FaBrickation: Combining Lego And 3D Printing

January 28, 2014 by Eric Evenchick 29 Comments

While 3D printing gives you the ability to fabricate completely custom parts, it does have some drawbacks. One issue is the time and cost of printing large volumes. Often these structures are simple, and do not require completely custom design.

This is where the faBrickation system comes in. It allows you to combine 3D printed parts with off the shelf LEGO bricks. The CAD tool that lets you ‘Legofy’ a design. It creates directions on how to assemble the LEGO parts, and exports STL files for the parts to be 3D printed. These custom bricks snap into the LEGO structure.

In their demo, a head mounted display is built in 67 minutes. The same design would have taken over 14 hours to 3D print. As the design is changed, LEGO blocks are added and removed seamlessly.

Unfortunately, the tool doesn’t appear to be open source. It will appear for the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, so hopefully we will see more in the future. Until then, you can watch the demo after the break.

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3D Printed Netduino Remote Controlled Car

January 28, 2014 by Marsh 7 Comments

netduinocar

[Matt] lives in South Africa, where homes have smallish crawlspaces (some only 30cm high!) that he can’t quite squeeze himself into. Even if he could, he probably wouldn’t: they’re apparently vacation homes for the local rats. He did, however, want to explore these spaces to get a better idea what’s going on inside, so he built a Windows Phone-controlled car with a Netduino and 3D-printed parts.

Such a specialized application requires unique parts, so [Matt] designed and 3D-printed the wheels and frame from scratch. You’ve probably noticed that the wheels aren’t your typical cylinders. The terrain [Matt] faces is sand, so the spiked shape provides better grip. The body’s design required extra attention because it holds the motors, the Netduino, the motor driver, and the battery.

A Bluetooth module connects to the Netduino and allows [Matt] to drive the car with his Windows Phone, and an inexpensive 5V LED board provides some light for those dark corners. How does it see once inside the crawlspace? It looks like [Matt’s] getting to that part. His plan is to simply mount a second phone running Skype and watch the stream. Stick around after the break to see [Matt] use the car to both confuse and excite his dog.

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Copying Objects In 3D

January 26, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 8 Comments

photocopier

[Pulse 9] sent in a very interesting project he just finished up at an internship. It’s a 3D photocopier that scans an object and then mills said object into floral foam.

The copier is made out of material [Pulse] found sitting around – PVC, drawer slides for the X and Y axes, acrylic for the structure, and broken printer parts for the Z axis.

To scan an object, [Pulse] puts an object down on the bed and scans it with a laser and webcam. The images recorded on the camera are fed into MATLAB. The output from MATLAB is sent over serial to a custom board containing a PIC18F4620 that controls the axis motors. The spindle for this floral foam router is a simple drill; one layer at a time, the drill mills out the unneeded foam which can be sucked up by a vacuum when the object is complete.

Below you’ll find [Pulse]’s demo of his photocopier and a piece the local news did on the project. If anyone is willing to translate that story, feel free to do so in the comments.

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3D Printed Guitar

January 25, 2014 by Marsh 18 Comments

We’re not sure how we missed this one, but it definitely deserves a look. Professor of Mechtronics [Olaf Diegel’s] 3D printer must go to 12, because he’s printed these incredible electric guitar bodies. You probably won’t be making your own on your filament printer, however, because [Diegel] uses SLS (Selective Laser Sintering) to create the body out of nylon, then he dyes the resulting piece in a two-step process. You can read more about the construction specifics on his website.

And, they’re more than just eye-candy: the guitars sound brilliantly metallic. There are more than enough pictures and videos to keep you occupied on the site, where you can sift through all eight designs to your heart’s content. You’ll want to keep reading for a couple of videos embedded after the break, which feature some demonstrations of the guitar and comparisons to traditional electric guitars, as well as a brief history of its construction and build process.

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Touring Deezmaker, The First Good 3D Printer Store In The World

January 23, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 24 Comments

When we visited the Crash Space hackerspace earlier this week, it came to our attention we were staying mere blocks away from Deezmaker, a 3D printer store in beautiful Pasadena that is home base for the Bukobot and Bukito printers, an awful lot of awesome printed plastic things, and [Rich] a.k.a [whosawhatsis], creator of the RepRap Wallace and all this stuff. Obviously a tour was in order.

Inside Deezmaker is a treasure trove of printed baubles and a fishbowl full of a herringbone planetary gear systems free for the taking. They have printers running all the time, a very nice lab for [whosawhatsis], and enough work space to host a few workshops every week.

In the video below, [Diego], the big cheese of Deezmaker takes us around the shop showing off his wares. [whosawhatsis] also makes an appearance showing off his latest invention, the Bukito printer. It’s a very small and incredibly portable printer that can be powered by batteries. They’re using a 3-cell 5000mAh lipo battery when they take the Bukito camping. I didn’t catch how long the battery lasts, but it’s more than enough to squirt out a few of the gear systems they give away.

Video after the break.

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3D Printering: Making A Thing In Autodesk 123D

January 22, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 27 Comments

In the continuing battle against 3D printers used exclusively for fabricating plastic octopodes and useless trinkets, here’s yet another installment of a Making A Thing tutorial. If you’ve ever wanted to make one single object in multiple 3D design softwares, this is for you.

Previously, we’ve built a ‘thing’ in a few different 3D modeling programs, including:

See that ‘Read more…’ link below? You might want to click that.

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A Quick And Simple Filament Joiner For Multi-Color Prints

January 20, 2014 by Adam Fabio 26 Comments

Filament splicer

[Malcolm] was having a grand time with his new 3D printer. He was getting tired of monochromatic prints, though. Not having a machine with multiple extruders, he went looking for a way to join pieces of filament. There were a few designs on Thingiverse, but they required milled parts that he didn’t have the tools to recreate. Rather than invest in a mill, [Malcolm] decided to build his own filament joiner. He started by raiding his wife’s hair care tools. His first test was a curling iron. It had the heat, but lacked a good surface to join the filament. [Malcolm’s] next test was a ceramic hair straightener, which he found to be the perfect tool.

The splicing process is simple. Start with a hot iron, then lay two pieces of filament on top of the short end of the iron. They soften quickly and melt together. [Malcolm’s] real trick is to slightly pull the joint once the two pieces have joined. Pulling causes the filament to stretch, slightly reducing the diameter of the joint. A thinner joint helps prevent extruder jams as the joint passes through. This method works great for PLA. We’d love to see if it works for ABS as well.

Click past the break for an example piece and for [Malcom’s] instructional video.

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