If you’ve been following this blog, or have kept an eye on the DIY 3D printing world, you’ll remember the DMCA drama from last week. I’m happy to say that there is a new and interesting development: Ulrich Schwanitz has decided to drop his DMCA claims and place his design in the public domain! I am not privvy to the reasoning behind it, but perhaps he was inspired by the thousands of other open designs here on Thingiverse?

I would like to publicly re-iterate my words of encouragement to Dr. Schwanitz to post his designs to Thingiverse. I’d like to show him what an awesome community we are, and that making money is still possible while giving away your design. So if you see a thing or two by him, please be nice!

We have re-enabled both of the designs in question, so feel free to print them to your hearts desire. With this recent development, the whole “Copyright Challenge of a 3D Printable Model” chapter of 3D printing comes to a close. As my mother used to say: All’s well that ends well.

Breakout Elements by Michael Rule

Tons of great tutorials from MakerBlock, plus the tutorials I’ve already done, lead me to post this, the OpenSCAD Tutorial Roundup Post.

MakerBlock’s Series so far:

The Setup

2D Forms

3D Forms

Manipulating Forms

My Series so far:

Getting Started

Modules and Loops

Include and Import

MCAD Library

Loops and Constants

There’s been quite a bit of buzz lately about 3D Tin, a browser based, voxel modeling program. Its super simple interface combined with STL export have made it into an intriguing tool for beginners and professionals alike. We’re particularly happy with it because the STLs it generates are ready for 3D printing and of course the program itself is completely free. If you haven’t tried it already, its worth 15 minutes of your time.

We sent the creator, Jayesh Salvi a gushing email about how much we loved it, and he wrote back asking if we would be interested in integration. It was like a match made in heaven. This weekend, we hacked a simple upload API into Thingiverse. The first site to support this is 3D Tin (it’s live, so go ahead and try it!)

If you are a website owner and you would like to add you own Thingiverse implementation, its super easy. Check out the API docs and start posting to Thingiverse today! This API is just about as barebones as you can get, but it does allow you to get your stuff onto Thingiverse in a simple, painless way.

So there are a lot of things awesome about this.  First, sweet wheels.  Second, excellent documentation.  Third, controlled via smartphone, which is neat not only in that the maker got it working, but that this is so common these days.  Sensor/Thought bundles.  Computronium ingots.  Seriously neat stuff.

The Geohashing site (how awesome, by the way, is geohashing?) as of this writing has a photograph of the Geohasing Coin on thingiverse!  That’s super-awesome and makes me proud to be a nerd.

One of the things I don’t think a lot of people saw coming in this new “information age” is that instead of causing us to all clamp our faces into computers and become more isolated, it seems very often the result of all this information technology is to empower us in the real world to do strange and awesome things, like meeting up at a randomly generated location to hang out, without prior communication of any kind.

Or building machines that turn information into stuff…

The creator of this thing made it for holding a laser line steady, but you could easily use this for holding one of those super-cheap side button laser pointers still, and with an acrylic dowell or maybe even a salvaged pen barrel, make your own steadied laser line.

Geometrically speaking this is pretty simple, and that’s part of why I like it so much.  Having a steady mount for a laser is the start point for a whole lot of laser tomfoolery (to say nothing for what you could do with this combined with a servo mount or two), and Thingiverse contributor Pieter Bos tells us he’s building this as part of a 3D scanner project!

Plus, that’s a photo of a laser line.  Photos of laser lines are always cool, no matter how commodified lasers get.

With the tutorials we’ve done so far, it’s pretty easy to do the basics with OpenSCAD.  You can slap down some cubes, cut some drill holes in them and even create parametric .scad files that create parametric objects with only a few numbers from the end user.

But if you really want to start causing trouble, you’re going to need the power to remix.

Really, the ease with which models can be remixed and combined using OpenSCAD is what makes it so powerful.  Of course, any two files can be merged, and with modules it can even be done reasonably cleanly, but ideally, we want what the programmers have: include files.  One line of code that stands for all the code needed to do a task, however complex, so that we can box up each task, one after the other, and just move boxes around with minimal complexity at a given step.

No problem.  Take this file, name it ShellSphere.scad:


module ShellSphere(r, ratio1, ratio2){
difference(){
sphere(r);
scale([ratio1, ratio1, ratio2])sphere(r);
scale([ratio1, ratio2, ratio1])sphere(r);
scale([ratio2, ratio1, ratio1])sphere(r);
}
}

Now, in any file in the same directory, you can just call the library:


include <ShellSphere.scad>
ShellSphere(10,0.5,2);


Any module becomes a library.  Groups of libraries can be lumped together and pretty soon you’ve got BIG libraries.  I haven’t yet seen an OpenSCAD “standard library” for any type of task, but there totally should be.

And what of my beloved Blender?  What’s to become of mesh-modeled subdivided oddities?  Answer, import ‘em:

import_stl("mesh.stl", convexity=3);

Easy to do, and once you’ve got a manifold mesh (OpenSCAD will have trouble if it isn’t) you’ll be able to cut it, merge it, and generally fiddle around with it more or less worry free.  This can be a great tool flow for taking a nice ergonomic form factor made in Blender and putting utilitarian things like drill holes and mounting brackets on it…

HemeshGui – Process from Amnon Owed on Vimeo.

The Hemesh Generative Modeler

Processing is a language (and IDE) which is one of my personal favorites, mostly because of the libraries that come with it, already installed and ready to go.  You can do a lot in Processing, right away, without having to poke or prod it the way you’d have to do with a lot of language-IDE combos just to get graphics on the screen.

And naturally, there are 3D libraries that, with some of that poking and prodding I just mentioned, get you some pretty robust 3D mesh functionality.  Hemesh is a dazzling example of just that, using modifiers, a technique of non-destructively overlapping mesh operations, to turn basic 3D primitives in to some pretty gorgeous works of generative sculpture.

While Thingiverse already has a lot of great generative art, I’d love to see a whole crop of generative tools and widgets for creating lovely shapes. While a lot of the current generation of generative art leans towards pretty paperweights, already we’re beginning to see generative light fixtures, and ultimately I think a lot of otherwise mundane objects might get spiced up by “growing” generative art on their surfaces. For example, imagine a coffee cup with a smooth inside but a bushlike fractal pattern reaching out to the surface, thermally isolating the cup by the sudden jump in surface area…

Not only is this one of the more awesomely arachnophobia-triggering hexapods in a while, but Mole’s ModHex also earns major OpenSource Cred by being a derivative of an earlier, also-awesome hexapod based on the same three-servo actuation scheme.

The overall design brings a lot of style and a lot of little innovations to the table, and as with many of the printable robots on Thingiverse demonstrates the handiness of servo motors as vitamin parts.  Mechanical fabrication used to be a fairly big sticking point for a lot of DIY robotics.  Increasingly, with low-cost digital fabrication, it’s the easy part.

(Photo is of the awesome LED laser glasses by the way.)

I’m a tremendous fan of all the contests that keep showing up, as they always end up enriching Thingiverse many times over the value of the bounty.  Here’s a really neat one, a Wearable 3D Print Contest!

The benefactor of this one writes in his blog:

I have been on the 3d printing bandwagon for about 6 months now. It’s
been a wild ride and it’s about to get wilder.  I have come across a
few articles about 3d printed fabrics and high fashion but none of
them seem to share files.   This places 3d printed fashion out of
reach.

Until now. (Imagine that in the voice of the guy who announces for the
movies)
» Continue reading “Wearable Print Contest!”