Day: January 9, 2025

3DBenchy Starts Enforcing Its No Derivatives License

January 9, 2025 by 87 Comments

Nobody likes reading the fine print, least of all when you’re just downloading some 3D model. While printing a copy for personal use this is rarely an issue, things can get a lot more complicated when you make and distribute a derived version of a particular model.

Case in point the ever popular 3DBenchy model, which was intended to serve as a diagnostic aid by designer [Creative Tools] (recently acquired by [NTI Group] ). Although folks have been spinning up their own versions of this benchmark print for years, such derivative works were technically forbidden by the original model’s license — a fact that the company is now starting to take seriously, with derivative models reportedly getting pulled from Printables.

The license for the 3DBenchy model is (and always has been) the Creative Commons BY-ND 4.0, which requires attribution and forbids distributing of derivative works. This means that legally any derived version of this popular model being distributed on Thingiverse, Printables, etc. is illegal, as already noted seven years ago by an observant user on Reddit. According to the message received by a Printables user, all derived 3DBenchy models will be removed from the site while the license is now (belatedly) being enforced.

Although it’s going to be a bit of an adjustment with this license enforcement, ultimately the idea of Creative Commons licenses was that they set clear rules for usage, which become meaningless if not observed.

Thanks to [JohnU] for the tip.

All-Band Receiver Lets You Listen To All The Radio At Once

January 9, 2025 by 41 Comments

There are many ways to build a radio receiver, but most have a few things in common, such as oscillators, tuned circuits, detectors, mixers, and amplifiers. Put those together in the right order and you’ve got a receiver ready to tune in whatever you want to listen to. But if you don’t really care about tuning and want to hear everything all at once, that greatly simplifies the job and leaves you with something like this homebrew all-band receiver.

Granted, dispensing with everything but a detector and an audio amplifier will seriously limit any receiver’s capabilities. But that wasn’t really a design concern for [Ido Roseman], who was in search of a simple and unobtrusive way to monitor air traffic control conversations while flying. True, there are commercially available radios that tune the aviation bands, and there are plenty of software-defined radio (SDR) options, but air travel authorities and fellow travelers alike may take a dim view of an antenna sticking out of a pocket.

So [Ido] did a little digging and found a dead-simple circuit that can receive signals from the medium-wave bands up into the VHF range without regard for modulation. The basic circuit is a Schottky diode detector between an antenna and a high-gain audio amplifier driving high-impedance headphones; [Ido] built a variation that also has an LM386 amplifier stage to allow the use of regular earbuds, which along with a simple 3D-printed case aids in the receiver’s stealth.

With only a short piece of wire as an antenna, reception is limited to nearby powerful transmitters, but that makes it suitable for getting at least the pilot side of ATC conversations. It works surprisingly well — [Ido] included a few clips that are perfectly understandable, even if the receiver also captured things like cell phones chirping and what sounds like random sferics. It seems like a fun circuit to play with, although with our luck we’d probably not try to take it on a plane.