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…

So now we’re starting to see “mainframe” recycling of plastics take on more robust characteristics like true throughcycling (as opposed to “downcycling” where you always go to lower-grade plastics from virgin ones) with, and this is the important part, computerized sorting to produce high-quality, low waste plastics from discard plastics.

The next step obviously is to be doing this locally and ubiquitously, which I think eventually we’ll really see home 3D printer users pioneering, because they’ve got a lot to gain (cheaper feedstock and peace of mind) and a relatively simple version of the problem (known plastic types mixed in known ways).  Sure, the new extruder modules are compact enough that we’re starting to see more and more multicolor prints, but even then, the user knows just what those plastics are, as well as a thing or two about their melting points and other physical properties!

Way back when home 3D printing was young(er), Adrian and crew did some forethought into drill holes that’d need to be printed horizontal while still obeying the 45-degree angle rule.  (At the time, the many experiments in bending or breaking this rule that would follow were unattainable, as RepRaps, MakerBots, and their kin had not been implemented yet.)  The solution: make the hole into a teardrop shape, so that plastic being built up on either side would not droop and clog the hole.

This technique worked, but it was later found that for small holes you can (usually) get away with completely cylindrical holes if you’re willing to run a bolt through them a few times first.

There also was a (somewhat ill-advised) tradition of building a shot glass as one’s first print and drinking to the new machine’s health.  Combining these two bits of living 3D printing history, we have Ron Aldrich’s very attractive teardrop shot glass, which he offers with a tip to use food grade urethane to make the glass usable.

So there’s this deeply clever integrated clapper bell print and it’s noted that, in plastic, it rattles more than rings, and I thought, ah, but surely someone’s printing in something better suited…

Ceramics would probably do it, as would any metal but those are hard to do…

What’d be really cool is if someone used a scaled-up version of that desert skyburner thing and made a big sandstone bell.  (Really if you could get that set up with GPS and well-protected moving parts it could go around building glass ghost towns until you ran out of desert…)

Now granted, this spinal column is designed for demonstration/instructional purposes, but when I look at it, I start to think really seriously about the scenario Bre came up with concerning making replacement body parts.

These days there are a lot of stories about replacement limbs, and increasingly there’s this air of rehabilitation rather than adjustment– missing hands and feet are replaced with tightly-wound bundles of servos and sensors, implants restore sight and hearing.  In time, between biocompatible materials and advanced electronics, we may see more developments towards home-made fixes for serious injuries.  We’re already seeing little tools such as this one developed by an MS patient to make his routine easier…

Now Sirmakesalot is just showing off.  Which isn’t to say that I don’t vastly approve.  Whoever manages to steel-cast one of these and get it running may very well be the first person to win an entire kilo-internet.

It’s been a while since I talked about economics here, but I’ve been thinking a lot lately about an economic effect Ray Kurzweil pointed out a while ago (but didn’t name) where rapidly advancing technology tends to create a bunch of stuff which a few years ago would have been priceless but which now has virtually zero street value.  He pointed out that this was deflationary (a dollar buys a lot more, at least of what’s advancing) and that this wasn’t well modeled in current economic theory, because unlike classical capital deflation, nothing has “worn out” to make it cheaper.

I think we’re seeing a lot of that lately, not just with processing technology (although this is a key enabling technology to all home 3D printers and Thingiverse itself) but also with fabrication technology in that anything you can make on a home 3D printer rapidly shoots to a price point that has to do with per-pound plastic and the local cost of electricity.

This tends to synergize with the lowering cost of information technologies into things like the above spherical display.  The value in the things that have become so cheap hasn’t gone away at all– it’s just become easier to get.