The Real John Wick-Style Bullet Proof Suit

If you’ve seen the John Wick movies, you’ve probably had to suspend your disbelief about many things, but the bulletproof suits are perhaps the hardest thing to swallow. They look like stylish suits but are impervious to just about anything at any range. What’s more is when you are hit, they seem to absorb all impact with no effect on the wearer at all.

You can keep running, firing, or karate kicking while the suit takes all of the bullets. You can even pull your jacket up over your face if you want to protect that million-dollar smile. Physics, of course, tells us that a suit like this is pretty much impossible. Except that they actually exist. Granted, the real-life suits don’t have the magic physics-defying powers of Mr. Wick’s suit, but if you have the cash, you can get a smart-looking suit that protects you from getting killed by a bullet.

Real Life, Part I

In the movies, the suits supposedly have Kevlar in them just like a real piece of ballistic body armor. The problem is, Kevlar is bulky. However, most of the real body armor you see — like a vest on a SWAT team operative — is made from Kevlar or similar ballistic fibers like Twaron, Goldflex, or Dyneema. They also have plates made of metal or ceramic. Continue reading “The Real John Wick-Style Bullet Proof Suit”

Tree Supports Are Pretty, So Why Not Make Them Part Of The Print?

Here’s an idea that [Nephlonor] shared a couple years ago, but is worth keeping in mind because one never knows when it might come in handy. He 3D printed a marble run track and kept the generated tree supports. As you can see in the image above, the track resembles a roller-coaster and the tree supports function as an automatically-generated scaffolding for the whole thing. Clever!

As mentioned, these results are from a couple of years ago; so this idea should work even better nowadays. Tree supports have come a long way since then, and are available in more slicers than just Cura.

Tree supports without an interface layer is easy mode for “generate me some weird-looking scaffolding”

If you’re going to do this, we suggest reducing or eliminating the support interface and distance, which is the spacing between the supports and the rest of the model. The interface makes supports easier to remove, but if one is intending to leave it attached, it makes more sense to have a solid connection.

And while we’re on the topic of misusing supports, we’d like to leave you with one more trick to keep in mind. [Angus] of Maker’s Muse tucked a great idea into one of his videos: print just the support structure, and use it as a stand for oddly-shaped objects. Just set the object itself to zero walls and zero infill, and the printer will generate (and print) only the support structure. Choose an attractive angle, and presto! A display stand that fits the object like a glove.

You can watch a brief video of the marble run embedded below. Again, tree supports both look better and are available in more slicers nowadays. Have you tried this? If so we’d love to hear about it, so let us know in the comments!

Continue reading “Tree Supports Are Pretty, So Why Not Make Them Part Of The Print?”

ISD1700 Based Lo-Fi Sampler

Custom music instruments here at Hackaday range from wacky to poignant. OpnBeat by [Hiro Akihabara] focuses on something different: simplicity.

There are few buttons, the design and code are optimized to be straightforward and easy to modify, and the interface is slick. Eight musical keys complement three interface keys and a knob. An Arduino Nano powers the main brains of the system but the music generation comes from eight Nuvoton ISD1700s controlled over SPI by the Nano. The beautifully laid-out PCB is 110mm by 180mm (4.33″ by 7″), so cases can easily be printed on smaller FDM printers. All the switches are Cherry MX switches for the beautiful tactile feedback.

The code, PCB, and 3D case files are all available on GitHub. We love the thought that went into the design and the focus on making it easy to recreate. It might be quite as cute and simplified as this twelve-button musical macro pad, but the two together could make quite the band.

Continue reading “ISD1700 Based Lo-Fi Sampler”