Another sunny day here in Hannover.
We went to the fair around ten this morning, and I started from halls 1 and 2. Mostly filled with IBM and other very large companies, but it was interesting nevertheless. IBM was trying to get back into academic co-operation (apparently Microsoft has ousted them from the close relationship they had previously, so my business card was hot stuff). Continue reading CeBIT Trade Fair 2015, Day 2
Haaga-Helia sees it fit to send teachers to trade fairs to sniff out the latest trends in IT. This year it was my turn to join the team and fly out to Hamburg, then take the train to Hannover where the gigantic expo is held every year. Together with two colleagues I signed in at the fair around noon today and will spend four days walking around. This is what I found today.
The first thing that got my eye was this very light quad. It has a HD 1080 camera, a 9 volt battery driving the four tiny motors, and an endurance of 10 minutes. Continue reading CeBIT Trade Fair 2015, Day 1
For some time now, I have been thinking of printing a trebuchet. On Youtube you see massive trebuchets capable of hurling a flaming piano (!) to a distance of 200 meters, or trailer-based versions used in pumpkin-throwing contests. This sort of machinery is clearly beyond my MiniFactories and even the Print-Rite model I was handed the other week, but a small one should be within reason.
As always I first tried an unstable one before hitting on the right design. The first version seemed fine in Blender, and I was thinking of creating a system with many separate parts to maximize size. The first version looks like this in Blender:
Continue reading Trebuchet, or counterweight catapult, part I
So, my son scavenged two 320GB drives from two laptops that were not very functional. He had space inside his own cavernous computer for them, and even a drive cage where he could fix the 2.5″ drives side by side. He screwed the drives onto the cage and it looked solid enough, but surely it’d look even better if there was something holding the tops of the drives. It was also a question of having space for the connectors, because this is not a standard layout, but would enable him to install both at one go. Continue reading Quick but not dirty printing
See this video for a hint of what will happen today.
Now that we have covered the somewhat tricky route of tracing gear curves from images (which, by the way, you can use to create meshes out of any image) in part I, let’s have a look at the eMachineShop way. eMachineShop is a free gear designing software from the firm by the same name. They allow you to use their proprietary software for free in personal use, and then you can order the final product from them in a variety of machining finishes. I commend such an approach, especially since the software exports pure STL for our needs.
You can download the software package from eMachineShop.com and install it. When you start it the first time, you see a tutorial screen, but you can turn it off once you have the hang of the software. As it happens, it is very powerful, but a little quirky.
The main window looks like this: Continue reading Printing gears, part II
Gears are an interesting set of things to print. With gears you can make all kinds of things, and if you run an Arduino or a Raspberry Pi, you can significantly extend the toolbox when you can design custom gears. Of course, on Thingiverse, you have literally thousands of gears to pick and print from, but surely you want to make your own?
Blender itself has a Gears add-on, which you can install merely by downloading it and using the Install Add-on feature in the User Preferences. It adds a new type of meshes to the Add Mesh menu, namely Gears. In it you have Gear and Worm Gear, of which I will leave the Worm Gear for later.
Continue reading Printing gears, part I
Having had the MiniFactory 3D printer for a little over a year now, I have been very satisfied with it. It has lots of power, it can build quality prints, and it has just the right amount of the frontier spirit, that hack lab feeling to it. I have been able to produce just about every piece I have come to think about, and having stripped the machine a couple of times to the frame, I feel confident with it and can maintain it well enough. Now, Haaga-Helia bought two more, and here’s a video of one of them in operation.
I don’t know about you, but I am one to get irritated with stuff that hangs out in the wrong places. A good example is the chest strap of the computer backpack: I never use it, but I don’t want to cut it off either and harm company property. Instead, I made a quick mesh in Blender and printed it out on the Minifactory, with the net result of straps no longer hanging around causing me to lose hair even further.
Here’s the starting situation:
And this is the finished, improved situation:
Let’s have a look at the fixing clip. Continue reading Solving everyday niggly bits with 3D Printing
It’s been a nice summer indeed, with scarcely a thought given to 3D or 3D printing at all. But now it is Autumn, school has started, and the heat on the trusty Minifactory has been set on again. The first thing I printed this fall was an unusual little device, a pie stamp, for my friend Keefie Williamson. Continue reading Back after the Summer with a Stamp