So leaving out the fact that a nested Reuleaux Triangle that you can fit in your pocket is something that just oozes cool and, were you to whip it out at a party (at least the kind I go to) have everyone instantly fascinated even if it weren’t something you downloaded and printed, mechanisms of this type particularly interest me because they natively react well to extruded plastic 3D printing.

Captive parts aren’t always possible in a project, when it works, it’s magic.

Design 3D surfaces by drawing bitmaps!  The script writes directly in GCode, the native language of 3D printers, so this is definitely a time to know your extruder behaviors.  Scripting directly in GCode has a lot of advantages, like simplicity, since you often can get away without really wrestling 3D geometry and mesh files.

You can also code in whatever language you like, as long as it can save to ASCII text files.  This code generator is written in Lua!

Bicycle shops are already places where a pretty dazzling array of mechanical engineering feats are accomplished (after all, a bicycle shop built the first airplane), and happily this tradition continues with a plethora of bicycle widgets from the classic to the cutting edge, and from straightforward keep-it-going fixes like this one to pure artistic expression, enabled by 3D printers.

(Little wonder also that a recent episode of MakerBot TV featured a whole-bike makeover.)

Even without a 3D Printer they’re pretty amazingly versatile, but with a 3D Printer they are also a lathe, a centrifuge, a CNC Mill Head and here, a turbine that you could use as the basis for, say, a shop vac.  (Note to modelers the first person to make a mostly-printable shop vac based on a rotary tool will probably be hailed as some kind of Maker Superhero.)

The maker of this thing warns that, as the inside of that sleek dome is basically filled with plastic rectangles moving at high radial velocity, one should be quite careful and use eye protection when turning it on for the first time, which can mean the difference between an awesome lab accident story and the story of why you’re wearing an eye patch weeks after Halloween.

Because this right here?  Unmitigated awesome.

It’s moments like this– where I realize someone has compartmentalized the development of a complex toy which had a fair chance of going extinct until, well, arguably yesterday when this was uploaded, and made it into a downloadable file, where I just feel a little awed, humbled, and honored to be around to see and comment on such things.

I think we live in an age where, if you aren’t constantly amazed, you’re doing something wrong.

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!

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!

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!

GEEK WARNING: Great swaths of this post will make little sense if you don’t actually use polyhedral dice.

What exactly does one use an all-20 d20 for?  I mean, there are obvious ornamental purposes, and it makes a great conversation piece, but around the gaming table, the only reason to use it is to announce that you’re “taking 20″ on something or if you’re the GM pronounce that you’re fudging a roll. (Okay admittedly there’s an intimidation factor, particularly if you print your d20 around fist-sized.)

However!  The very existence of an all-20 d20 should serve as a signpost to customized dice with arbitrary inscriptions, from dice that start at zero (like the d6s in House on Haunted Hill, which count from zero to two) to more exotic things like dice with character names on them or replacing the “one” with something suitably comical indicating critical failure.

Also for less tabletop RPG-specific purposes you might use them as an “unplugged” way to come up with story ideas if they had icons on them for different themes, or perhaps words if you have enough precision or a large enough build area…