Okay, okay, PLA is an amorphous solid polymer, but zoomed in (and with the really boss photography here) it looks very crystaline. Printer operators the world over are diving towards the tiny, and we’ve seen miniaturization do amazing things before. There is, after all, plenty of room at the bottom…
The distance between awesome animatronics projects is shrinking, and the quality is improving. Soon, I suspect, they’ll be just another one of the streams of stunning work in Thingiverse. But I think this one is from some time in the future, because it’s more amazing than I was really expecting.
Vogal the Dragon is a shoulder-mounted animatronic dragon with wings that fold and a head that moves. Eventually he will be autonomous, riding his owner through the conventions, etcetera… and not long after, I think, sights like him will be common. Wow.
I love a good earring project, and these are pretty elegant-looking. Things with thin walls like these tend to print pretty well without a raft, too, since there’s not a lot of infill to potentially scrape up during that all-important lowest layer.
I had some questions in comments on my peg placement, so here’s a snapshot of the model with the pegs in. When it printed, they snapped off easily and the head turned out pretty well considering how small I printed it!
I didn’t try supports for the belly and tail, and the underside of both came out a little scraggly as a result, but at this scale (less than 8cm long) those details ended up being less important than keeping the head from falling over during printing.
On more complex models I’ve found you can get away with surprisingly little support, but the cost of going too far with this can be anything from a ponytail that twists off before it reaches the connection point up top to total build failure. Like with all home 3D printing, you get a “sense” for what will work and what won’t over time…
Skeinforge has the ability to automatically create support meshing that comes away comparatively easily with a pen knife, but at some point it starts to feel less like printing and more like whittling, and while soluble support structures are less far off than they once were, if you’re like me you’ll still find yourself looking around for a more elegant solution.
Enter the support peg.
The idea is to basically extend a vertical support peg through your model, allowing the fairly common practice of bending or breaking the “45 degree rule” to stretch a little farther than it usually does. For my example I’m going to use this adorable but tough-to-print stegosaurus model:
I go on about how 3D printing and Thingiverse (and of course, the users who know their way around 3D tools) are well-aligned to provide things which aren’t just good enough to serve but which are precisely suited to their desired application, but this thing speaks for itself rather boldly.
It does what it’s for. More or less exactly.
Looking at the thumbnail for this, I literally thought, “oh man, that’s beautiful, no way will it print on a thermoplastic extrusion system though,” before clicking it to discover that that is exactly what has been done here.
What you’re looking at is actually the crystalline configuration of diamond, which is also the exact same configuration of the atoms in silicon semiconductors. In semiconductors, different atoms are pushed into the lattice, replacing silicon atoms, to alter the local average number of electrons, which in turn makes it possible to build diodes and transistors in high densities through a combination of technologies related to photography and, well, clay firing, which enables complex but inexpensive circuits like microcontrollers, which in turn enables low-cost 3D printers, which is where we get models like this one…
So it’s all connected really.
This is video of a 3D-printed, Arduino-controlled animatronic tail. It’s a great example of design following nature, with vertebrae and tendons being modeled by mechanical substitutes, and while you might be able to replicate this version of the design with more traditional prototyping methods, the 3D printing makes it both easier to duplicate and easier to reconfigure. And a few of the improvements I can imagine, such as making the vertebrae interlink like biological ones to be more firmly linked to one another would be really tricky with hand tools, but pretty easy on 3D printing…
Thing is, I’m not entirely kidding…
The neural interface captures data from her brain and a microcontroller transmits it to the ears. It’s easy to become dismissive of stuff that’s “just X, Y, and Z hacked together,” especially if you see it happening all the time, but let’s look at this, as it is, for what it is, and that’s a neurally-linked robotic prosthesis, purely for entertainment purposes. The parts aren’t even that expensive…
But I did, because this one is really pretty. A finial is basically anything you put on the top of a flagpole, steeple or other architectural structure to make it look neat. This one would have been pretty attractive in opaque plastic, but in PLA with multiple colors of LED glowing through it, it’s pretty serious.
Now of course someone has to start putting this on top of other things, because that’d be sweet.
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