If you had asked us yesterday “How do you 3D Print a Photo”, we would have said “well, that’s easy, do a lithophane”– but artist, hacker and man with a very relaxing voice [Wyatt Roy] has a much more impressive answer: Gaussian splats, rendered in resin.
Gaussian splats are a 3D scanning technique aimed at replicating a visual rather than geometry, like the mesh-based 3D-scanning we usually see on Hackaday. Using photogrammetry, a point cloud is generated with an associated 3D Gaussian function describing the colour at that point. Blend these together, and you can get some very impressive photorealistic 3D environments. Of course, printing a Gaussian smear of colour isn’t trivial, which is where the hacking comes in.
Sometimes, a hack solves a big problem. Sometimes, it’s just to deal with something that kind of bugs you. This hack from [Dillan Stock] is in the latter category, replacing an ugly, redundant downspout with an elegant 3D printed pipe.
As [Dillan] so introspectively notes, this was not something that absolutely required a 3D print, but “when all you have a hammer, everything is a nail, and 3D printing is [his] hammer.” We can respect that, especially when he hammers out such a lovely print.
By modeling this section of his house in Fusion 360, he could produce an elegantly swooping loft to combine the outflow into one downspout. Of course the assembly was too big to print at once, but any plumber will tell you that ABS welds are waterproof. Paint and primer gets it to match the house and hopefully hold up to the punishing Australian sun.
The video, embedded below, is a good watch and a reminder than not every project has to be some grand accomplishment. Sometimes, it can be as simple as keeping you from getting annoyed when you step into your backyard.
Sometimes it seems odd that we would spend hundreds (or thousands) on PC components that demand oodles of airflow, and stick them in a little box, out of sight. The fine folks at Corsair apparently agree, because they’ve released files for an open-frame pegboard PC case on Printables.
According to the write-up on their blog, these prints have held up just fine with ordinary PLA– apparently there’s enough airflow around the parts that heat sagging isn’t the issue we would have suspected. ATX and ITX motherboards are both supported, along with a few power supply form factors. If your printer is smaller, the ATX mount is per-sectioned for your convenience. Their GPU brackets can accommodate beefy dual- and triple-slot models. It’s all there, if you want to unbox and show off your PC build like the work of engineering art it truly is.
Of course, these files weren’t released from the kindness of Corsair’s corporate heart– they’re meant to be used with fancy pegboard desks the company also sells. Still to their credit, they did release the files under a CC4.0-Attribution-ShareAlike license. That means there’s nothing stopping an enterprising hacker from remixing this design for the ubiquitous SKÅDIS or any other perfboard should they so desire.
At Hackaday, it is always clock time, and clock time is a great time to check in with [shiura], whose 3D Printed Perpetual Calendar Clock is now at Version 2. A 3D printed calendar clock, well, no big deal, right? Grab a few steppers, slap in an ESP32 to connect to a time server, and you’re good. That’s where most of us would probably go, but most of us aren’t [shiura], who has some real mechanical chops.
There’s also a 24-hour dial, because why not?
This clock isn’t all mechanical. It probably could be, but at its core it uses a commercial quartz movement — you know, the cheap ones that take a single double-A battery. The only restriction is that the length of the hour axis must be twelve millimeters or more. Aside from that, a few self-tapping screws and an M8 nut, everything else is fully 3D printed.
From that simple quartz movement, [shiura]’s clock tracks not only the day of the week, the month and date — even in Febuary, and even compensating for leap years. Except for the inevitable drift (and battery changes) you should not have to adjust this clock until March 2100, assuming both you and the 3D printed mechanism live that long. Version one actually did all this, too, but somehow we missed it; version two has some improvements to aesthetics and usability. Take a tour of the mechanism in the video after the break.
We’re suckers here for projects that let you see the unseeable, and [Ayden Wardell Aerospace] provides that on a budget with their $30 Schlieren Imaging Setup. The unseeable in question is differences in air density– or, more precisely, differences in the refractive index of the fluid the imaging set up makes use of, in this case air. Think of how you can see waves of “heat” on a warm day– that’s lower-density hot air refracting light as it rises. Schlieren photography takes advantage of this, allowing to analyze fluid flows– for example, the mach cones in a DIY rocket nozzle, which is what got [Ayden Wardell Aerospace] interested in the technique.
Examining exhaust makes this a useful tool for [Aerospace].This is a ‘classic’ mirror-and-lamp Schlieren set up. You put the system you wish to film near the focal plane of a spherical mirror, and camera and light source out at twice the focal distance. Rays deflected by changes in refractive index miss the camera– usually one places a razor blade precisely to block them, but [Ayden] found that when using a smart phone that was unnecessary, which shocked this author.
While it is possible that [Ayden Wardell Aerospace] has technically constructed a shadowgraph, they claim that carefully positioning the smartphone allows the sharp edge of the case to replace the razor blade. A shadowgraph, which shows the second derivative of density, is a perfectly valid technique for flow visualization, and is superior to Schlieren photography in some circumstances– when looking at shock waves, for example.
Regardless, the great thing about this project is that [Ayden Wardell Aerospace] provides us with STLs for the mirror and smartphone mounting, as well as providing a BOM and a clear instructional video. Rather than arguing in the comments if this is “truly” Schlieren imaging, grab a mirror, extrude some filament, and test it for yourself!
Hackers like making clocks, and we like reporting on them around these parts. Particularly if they’ve got a creative mechanism that we haven’t seen before. This fine timepiece from [gooikerjh] fits the bill precisely—it’s a sliding tile clock!
The brains of the build is an Arduino Nano ESP32. No, that’s not a typo. It’s basically an ESP32 in a Nano-like form factor. It relies on its in-built WiFi hardware to connect to the internet and synchronize itself with time servers so that it’s always showing accurate time. The ESP32 is set up to control a set of four stepper motors with a ULN2003 IC, and they run the neat time display mechanism.
All the custom parts are 3D printed, and the sliding tile concept is simple enough. There are four digits that show the time. Each digit contains number tiles that slide into place as the digit rotates. To increment the digit by one, it simply needs to be rotated 180 degrees by the relevant stepper motor, and the next number tile will slide into place.
Nanostructured metamaterials have shown a lot of promise in what they can do in the lab, but often have fatal stress concentration factors that limit their applications. Researchers have now found a strong, lightweight nanostructured carbon. [via BGR]
Using a multi-objective Bayesian optimization (MBO) algorithm trained on finite element analysis (FEA) datasets to identify the best candidate nanostructures, the researchers then brought the theoretical material to life with 2 photon polymerization (2PP) photolithography. The resulting “carbon nanolattices achieve the compressive strength of carbon steels (180–360 MPa) with the density of Styrofoam (125–215 kg m−3) which exceeds the specific strengths of equivalent low-density materials by over an order of magnitude.”
While you probably shouldn’t start getting investors for your space elevator startup just yet, lighter materials like this are promising for a lot of applications, most notably more conventional aviation where fuel (or energy) prices are a big constraint on operations. As with any lab results, more work is needed until we see this in the real world, but it is nice to know that superalloys and composites aren’t the end of the road for strong and lightweight materials.
