Halloween, here in no particular order are a few of my favorites from the Halloween Tag on Thingiverse!

Decking out a child of arbitrary head size with spectacles befitting a certain lightning-scarred wizard could hardly be easier than these, although above a certain head size and depending on your build area you might need to subdivide a bit:

It’s… okay there are a LOT of running gags in Futurama so I’ll just say the Brain Slugs are a good one.  And this might be the easiest costume possible that will still go over big.  Just print and attach, and act weird.  Well, weirder than usual.

Good prints that make effective use of two parts printed in different colored plastic tend to be instant classics, especially if the lines are good like this one.  Bat-tastic.

And finally, here’s a really great heap of Halloween Pandemonium in board game form:

I picked this out because it looked like a really great excuse to roll some tabletop strategy gaming into a presumably-already-high-geek-factor Halloween Party, of which I am always in favor.

And now, firm widgets.  It’s always neat when OpenSCAD helper scripts show up, making OpenSCAD ever more flexible, extensible, and generally potent as a tool for development.  In this case it’s a little modularity hack.  A script that aids in rapidly producing more customizable structures.  In the software world, we call this a makefile.  In the hardware world, well, we call it a makefile, because the terminology is increasingly borrowed.

And the distinction, increasingly a matter of semantics.

I am having trouble thinking of them, however.

This is a captive-dice, roll-to-randomize portable dice game with 8-bit style fonts on the numbers.  The numbers and dice are colored in with sharpie but a well-tuned dual-extruder setup could probably bang out a fully-formed version of this that just popped off the build platform ready to roll.

The captive dice setup really wins a lot.  Captive anything is great, really.

Hey Thingiverse users! The Crabitat at MakerBot is live (as seen above) and we need new shell shapes to try out and see if they’ll move in. Join the project to help help hermit crabs. Please upload designs and tag them with “Shellter”.

More info!

This Mendel variant relies on extruded aluminum to get a lot of rigidity for little extra cost, and introduces yet another mutation to the rapidly-branching reprap tree.  Nice build area, too!

An arbitrary number of vice clamps can be fabricated at some fixed cost in print time and plastic per vice clamp.  I always love seeing the “arbitrary number” part demonstrated by these batches of prints that show off the kind of process regularity you can get with a little patience and tuning.

So if you were building something with hand tools, you might make a design with lots of filigrees and fluting and carvings, but odds are good that you’d use simple geometry that conforms to your stock.  But, if you were going to use a 3D printer anyway…

Doesn’t cost anything to punch a bunch of holes in something.  Not even that much design time.  In fact, as I’ve said numerous times before, the more holes you punch in something, the cheaper the material and machine time costs.  So increasingly, you get these really intricate designs, because the complexity doesn’t cost anything.

The Awesome is Free.

David Mellis brings us a very SHINY and elegant PCB design for programming ATTiny microcontrollers.  The ATTiny series are kind of amazingly tiny, especially if you’ve used something like the equally-small 555 timer and then you realize, there’s basically a whole computer in that thing.

Also note recent tutorials indicating the Arduino environment is now set up to push sketches right onto ATTiny45s.  Good days for tiny microcontrollers!

Because that’s a nonworking prototype along the way to a printable zero-assembly gear box.  With soluble support material it’s possible– the industrial prototyping businesses demonstrate complex clockworks printed in-place all the time.  A water soluble material is available in the MakerBot store, but the experimentation with it so far is pretty limited…