3D Printed Desk Harnesses The Power Of Fusion 360 And McMaster-Carr

January 23, 2018 by Dan Maloney 36 Comments

Black pipe furniture is all the rage now, and for good reason — it has a nice industrial aesthetic, it’s sturdy, and the threaded fittings make it a snap to put together. But if you’ve priced out the fittings lately, you know that it’s far from cheap, so being able to 3D-print your own black pipe fittings can make desks and tables a lot more affordable.

Cheapness comes at a price, of course, and [Vladimir Mariano] takes pains to point out that his desk is a light-duty piece that would likely not stand up to heavy use. But since the flange fittings used to connect the plywood top to the legs and as feet would cost about $64 all by themselves from the local home center, printing them made sense. Together with custom pieces to mount stretchers between the legs, the 3D-printed parts made for a decently sturdy base.

But the end product isn’t the main point of the video below. Thanks to the ability to browse the McMaster-Carr catalog from within Fusion 360, [Mariano] was able to seamlessly import the CAD model of a suitable iron flange and quickly modify it to his needs. The power of this feature is hard to overstate; you can literally browse through a catalog of engineered parts and print usable replicas instantly. Sure, it’s not made of metal, but it’s a huge boon to designers to be able to see how the final product would look, especially in the prototyping phase of a project.

Not familiar with McMaster-Carr? It’s an engineer’s online playground, and we covered the ins and outs of doing business with McMaster a while back.

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A Massive Adjustable Standing Desk From Scratch

September 13, 2017 by James Hobson 31 Comments

Standing at your desk all day is healthier by far than sitting, but the commercial options tend to be expensive. [drivenbyentropy] had to contend with a heater right where the desk would go, but building an adjustable office desk to accommodate it turned out — well — gorgeous.

Two 18″ heavy duty 12 V DC actuators raise and lower the desk with a 600 lbs static load capacity and 200 lbs of lifting load each. One actuator is actually slightly faster than the other, so instead of working out something fancy, [drivenbyentropy] simply extended the cable length on the faster actuator to disguise the difference.

Framed with some standard 2×4’s and sheathed with plywood, the massive four by eight foot desk has twelve ball-bearing drawer slides in the legs to add stability and smooth out height adjustments. Because of its size and having to build around the heating unit, the desk is stuck in the room since it does not easily come apart. There is, however, easy access to the two electronics compartments for troubleshooting!

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Making A Mega LED Desk

March 2, 2017 by James Hobson 37 Comments

Few things beat a sturdy, home-built desk — especially when it’s jam-packed with over 1200 WS2812 LEDs.

[nolobot] and his bother struggled with setting up and squaring-off the t-slotted, extruded aluminium frame which makes up the desk. He recommends practicing with a smaller frame for anyone else attempting a similar build. The surface of the desk has a few inches between the polycarbonate top and the 1/4″ plywood painted black serving as the substrate for the LEDs. Those LEDs come in strip form but still required several hundred solders, and wiring headaches in an attempt to make future upgrades manageable. Dozens of support bolts with adjustable feet support the desk surface throughout. These all had to be individually adjusted and can be made out if you look closely at the demo videos.

An Arduino Mega controls the LEDs with the help of the FastLED library. Custom code was necessary because one of the major issues [nolobot] faced was the power draw. 1200 LEDs at 5V draw quite a bit of current, so the LEDs were coded to peak at about 50% brightness. The matrix was split into different banks, while also limiting the 40A PSU to only 15A.

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Tesseract Infinity Desk

February 20, 2017 by Al Williams 13 Comments

We’ve all seen infinity mirrors. Even Mr. Spock had one in the Star Trek movies. Usually, these aren’t very large and hang on the wall. [QuackMasterDan] decided (after watching another movie, Interstellar) to try making a desk using the same idea. We aren’t sure it will make you more productive, but if you want to up your office cool factor, consider building his tesseract infinity desk. In fact, we imagine it would be pretty distracting. Sure to be a conversation starter, though.

Unlike a regular two-plate infinity mirror, [Dan’s] desk has six plates. He used metal for the structural parts of the desk and the top is a sandwich of an acrylic mirror and a large piece of half-inch tempered glass (available–unsurprisingly–on Amazon). There’s also privacy film to make the glass into a one-way mirror. He also includes instructions on how to make a wood version, too. You can see the desk in a video, below.

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Feel Extreme Workbench Envy After Seeing The Tempel

July 4, 2016 by Gerrit Coetzee 24 Comments

For those of us with space to spare, our workbenches tend to sprawl. The others who are more space limited will certainly feel envy at [Love Hultén]’s beautiful Tempel workbench.

The workbench appears at first to be a modern interpretation of a secretary’s desk. There are some subtle hints that it is no ordinary piece of furniture. The glowing model of our solar system on the front, for example.

With the front folded down, rather than the expected leather writing pad and letter sized drawers, a few more oddities become apparent. The back is a pegboard which holds a small selection of tools. To the left, a checkered grid obscures speakers. Knobs control volume There are even USB ports. On the right sits another speaker. Banana jacks let you use the analog voltmeter. Most appealingly, the indestructible Hakko 936 soldering iron has been entirely integrated into the structure of the desk.

If you press the right button on the front, the desk will reveal its last secret. It contains an entire workstation somewhere behind the array of drawers on the front. A linear actuator pushes a computer monitor up from inside the cabinet, covering the pegboard in the back. Awesome.

There is a build log, but unfortunately it’s been imageshacked and only the words remain. We think [Love Hultén] has finally managed to build a soldering station that’s welcome in every room of the house except for the garage.

Building An Interactive LED Lamp To Annoy Yourself

March 1, 2016 by Gerrit Coetzee 12 Comments

[Norwegian Creations] makes things as a business model. Tired of the mundane lamp above their heads, they decided to put their skills to use. The basic idea was simple, plot out a cool 3D function, put some RGB LEDs behind it, make it an awesome mathematical rainbow light display, hang it right above their desks, and then ignore it for their monitors while they worked.

The brains of the project is a Raspberry Pi B+, WS2812 LED strips, and a Fadecandy controller from Adafruit. They 3D printed hexagonal towers out of clear plastic and labeled each carefully. Then they attached the strips to the board, glued on the hexagons, and covered the remaining surface in cotton balls to give it a cloud-like appearance.

The lamp normally plays patterns or maintains a steady light. As the day turns to night it reflects the world outside. However, if someone likes their Facebook page the light has a little one robot strobe party, which we imagine can get annoying over time. Video after the break.

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Raspberry Pi Powers The Desk Of The Future

October 21, 2015 by Al Williams 32 Comments

Recent science fiction movies always show people sitting at stylish semi-transparent desks that have all kinds of strange and wonderful gadgets in them. Our desks look like something your grandfather might have sat at. [Frederick Vandenbosch] must have seen those same movies so as part of contest he decided to build the desk of the future.

The desk is as much a furniture project as an electronics project, but it does have a Raspberry Pi, a scavenged laptop LCD, embedded touch sensors and LEDs, a wireless charger, and a built-in sound system. In addition, it uses a Gertbot and some stepper motors that it uses to raise and lower the screen in and out of the desk (watch the video below to see how that looks).

[Fredrick] used Python to get the major functions of the desk programmed. We couldn’t help but think of all the things you could do with an easily programmable desk surface: show stock quotes (or sports scores), notify about e-mail, or other things. Although it doesn’t look like it would be simple for a simple user to add those things, if you were a handy programmer, they look like they’d be in reach.

We’ve seen some desks before, but nothing quite like this. We couldn’t help but wonder if you could add some Minority Report-style goodness to [Frederick’s] already impressive desk.

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