Bringing Fiction To Life With 3D Printing

April 2, 2018 by Tom Nardi 27 Comments

I print something nearly every day, and over the last few years, I’ve created hundreds of practical items. Parts to repair my car, specialized tools, scientific instruments, the list goes on and on. It’s very difficult for me to imagine going back to a time where I didn’t have the ability to rapidly create and replicate physical objects at home. I can say with complete honesty that it has been an absolutely life-changing technology for me, personally.

But to everyone else in my life, my friends and family, 3D printers are magical boxes which can produce gadgets, weapons, and characters from their favorite games and movies. Nobody wants to see the parts I made to get my girlfriend’s 1980’s Honda back on the road before she had to go to work in the morning, they want to see the Minecraft block I made for my daughter. I can’t get anyone interested in a device I made to detect the algal density of a sample of water, but they all want me to run off a set of the stones from The Fifth Element for them.

As I recently finished just such a project, a 3D printed limpet mine from Battlefield 1, I thought I would share some thoughts on the best practices for turning fiction into non-fiction.

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Reverse Engineering Bottle Threads For Fun And Profit

April 1, 2018 by Kristina Panos 37 Comments

Recently, one of [Eric]’s clients asked him to design a bottle. Simple enough for a product designer, except that the client needed it to thread into a specific type of cap. And no, they don’t know the specs.

But that’s no problem, thought [Eric] as he turned on the exhaust fan and reached for the secret ingredient that would make casting the negative image of the threads a breeze. He mixed up the foul-smelling body filler with the requisite hardener and some lovely cyan toner powder and packed it into the cap with a tongue depressor. Then he capped off the cast by adding a small PVC collar to lengthen the cast so he has something to grab on to when it’s time to take it out.

Bondo does seem like a good choice for casting threads. You need something workable enough to twist out of there without breaking, but rigid enough that the small detail of the threads isn’t lost. For the release agent, [Eric] used Johnson’s Paste Wax. He notes from experience that it works particularly well with Bondo, and even seems to help it cure.

Once the Bondo hardened, [Eric] made sure it screwed in and out of the cap and then moved on to CAD modeling and 3D printing bottle prototypes until he was satisfied. We’ve got the video screwed in after the break to cap things off.

Did you know that you can also use toner powder to tint your epoxy resin? Just remember that it is particulate matter, and take precautions.

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Giving A 6th Generation IPod A New Lease On Life

March 30, 2018 by James Hobson 13 Comments

It can be disheartening when a favoured device begins to break-down. Afflicted by an all-but-dead battery and a fritzing-out hard drive, Redditor [cswimc] sensed the imminent doom creeping up on their 6th generation iPod, and responded by reviving and upgrading the decrepit device instead!

It’s no easy task to crack open one of these things, so they found themselves taking their time and carefully wedging the pry tool between the front and back covers, working their way around the exterior. Once separated, gingerly disconnecting the few ribbon cables allowed the iPod to be opened fully. From there, they turned to swapping out the original hard drive for an iFlash dual SD card board — one of the cards turned out to be a dud, but 128GB is still a step up from 80GB — and a new 3000mAh battery. Combined with replacing the power-hungry HDD, the battery life has been overwhelmingly increased over the original’s 650mAh capacity!

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Color Spaces: The Model At The End Of The Rainbow

March 30, 2018 by Kerry Scharfglass 23 Comments

When I learned about colors in grade school everything started with red, yellow, and blue and getting fancier colors was easy. I mixed some blue into my yellow to get green, or into red to get purple, and so on. After painting enough terrifying “art” for my parents, this made intuitive sense. That is until my mind was blown by the revelation that this wasn’t always true!

To make the same colors with light instead of paint I had to use red, green, and blue, not yellow. It was until much later when trying harness banks of RGB LEDs that this knowledge became useful. I was struggling to make my rogue diodes look quite the way I wanted when I stumbled into the realization that maybe there was another approach. What did the numbers representing R G and B actually mean? Why those parameters? Could there be others? [Elliot Williams] has written about the importance of gamma correction and adjustment for human perception of color, but we can ask a more fundamental question. Why do we represent color this way at all?

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Cutting Paper And Corners In Animation

March 29, 2018 by Brian McEvoy 6 Comments

Cutting every corner can lead to some shoddy projects, but [Terry Gilliam] shows us that cutting the right corners yields unforgettable animations when mixed with the right amount of quirky imagination. The signature animation style of Monty Python’s Flying Circus is a mixture of [Terry]’s artistic craft and doing it with as little work as possible. You can watch after the break.

For [Terry], cutout animation is the quickest and easiest way he knows to convey an idea, a joke, or a story. With his vocal repertoire, even the sound effects can be produced in a basement studio. Sometimes, he makes the artwork himself and sometimes he relies on found-media in magazines or print. Both of these resources have vast digital counterparts for the betterment or detriment of animators.

Cutout animations have limitations such as jerky movement and the signature paper-on-a-background look, but that didn’t stop South Park. Textures and gradients can be used, unlike traditional animation which leverages a simplified color palette so you can pick your poison.

If your story or idea is held back because it can’t be expressed, maybe it needs a cutout animation kick in the right direction, and it couldn’t hurt to illustrate your 2018 Hackaday Prize submissions. At the opposite end of the tech spectrum, we have an animation made with 3D printed objects.

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Storm Detector Modules: Dancing In The Rain

March 28, 2018 by Sean Boyce 18 Comments

Earlier, we had covered setting up an AS3935 lightning detector module. This detector picks up radio emissions, then analyzes them to determine if they are a lightning strike or some other radio source. After collecting some data, it outputs the estimated distance to the incoming storm front.

But that only gets you halfway there. The device detects many non-lightning events, and the bare circuit board is lacking in pizzazz. Today I fix that by digging into the detector’s datasheet, and taking a quick trip to the dollar store buy a suitable housing. The result? A plastic plant that dances when it’s going to rain!
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How To Reverse Engineer Mechanical Designs For 3D Modeling

March 27, 2018 by Cameron Coward 38 Comments

If you’re interested in 3D printing or CNC milling — or really any kind of fabrication — then duplicating or interfacing with an existing part is probably on your to-do list. The ability to print replacement parts when something breaks is often one of the top selling points of 3D printing. Want some proof? Just take a look at what people made for our Repairs You Can Print contest.

Of course, to do that you need to be able to make an accurate 3D model of the replacement part. That’s fairly straightforward if the part has simple geometry made up of a primitive solid or two. But, what about the more complicated parts you’re likely to come across?

In this article, I’m going to teach you how to reverse engineer and model those parts. Years ago, I worked for a medical device company where the business model was to duplicate out-of-patent medical products. That meant that my entire job was reverse engineering complex precision-made devices as accurately as possible. The goal was to reproduce products that were indistinguishable from the original, and because they were used for things like trauma reconstruction, it was critical that I got it right.

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