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Archive for the ‘3D printing’ Category

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Austrian Kinect hacker Sebastian Pirch from ">3rD-EYE in Salzburg has built a 3D modeling system using a Microsoft Kinect controller and an Arduino. Using a pair of custom soft circuit gloves to provide a mouse click, Sebastian is able to model objects in mid air, in 3D, using gestures captured by the Kinect, which are then rendered with an LCD projector. It’s a little crude now, but he’ll probably be designing flying armored suits by this time next year. [via GeekyGadgets]

MakerBot Industries blogger MakerBlock is working on a clockwork spider, and went the route of designing his own gears. He’s sharing his observations of designing and printing his own clockwork parts on the MakerBot blog. Here’s a sample:

Don’t make parts too thin. The parts I printed tended to be designed too thin. If you are designing a multi-part mechanism, don’t skimp on plastic and make the parts unnecessarily thin or small. My original gears and cogs were 2mm thick. The problem was that it was easy enough for the teeth in one gear to simply miss the other thin gear. My new design uses gears that are 5mm thick and they never miss one another.

Bart Bakker of Utrecht, Netherlands sent us these images and a link to a short piece about his mini home fab lab. He built it for around US$4K. The lab consists of an A4 Laser Cutter, a vintage Ultimaker 3D-printer, a Mantis CNC mill, and a CraftRobo vinyl/papercutter. Bart built the Ultimaker and the Mantis 9 at the ProtoSpace Fablab. Both use an Ultimaker open source motherboard and ReplicatorG for control. The 35W lasercutter from HPC costed € 1235.

Mini FabLab

Thingiverse user BenJackson designed a bracket and two gears that allow you to add numeric ontrol capability to your Etch-A-Sketch.

What can I say? I’ve never been able to draw anything with an Etch-a-Sketch. I won this one in a Christmas gift exchange some years ago and hung onto it with the idea that someday I’d CNC it.

The stepper motors are 7.5 degree Airpax steppers I got surplus many years ago. It turns out those mounting ears are actually NEMA 23 compatible so this should work unmodified with “square” steppers as well.

We've seen plenty of neat 3D printing products over the last year or so, though none are as impressive as this bicycle in terms of scale. Unveiled by EADS (European Aerospace and Defence Group), the Airbike is "grown" with nylon powder using a process called additive layer manufacturing, which is similar to 3D printing but with the added benefit of laser-sintering to reinforce the structure. This way the parts can save up to 65 percent in weight while retaining the same strength (of steel or aluminum in this case), and apparently Airbus was quick to pick up this technology well before everyone else (hence named Airbike, in its honor). It's all well and good, except EADS does say there's still some way to go before we can print our own custom Harley-Davidson bikes without breaking our banks. Shame -- as with many things in life, we'll just have to wait.

EADS's Airbike is a 3D-printed nylon bicycle, actually looks rather decent originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 09 Mar 2011 14:50:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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