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 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.

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…

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 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.