Is your plastic filament a mess?  If you just leave it sitting around you probably have had your fair share of knots and tangles.  Don’t despair, Thingiverse has solutions!

Check out this laser printed filament spool:

Filament Spindle v0.4 by builttospec

It should be noted that this is a derivative of Erik’s and CidVilas’ work.  Taking a design and making it better and custom FTW.

There’s also a spindle design that FDM  (fused deposition modeling) type machines like the RepRap and Makerbot can produce. This one is by tbfleming:

Printed Filament Spindle by tbfleming

All those rods and connectors are sort of remind me of tinker toys.

No 3D printer at all?   No Problemo!

Cardboard Spool by charlespax

Pax has an excellent design which only needs a knife and some cardboard!

Via the most recent Thingiverse Challenge, you can now print out a gyoza press from Thingiverse!

Mr Seeker from the Netherlands makes a workable press with some additional parts using the parts lister.  The list of useful things around the house is growing nicely!

There’s a really great article in this month’s Wired on the “Lo-fi revolution” sweeping the tech world one industry at a time lately, and my thoughts immediately turned to the MakerBot and the RepRap, which deliver a lower resolution than commercial 3D printers, but at such a tiny fraction of the cost that they utterly change the game.

This is, according to the Wired article, just what the mp3, Hulu, and the Flip video recorder have done: provide a known benefit at a lower resolution or fidelity or precision, but using the other side of that trade-off to arrive at something unprescedented: in the case of the MakerBot and Flip video recorder, it’s a price so low the market potential hadn’t even been considered previously.  In the case of mp3, it’s a file size so much lower than uncompressed audio that amounts of music can be stored that’d be unheard of without compression.

In the above photo, there’s an example of this: parts for 3D printers, whether for replacement, upgrade, or decoration (what is referred to in more colloquial circles as “bling”) can be printed ON a low-cost, low-fidelity 3D printer at a cost which is transformitively low.  The lower fidelity of thermoplastic extrusion on 500um print heads with no support material or build chamber temperature control compared with the big dogs is exchanged for a super-low cost and an open-source architecture which makes repairs cheap.  The result has, so far, been a newborn but rapidly-growing Cheap 3D Print sector, as well as a whole lot of traffic and design passing through Thingiverse.

I think the next big thing to happen in the personal automated fabrication market could learn something from this: the secret to success might be in finding a tradeoff that can be exploited rather than in better precision or higher detail or a merely larger build area.  Perhaps a powder-based system could sacrifice the durability of thermoplastic parts for the high resolution offered by using pre-existing ink cartridges to bind a cheap powder substrate.  Maybe this MakerBot as Case Mod project will turn into a computer that also prints 3D parts, transformative because if you think of the MakerBot as a PC case, the printer itself doesn’t have much of a footprint at all.

The enabling aspect of technology is a force to be reconed with, and it often trumps traditional values like precision and feature richness, especially when a new approach to a problem like fabrication earns as much for a tradeoff as the low-cost 3D printing sector has.

Once again, an amazing week on Thingiverse!  There’s a pen holder and a vase, the desk clamp parented a superb PCB clamp, the experimental front saw work on an electromagnet project, and the printable compass marks yet another everyday tool that can be printed.  There was also a healthy pile of objects copied from reality!  Go 3D archives!

But for sheer photogenic cool factor, it’s hard to go wrong with an accessory that turns a tube of glowrods from a bundle of  bracelets  into an arc-bent polyhedron factory!  This is a great example of 3D printing working in harmony with commodified infrastructure to produce things neither would likely do alone.  Adding to the cool factor is that the photo of this design actually working doesn’t come from the designer, but from another maker on Thingiverse.  Increasingly, fabricators and designers are using Thingiverse to collaborate across any distance at all to reshape reality!

It’s been another really busy week on Thingiverse– there have been objects from the functional to the freaky this go round, from the second skull to arrive (from an MRI of the thingiverse member to post it!) to bike brackets to name tags for bottles, Thingiverse is swelling with products that digital fabrication makes available over software.

The win for this week though, goes to a pair of objects which are functional AND have a lot of design-value-added: these cute salt and pepper shakers by DesignGlut!

The DesignGlut shakers are a pro design, and it shows in their adorable look.  Thingiverse is still new, and a lot of the time there’s only one of a given thing you might be looking for, but increasingly it’s got a chance to be there, and with designers like these, it won’t be long before many of the options are slick, professional designs!

In addition to the many wonderful stl and dxf files on Thingiverse, there’s a growing number of scripts which, instead of creating one exact shape, can be reconfigured to create a family of shapes for each script.

The Box-o-tron represents not one box but a whole class of boxes.  The GCode Python Packs turn math into models.  There’s now a script that makes detailed, correctly-shaped involute gears.  In creating this universe of things first imagined by Zach and the gang, users are discovering how to spend their design efforts making not single things, but whole classes of things at a time, making shapes available to Thingiverse in quantity and richness that really might start to look like the “just download one” future we optimists go on about.

Digital fabrication is getting cheaper from all sides, and Thingiverse now includes design specs for a powder deposition system, pioneered by researchers at the University of Washington!  Like the RepRap, this is a work-in-progress, but the basic technology of using inkjet-inspired systems to glue-sinter powder is super-promising, especially in the realm of getting high-resolution, support-material-required models to print well.

Users who don’t need the robustness of a thermoplastic-printed model, and who need a dpi in the hundreds are better off using a powder-sinter method like this one.  Given that the UW has already invented an open-source powder-and-glue pair for printing ceramics, the future of open 3D printing standards is really, really bright!

One great thing about rapid prototyping and personal fab is the little everyday uses.  Thingiverse user Cliff Biffle (who also has posted an awesome chess set) shows us a quick use that saved a lot of irritation on a shelf installation!

While we’re still using 3D printers as niche fabricators rather than primary manufacturing, I think we’ll increasingly see accessory designs published in association with manufactured products like these shelves.  Soon, there just might be enough users and designers running personal fabrication systems that many products (especially the big name ones) have an associated bundle of printable objects on thingiverse or even the products’ site itself that can be used to extend functionality.

Various factions of widget-makers may be harmed by all this, but I think in the end the benefits far outweigh the costs.  After all, the stated goals of the RepRap foundation are much MORE ambitious on this front…

This sweet machine by Simon Kirkby is another great example of servos and printed parts working together to create really impressive engineering feats!  I did a search for such devices and they can get rather pricey, so this is also another big bonus to the “3D Printer Basket” of goods available to a new user of a 3D printer without modifications.

I’m also really excited about how the low-end 3D printer segment of the market has grown enough in such a short time that a large fraction of the 3D designs uploaded to Thingiverse come with pictures of actual test prints!

Once again, the Thing of the Week was a pretty hard call.  I mean, there was a slingshot, neatly-labeled measuring spoons, and even a set of awesome alphabet blocks!

But in addition to that, we’ve also got this.  A user who has printed out a copy of his own head!  Bre is probably on to something when he talks about a future where custom-fit biometrics are available to personal fabricators, and here we see the beginnings of that.

Looking forward to a “personal biometrics” category of things on Thingiverse!