When I first got all excited about the first extruder module that had a plunger-based idler, it was because it would be far more reliable than the captive idler wheel it replaced, but there was another benefit that didn’t occur to me at the time:

It became really easy to swap out filament colors.

These days of course, you can print two colors in place, together, at the same time, but these simple planetary gears really visually “pop” with just a swapped-out filament providing any of the lovely colors ABS comes in.

Okay I’ll admit it, that’s one adorable little dragon.  He’d fit right in with the Makerbot Castle Playset, particularly with some paint to bring out the details.  What’s that you say?  No dragons in the guest room?  I’m sure someone could put together a nice crystal-encrusted cavern add-on for the set…

You know, with work like this already out there, and with the advent of a print-in-place gearbox, we’re really not all that far now from a clock you print, soak, and then operate.  Prospects like that kinda blow my mind.  Also, they make me want to see how small I can print one of these with a powder-based printer and still have it run…

I remember a comment a while back from someone who was pretty adamant that sharing everything would pretty much immediately ruin their business, and I have no reason to doubt that, in that case, this is a reasoned judgement.  But that doesn’t mean I don’t believe in companies sharing everything, opening their doors, and in general collaborating with their customers, in the open.

But a lot of your customers aren’t used to this, and unless you’re directly marketing to consumers, nearly all of them will be locked in to the trade secrets, patents and trademarks model– and from experience, I can tell you that at least some of them will treat open source almost like hazardous waste.

Winning with Sharing in these cases is a heck of a lot more challenging than if you’re working in a field where what you sell goes directly to individuals, because where individuals are eager to form brand loyalty to the more open provider, institutions in this climate are broadly sharing-averse.  But while a radical leap into deep sharing may very well be as dangerous as starting a new company altogether, there are things that aren’t, such as:

• Offering clients a discount if at some specified time down the road, their (anonymized)  commissioned engineering work enters your open tech wiki
• Pushing back on a few Non-Disclosure Agreement terms
• Share on the back end: general technical information, process blogging, specs of dead products
• Publish white papers or even academic ones (full disclosure, I’m in academia!)

Of course none of this will fix the problem that these days bringing a product to market can require a war chest of patents, or that in a lot of sectors open source is a four-letter word, but the steps above are in the right direction, and to me at least they look like good business choices too.

I loved these as a kid.  The model I had actually bent the path of the balloon into place so that the opening pointed out the side of the car, presumably so the injection-molded plastic car didn’t have to have a cavity.

For a 3D printer though, that’s trivial.  Awesome.

Here’s a neat little Blender script for converting point cloud data (often available for landscapes or as the output of 3D scans) into a mesh in Blender 2.6.  There are of course lots of ways to skin a point cloud, (not the least of which is meshlab) but I’m an old Blender nerd at heart…

Speaking of Blender, while most of the really exciting stuff happening in Blender lately has been to do with animation and video, there are a few new features that I’m looking at as potentially pretty helpful for modelers– BMesh is merging to the trunk soon, allowing faces with more than 4 edges, which combined with improvements to the boolean operators might really start to give Blender a real shot at becoming more useful for solids.

So a while back I talked about using OpenSCAD to tack on support struts to tough builds, giving them a better shot at printing properly.  My printer’s still not fully calibrated yet, but as you can see, despite huge overhangs, this steggy printed out just fine with some support struts.

But the process of dragging the pegs around in OpenSCAD was a bit tedious, so I worked up a quicker way to place them: Blender!  By creating a separate object with all the posts placed and aligned, OpenSCAD only needs to do a single union operation to merge the posts to the model, and an intersection to flatten the feet to the right height.  Here’s an example of what I mean– I colored the posts blue so they’d be visible:

The model could probably use a fifth post in the center to hold everything up, but the important thing with posts seems to be that they are wide enough to print solidly, and close together enough that the plastic “bridges” from post to post easily.  On my machine and in my climate this is a little under a centimeter– you might try building a bridging test object to see what works best for you!

3D Artist magazine has announced a creature creation competition to win a 3D printer, and a new crowd of designers from the visual artistry side of 3D are arriving!  3D Artist also provided a link to a tutorial for preparing your models for 3D printing which covers manifold geometry and the practice of shelling to save print material (not quite as important on printers with material as cheap as coils of $43 a kg ABS), as well as a link to the skeinforge home page.

Some more help for those of you going for maximum printability:

* Avoid “overhangs” of greater than 45 degrees (except when you can get away with them)

* Learn a bit of Noodlemancy (although with modern extruders small details aren’t quite as tough)

* Learn from the masters

* Make sure you’ve got STLs, any helpful model files or documentation you can think of added in!

How easy it is to print your model won’t just be important in the contest (it will) but it’ll also play into whether you start seeing your model pop up on desks, shelves, and dashboards around the world after you upload it!

First and perhaps most importantly, the phrase “3D Printing Troubadours” is wonderful.

Second, this is the sort of inventive approach to available technology that changes the fundamental mechanics of the world.  How clever is it to drive around with a 3D printer, actually running in the back seat of your hybrid electric car, selling your prints and telling the story of 3D printing?  Awesomely, that’s how clever.

This is a project I can’t wait to see more of.

The picture of this outstanding build pretty much says it all.  Dual extrusion, with soluble support on one print head means you can do any overhang you please.  Water soluble PVA is actually more expensive than the plastic you print on top of it, so when designing your support network you may want to economize a bit.

The good news of course is that modern extruder designs are very sleek and can fit onto small bots, and even at that price support is less than ten cents a cubic centimeter, and the PLA itself is less than four, so “expensive” is kind of a value judgement…