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Thingiverse user lory90sw assembled a full set of Mendel parts that fits on a single 20cm x 20cm Mendel build platform. It accomplishes this by stacking up parts, using breakaway support material to keep them from all sticking together. [Via the Thingiverse blog]

A work-in-progress from Thingiverse user searchresults. Each block has twelve 3mm supermagnets installed around its six edges, their polarities alternating so the blocks will click together.

We've been whittling our likeness into bars of soap for decades, but lucky for us someone's come up with a far easier way to render our flawless good looks in miniature. Following in a long line of inventive Kinect hacks, the folks at Interactive Fabrication have produced a program called Fabricate Yourself that enlists the machine to capture images of users and convert them into 3D printable files. The hack, which was presented at Tangible, Embedded and Embodied Interaction Conference in January, results in tiny 3D models that resemble Han Solo trapped in carbonite and sport jigsaw edges that can be used to make a grid of small, but accurate renderings. Fabricate Yourself is still in its infancy, and the resulting models are relatively short on detail, but we're no less excited by the possibilities -- just think of all the things we could monogram in the time it takes to produce one soapy statuette. Video after the jump.

Continue reading Fabricate Yourself Kinect hack turns you into a 3D puzzle piece

Fabricate Yourself Kinect hack turns you into a 3D puzzle piece originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 02 Mar 2011 11:40:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Interesting item from Dallas’s Southern Methodist University, where paleontologists Thomas L. Adams, Christopher Strganac, Michael J. Polcyn, and Louis L. Jacobs have used laser scanning to make a high-resolution model of a landmark outdoor dinosaur track in Glen Rose, Texas. Exposed to the elements in the town square, the track is (very slowly) eroding, and the team’s freely downloadable 3D model is intended to both preserve it for posterity and to facilitate its study by fossil buffs all over the world. Their results are published online in Palaeontologica Electronica. [Thanks, Alan Dove!]

Mark Ganter and his team at the University of Washington Mechanical Engineering Department’s Solheim Rapid Prototyping Laboratory just cut the time it takes to make a RepRap Prusa Mendel 3D printer. Instead of the usual week it takes to output all of the printable parts that comprise a Prusa Mendel, Ganter and students, Scott Tandoi and Travis Nicholes, created a set of silicone RTV molds to produce the parts in a mere fraction of the time. He states that all of the plastic parts for a complete Prusa can be produced in under 30 minutes. You’ll still have to finish some parts with a drill press, but to have all the parts ready in under a hour, rather than a week, is pretty impressive.

They’re calling their version of the Prusa Mendel a Clonedel and plan to “release working STL files of the mold plates to the community at large (hopefully, within a week).” [Thanks, Matt!]