In a world where we can buy affordable 3d printers it can seem intimidating when it comes to creating your own 3D model for the first time. This is what the founders envisioned when they created their first successful Kickstarter for the Doodle 3d WiFi box with embeded sketch app (still available). For the first time you could not only use your fingers to paint a 2d sketch and extrude it into 3D you could send the design directly to your printer over USB. The WiFi box hosts an app that allows any touch interface like phones or tablets to be the modeling tool wirelessly. It’s much easier than it sounds.
The founders have improved upon the concept by releasing the Doodle3D Transform App, which runs a web technology-based app and forthcoming tablet app, pending a successful campaign. You can draw by hand, scan photos/drawings or import existing images. In addition to sending your design to your 3D-printer you can upload it to an online service like 3D Hubs for output, if you’re still saving up for a printer. But instead of being limited to single-walled prints you can create complex objects with the same simplicity of the original. Watch the video above and see all the capabilities on their campaign page.
The above image shows solids that all have the same volume, you can check this by filling one with water and then pouring that water into the next, fixed-volume objects. You can use the OpenSCAD script that Rich Cameron (aka Whosawhatsis) shared or download the sample objects. But why? Rich Cameron and Joan Horvarth, well-known authors, are on a mission to get all the 3d printers in the world, in all those new classrooms to help visually impaired students make use of 3D prints to learn just about any subject, but they need help making good models. This is where you come in.
Start off by downloading the sample objects above or generating your own via the openSCAD script we mentioned. Then visit the project page on Hackaday.io to get instructions on how you can volunteer to help this community and join their Google Group to continue the conversation. This is a great tactile to learn and a great way to share your talents with the world.
“Often students with visual impairments have difficulty with concepts based on visual/spatial relationships, particularly in math and science. 3D prints offer an unprecedented asset for their teachers, and 3D printers are becoming affordable. But these teachers need help designing models. [Whosawhastis] and I have been volunteer mentors to various groups working on figuring out the best ways to use 3D printing for the visually impaired. Our goal with this project is to document some simple, practical conventions for designing models, and lay the groundwork so that interested parties can create the needed designs. We know that schools have 3D printers and want to teach design thinking to their students. This project creates a minimalist open-source way to link teachers who need design files and (sighted) students who want projects to do. We want students to create the designs for the needed models, learning science, math and other subjects while helping their visually-impaired peers.”
DUS Architects in Amsterdam has created a tiny gabled urban cabin that is a mere 25 cubic metres (882.87 cubic feet) using FDM technology. They are allowing guests to spend the night to experience what life in a micro 3d printed home might be like. There is no toilet but you can take a bath outside au natural. Concrete set into the infill gives it strength and forms a seat on certain locations while pebbles in the infill outside form a path.
(Bathtub photo by Sophia van den Hoek)
A window punctures one end, while the other integrates both an entrance and a stepped porch seating area. Its walls are patterned with angular protrusions that create a three-dimensional surface, giving the building extra structural stability.
It really is further insight into the groups design sensibility that is part of major project that launched in 2013, to be complete next year, a four story 3D printed canal house. They use the KamerMaker (Dutch for “room maker”) and KamerMaker2, a “XXL 3D Printer” 3.5 meters high and housed in an up-ended shipping container to produce the large pieces. They use bio-plastics on all pieces and say it is a part of a future ecosystem that allows full recycling of the material.
The amazing folks in the Tangible Media Group at MIT Media Lab have shared their research with creating the software to produce small hairs or Cilia from 150 to 50 micrometers to do things such as move, sense, adhere, or be aesthetically pleasing.
Looking into the Nature, hair has numerous functions such as to provide warmth, adhesion, locomotion, sensing, a sense of touch, as well as it’s well known aesthetic qualities. This work presents a computational method of 3D printing hair structures. It allows us to design and generate hair geometry at 50 micrometer resolution and assign various functionalities to the hair. The ability to fabricate customized hair structures enables us to create super fine surface texture; mechanical adhesion property; new passive actuators and touch sensors on a 3D printed artifact. We also present several applications to show how the 3D-printed hair can be used for designing everyday interactive objects.
Printing Your Own Hair
If you want to use your FDM printer to try out some hair-powered prints see the below projects.
Droolopp Tutorial Drooloop flowers are produced by purposefully printing out in the air and taking advantage of sagging filament as an aesthetic feature versus the normal dreaded print failure. Read the tutorial and try out some flowers for your loved one that will never die, create fascinating Jellyfish and in a little different technique create a bottle brush!
The production of food by machines is a fact of modern food production, from pasta, to Twinkies, to canned foods, raw ingredients are processed in factories all over the world. The only problem is each piece of food is identical, no customization or personalization is possible. Enter 3D Printing. If 3D Printing is considered being in infancy, then printing food is still in the womb. We now have so many tools at our disposal, open-source or not that it’s possible to print in sugar, chocolate, pasta, and more, just by replacing the standard toolhead with one that extrudes softer ingredient materials. Below are just a few of the projects that are growing in the food printing space with large photos to illustrate the yumminess of the prints…and failures! While it can seem like just a fun way to eat sweets on the surface, 3d printing food has ramifications that could help feed the worlds poor, provide elderly with nutrient-rich foods, or provide astronauts in space with a little more variety in a confined space than pouches of powder.
Follow each link below to learn more about buying or making your own 3D Food Printer!
Digital Food | Columbia Engineering
The above video shows what the folks at Columbia University in NYC’s School of Engineering, under the direction of Mechanical Engineering Professor Hod Lipson think about printing food, even going as far as creating a machine that also cooks the food after printing it. Make sure to watch the behind the scenes video for more!
CandyFab
The first 3D printer I ever saw was actually a machine designed to create models from sugar. It used heated air to fuse a sugar bed layer into wondrous geometric shapes. It ultimately was not mass manufactured but at a time when desktop 3d printing machines were coming online in 2009, it was surely a creative influence on many. Read more about the CandyFab machine!
PancakeBot
What’s not to love about Pancake bot? What started as a fun family Maker Faire project made out of Legos has turned into a full-fledge product that dispenses pancake batter in shapes that you load into their custom made software.
PrintrBot Printrbot, a well-respected 3d printer company, created a commercial paste extrusion system that can be added to their printers. This innovation has also lead to the below product collaborations, the Bocusini, and the Magic Candy Factory.
Bocusini Bocusini calls itself “…the world’s first Plug & Play Food Printing System” and hosts a myriad of recipes an ingredients in this turnkey system that comes with all the hardware and software you need to create your own edible art!
The Magic Candy Factory is indeed a magical place where people can not only buy candy but design and create their own custom piece of candy right in the store.
Discovery Extruder The Discovery Extruder is a very refined DIY paste extrusion system that can be retrofitted into any 3d printer, even as a second extruder. While is can indeed extrude exotic materials like silicone, it can also extrude materials like Nutella!
Ultimaker Syringe Extruder This printable open-source design gives you a paste extruder for things like nutella, peanut butter and chocolate. Like all of Joris’ designs it has a unique solution, it uses the filament itself as a cable to pull the stopper down and extrude whatever you load into the syringe.
Printing in 3 dimensions
Non-planar FDM (Fused Deposition Modeling) describes a printing process where layers are not deposited in uniform layers but rather in smooth, curved layers that allow creating smooth curved surfaces or features instead of the characteristic start-stepping from current FDM processes. Read more about the author’s tests for smooth, curved-surfaces, strength of such parts, structured surfaces and his hands-on tests that you can try for yourself. His method involves post-processing gcode via Slic3r. (Read Full Article via Hackaday)
We’ve seen experiments like this before from Joris who also post-processed gcode to produce beautiful structures and cups with curved tops. See his uploads to YouMagine and a sample video of one of these pieces being printed below.
Have you ever wanted to add just one more little thing to an existing model? A name, a mash-up of two STL’s? There are plenty of free tools to do it and below are just a few good articles about those tools. First up an video from TinkerCad, then a recent All3DP article that will cover 6 popular modeling programs. Quick links to download them are below. Here is an additional Pinshape article with 10 Steps to STL File Modification: A Beginner’s Guide.
BONUS: learn how to chop up models for printing in sections when you want larger than build volume prints.
Tinkercad Tinkercad is an easy, browser-based 3D design and modeling tool for all. Tinkercad allows users to imagine anything and then design it in minutes.
FreeCAD FreeCAD is a parametric 3D modeler made primarily to design real-life objects of any size. Parametric modeling allows you to easily modify your design by going back into your model history and changing its parameters. FreeCAD is open-source and highly customizable, scriptable and extensible.
SketchUp Hobbyists, kids, and backyard spaceship builders all agree that SketchUp Make is the easiest, most fun, entirely free 3D drawing tool in the world. We think you will, too.
Blender Blender is the free and open source 3D creation suite. It supports the entirety of the 3D pipeline—modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, even video editing and game creation.
MeshMixer Meshmixer is state-of-the-art software
for working with triangle meshes.
BONUS: Learn how to segment larger prints using NetFabb Basic.
NetFabb Basic netfabb Basic is not just a viewer, it provides mesh edit, repair and analysis
capabilities to everyone already being or aspiring to become part of this fantastic,
growing, creative, high-tech industry called Additive Manufacturing,
Rapid Prototyping or 3D Printing.
The very popular 3D Printing Nerd AKA Joel Telling partners up with Bill Doran, from Punished Props, to show how to properly sand, prime, paint, and weather a Harry Potter Elder Wand print. Be sure to watch all 42:09 minutes of this goldmine of information to find out the valuable tips and tricks used to turn your prints into stunning finished models.
When your done watching be sure to head over to Punish Props to watch Bill and Joel do some tests on different types of 3D printing filament to see which is best for prop making.
PolyMaker is known for their innovative approach to materials. Nicolas Tokotuu (Communication manager, 3D printing engineer and designer for PolyMaker) has performed a fun strength test utilizing one of their new materials, Polycarbonate (PC-MAX).
They designed and printed a car jack on an Ultimaker 2+ extended and subsequently tested it on a car. They want to stress that it isn’t recommended as a replacement for a proper jack, this was just to illustrate the strength of the material. The jack did function but due to the time it was taking and torque required it was faster to use a metal jack first then finish the last few turns to lift the car. Nicolas says if they had to do it again, they will remember to lubricate the screw. 😉
They used 80% infill and printed the screw perpendicular to the thread orientation for strength.
From an announcement post at 3ders.org abut PC-MAX:
So what’s so special about PC-Max? In a nutshell, it features mechanical properties that you rarely see in 3D printing materials and is far stronger and more impact resistant than any other Polymaker material. “Polycarbonate has properties that make it very desirable for the 3D printing community as a whole, and PC-Max™ makes it even better for creative designers and engineers at every stage of the production process” added Dr. Luo. PC-Max is also easier to 3D print than PC-Plus, which was 3D printed at 300°C – 320°C. In contrast, PC-Max can be 3D printed at a moderate 250°C – 270°C.
Polymaker PC-Max™ is an advanced polycarbonate based filament designed specifically for desktop FDM/FFF 3D printing. In addition to high printing quality, great mechanical strength and heat resistance, Polymaker PC-Max™ offers excellent impact strength and fracture toughness, making it the ideal choice for engineering applications.
We’ve been working on improving YouMagine for you. The most obvious improvement is the changes made to the design details page. We made the page easier on the eye and easier to scan through if you’re looking at a design quickly.
You can now also embed YouMagine designs on forums and blogs easily.
We also briefly summarize the licenses for you, please be advised that you should take the time (at least once!) to read through the different licenses to find out which one suits you and what rights you are restricting.
We repositioned the content on the page and changed the order of importance of things on the page. The page should be faster to load and quicker to use for you.
Commenting on models just got easier and you can decide to follow or unfollow activity streams.
We’ve updated our email addresses for them to be more personal for you. Although we continue to send any email to the old emails to us we now will use support (at) youmagine, hello (at) youmagine for support questions and supercomputer (at) youmagine for automated emails. You can always just email joris@youmagine for any and all questions! Also the support emails now get sent to the whole YouMagine team, so even though I will answer your questions all of us will read what you have to say in order to understand what our community’s needs and suggestions are.
Our error messages have become friendlier with a kinder tone. Our 404 page now explains that a community member did nothing wrong and gives them links to the gallery and main page as well as a way for people to report dead links should they wish.
If one of your designs is added to a collection then the notification email will also inform you to which collection this design has been added and which design has been added. This has been requested by a lot of people!
We’ve made the Bill of Materials easier to use and added an explanation of what the bill of materials should look like.
Our automated thank you emails have been changed yet again. We’ve updated the text, subject line and timing as per your suggestions.
We’ve solved some caching issues and solved the sizing of photographs on different devices. We’ve changed the related designs to “other designs” in the same category. This means that for now the other designs should be quite random and lead to serendipity. In future we will make them more logical for you.
We’ve added a list of many 3D printers and also let people link through to a detail page about the printer.
A contributed image by another user can also now be the primary image of your design.
OpenSCAD files are now downloaded instead of displayed as plain text. We’re wondering what you think of this feature since some prefer to copy paste the text into OpenSCAD while others prefer to download the file.
We’ve done research into how to best improve the search and will be doing this in the next sprint, these coming two weeks. Please let us know how to further improve YouMagine! Email joris (at) youmagine.com with any feedback, bugs or ideas.
(Photograph by Ossip)
CandyFab
PancakeBot
PrintrBot
