Inside 3D Printing Shoes

If you’ve ever thought about 3D printing shoes, you’ll enjoy watching the video below about a Portland-based company that creates shoes on demand using an HP MJF 5200 3D printer. Granted, this isn’t a printer you likely have in your basement. The one-ton printer costs up to a half-million dollars but watching it do its thing is pretty interesting.

The printer doesn’t create the entire shoe, but just a spongy foam-like TPU footbed and heel. They run the printer overnight and get about a dozen pairs out at once. There’s quite a bit of clean-up to get the piece ready. Of course, there’s also the assembly of the rest of the shoe to take into account.

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Wonderful Foldable Printable Dodecahedron

Debra Ansell of [GeekMomProjects] fame came up with a neat, 3D design that prints flat and then folds up into everyone’s favorite Platonic solid: a D12.

Why would you want to do this? Well, folding up your 3D prints gives you a third dimension “for free” without using all that support material. Here, all of the outside faces of the dodecahedron are printed flat against the build plate, which is probably the nicest side of your prints. And embedding LEDs in the resulting shape would probably be easy because they’re all in plane. And speaking of LEDs, we kinda expected to see them here, given Debra’s motto: “LEDs improve everything” — that part is up to you.

Debra notes that she likes PETG instead of PLA for the extra strength in the thin-printed hinges, and we’d bet that your printer’s tolerances will need to be spot on for the clips that hold the whole thing together. (We’d be tempted to apply a little super-duper glue.)

As always with Debra’s projects, there’s some creative solutions on display here that’ll help you out whether you need a D12 or a D20, so give it a look!

Thanks [Peter] for the tip.

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3D Printed Concrete Beam Improves Sustainability

Many of the 3D printed houses and structures we’ve seen use concrete and are — frankly — a little underwhelming. Making big squares out of concrete isn’t that hard and while we are sure there is some benefit, it isn’t overwhelming. [Andy Coward] apparently felt the same way and set out to find ways that 3D printing could offer unique benefits in building structures. The result: a beam that would be difficult to create with conventional techniques but is easy to make with a printer. The advantage is that it uses 78% less concrete than a conventional beam with the same properties.

The key is that in a normal beam, not much of the concrete is bearing a significant load. It is simply there because you need some concrete on one side of the beam and then some more on the other side. In the center, surprisingly little of the concrete actually supports anything. The new beam takes advantage of this along with a steel reinforcement at a strategic point. Still, it uses 70% less steel than a typical reinforced beam.

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3D Printer Helps Make A Neat Lyric Video

These days, it’s a lot easier to get attention online if your lovely music comes with some kind of visual accompaniment. Of course, shooting a full-scale music video can be expensive, so lyric videos have become a more affordable, approachable avenue that are growing in popularity. [prash] whipped one up recently with the help of a 3D printer.

The video is a timelapse of a 3D print, something we’re very familiar with around these parts. [prash] embedded words in the various layers of the objects to be printed. Thus, as the prints are laid down on the build plate, the words are revealed to the camera shooting the time lapse. The scene is further improved by shaping the prints to reference the lyrics of the song, and using attractive infill designs like spirals and stripes. There are even some strategically placed clouds and pretty lighting to improve the effect.

It’s a neat use of 3D printing, and an artful one at that. We’re pretty confident that [prash] has put together a highly unique lyric video, and it’s much more impressive than the dodgy 3D printing [Will.i.am] featured in his not-quite-a-Britney song a decade ago. Video after the break.

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3D-Printed Gear Press Can Squash Stuff, Kinda

A press is a useful thing to have, whether you like destroying stuff or you simply want to properly install some bearings. [Retsetman] decided to build one from scratch, eschewing the typical hydraulic method for a geared design instead.

The benefit of going with a gear press design is that [Retsetman] was able to 3D print the required gears himself. The design uses a series of herringbone gears to step down the output of two brushed DC motors. This is then turned into linear motion via a rack and pinion setup. Naturally, the strength of the gears and rack is key to the performance of the press. As you might expect, a fair few of the printed gears suffered failures during the development process.

The final press is demonstrated by smooshing various objects, in true YouTube style. It’s not really able to destroy stuff like a proper hydraulic press, but it can kind of crush a can and amusingly squash a teddy bear. If you’re really keen on making a gear press, though, you’re probably best served by going with a metal geartrain. Video after the break.

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Comparing 3D Printed Tires: Resin Vs. TPU

Many robot builders and RC enthusiasts find themselves turning to 3D printed tires. The benefit is you can make them in any size and style you want, and they’re as readily available for as long as your home printer is still working. [Michael Rechtin] printed some up and decided to see how long they’d actually last in use.

[Michael] printed a pair of tires for the test. One was made in TPU on a typical FDM printer, while the other was printed in flexible resin. The tires were then installed on hubs and fitted with gear motors for drive. The assembly was then fitted to the end of a test tether that would turn in circles for hours to put mileage on the tires.

After many hours and around 10 miles of testing, both tires were showing signs of wear. Notably, the resin tires showed a lot more wear than the TPU version, suggesting the latter material is a better choice for printing hard-wearing tires.

Overall, it’s reminiscent of the tether testing we saw from [rctestflight] recently. There’s something compelling about thrashing something round in circles to learn something in the process! Video after the break.

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Recreating A Camera Shot

People rolling off shields and spears clashing against swords as the camera zooms in and out wildly makes the hallmark action sequences in the movie 300 so iconic. Unfortunately, achieving this effect wasn’t particularly easy. Three cameras were rolling, each with a different lens (100mm, 50mm, and 21mm) to capture a different view of the same scene. In post-production, you can dramatically switch between the three cameras since the shot is synchronized. The folks over at [Corridor Crew] wanted to recreate the effect, but rather than create a custom mount to hold three expensive cameras, they 3d printed a custom mount to hold three costly smartphones.

While there are three cameras on the back of most phones, most phones can’t shoot in slo-mo from all cameras simultaneously. So they would need a rig to hold three phones. The first design was simple and just brackets to hold phones. While nice and sturdy, getting the phones in or out wasn’t easy, and getting to the record button was tricky. iPhones have this handy little magnetic ring on the back. They had a bracket that worked pretty well after a few iterations on the design and some printer issues. Since each camera has optical image stabilization, it is easy for the lenses to get out of alignment, which can mar the shot. However, they somewhat covered up the effect in post. With a working prototype, the only thing left to do was to slice a bunch of piñatas in slow motion with a thrumming soundtrack.

We love seeing exciting camera setups and iterating to find something that works. This dual-camera setup has a very different goal and tries to lean into the parallax effect rather than hide it. Video after the break.
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