What to do with a 3D Printer: Make Garden Tools. This entry was posted on May 21, 2012 by Alex English. The gardening season is here and it's time to get out and work the dirt. Even very traditional home tasks and pastimes like gardening can benefit from a 3D Printer. I've got a few garden accessories that I've designed for myself to use in the garden this season.
Hanging Garden Trellis Netting First, I needed a way to hang the trellis for my peas and green beans. There was already a cable stretched over the top of this long bed, so I just needed a way to attach the netting to the cable. Rather than tie the netting to the cable with twine or wire, I wanted a solution that would lower the net a bit so it would be easier to secure at the bottom. Seed Spacer I use a hybrid system to lay out my garden, a combination of square foot gardening and hexagonal plant spacing. This kind of spacing isn't too hard to do by hand, but is much faster and easier with a tool to help. Here are the spacers (4 inches, 3 inches, 2 inches, and 1.5 inches: HOWTO | OpenKnit. NINJA SPHERE: Next Generation Control of Your Environment by Ninja Blocks. Your Ninja Sphere learns about you, and your environment. It uses data from sensors and actuators to build a model that can inform you if something is out of place. It can monitor temperature, lighting, energy usage, you and your pets' presence, and anything else you connect to your sphere.
By using data from your devices, environment, and location your sphere is able to advise you intelligently and give you control only when you need it. We already support a huge array of devices, but because our approach is open source, almost anybody can write and share a driver to connect a device to your sphere. This essentially future proofs your Ninja Sphere, giving you peace of mind that as new devices come onto the market, your Ninja Sphere can support them. The Spheramid is the gateway that enables the Ninja Sphere. WiFi - Any IP things like smart lightbulbs, IP cameras, smart TVs - anything that connects to your wireless or wired network. USB - The Spheramid is a whole (tiny) computer. Open-source metal 3-D printer. Source[edit] Gerald C. Anzalone, Chenlong Zhang, Bas Wijnen, Paul G. Sanders and Joshua M. Pearce, “Low-Cost Open-Source 3-D Metal Printing” IEEE Access, 1, pp.803-810, (2013). doi: 10.1109/ACCESS.2013.2293018 open access preprint Attention: For notification when this page is updated, sign up for a free Appropedia account, enable email, and "Watch" this page.
See also: Abstract[edit] Technical progress in the open-source self replicating rapid prototyper (RepRap) community has enabled a distributed form of additive manufacturing to expand rapidly using polymer-based materials. Bill of Materials[edit] Printed Parts[edit] Print these STL files on any flavor of RepRap. Construction[edit] Note to Makers[edit] If you have made a RepRap before this will be easy -- if you are not familiar with RepRaps or Deltabots like the Rostock - more detailed build instructions are available at the MOST Prusa RepRap build page and the Delta Build Overview:MOST. Initial Prep[edit] Single pillar build[edit] 3X[edit] DIYROCKETS | 3D ROCKET CHALLENGE. The Electron: Crash Course Chemistry #5. DIY Book Scanning | A forum dedicated to book scanning, open source, DIY digitization. The Tricorder project. OPENROV. The Free Universal Construction Kit. Ever wanted to connect your Legos and Tinkertoys together?
Now you can — and much more. Announcing the Free Universal Construction Kit: a set of adapters for complete interoperability between 10 popular construction toys. Fig. 1. The Free Universal Construction Kit. Overview Video by Riley Harmon for F.A.T. F.A.T. The Free Universal Construction Kit offers adapters between Lego, Duplo, Fischertechnik, Gears! Motivation Our kids are already doing it! Opening doors to new creative worlds is one major reason we created the Free Universal Construction Kit. The Kit offers a “best of all worlds” approach to play and learning that combines the advantages of each toy system.
Finally, in producing the Free Universal Construction Kit, we hope to demonstrate a model of reverse engineering as a civic activity: a creative process in which anyone can develop the necessary pieces to bridge the limitations presented by mass-produced commercial artifacts. Download Figure 2. We (F.A.T. Implementation. THE Printrbot by abdrumm. Make. Introducing The MakerBot Replicator™ EmailShare 900EmailShare January 10, 2012 (Brooklyn, NY) – MakerBot Industries is excited to announce the launch of its latest product, The MakerBot Replicator™, which will debut at CES in Las Vegas, NV on Tuesday, January 10th. Available in the MakerBot store for pre-order today! The MakerBot Replicator™ is the ultimate personal 3D printer, with MakerBot Dualstrusion™ (2-color printing) and a bigger printing footprint, giving you the superpower to print things BIG!
Assembled in Brooklyn by skilled technicians, the MakerBot Replicator™ is ready within minutes to start printing right out of the box. Starting at $1749, The MakerBot Replicator™ is an affordable, open source 3D printer that is compact enough to sit on your desktop. With a build envelope that’s roughly the size of a loaf of bread, The MakerBot Replicator™ gives you the power to go big. The MakerBot Replicator™ is ideal for personalized manufacturing, providing a new way to make the things you want and need. Britta Riley: A garden in my apartment. "Interdependence is an extremely powerful social infrastructure that we can actually harness to heal some of our deepest civic issues, if we apply open source collaboration.
" --Britta Riley in her May, 2011 TED talk Britta is an artist and technologist from New York, and owns a company called Windowfarms.org. The company makes hydroponic platforms for growing food in city windows, designed with the help of more than 1,800 enthusiastic collaborators from all over the world. Britta took her inspiration from NASA, which uses hydroponics to explore how to grow food in space. She reasoned that many apartment windows have less than stellar conditions for growing plants, especially in a Northern winter. Conditions in any particular window would limit what could grow there—but perhaps hydroponics could contribute to food security on earth. NASA (or a large corporation) would be able to fund their own research and development (R&D) to solve the problem, but Britta took a more egalitarian approach. Making silica aerogel at home. Build a Laser 3D Printer - Stereolithography at Home. Here is how to make a Stereolithography 3D Printer.
It is still a bit of a work in progress but so far it is working pretty well. This is mainly an experiment which started as a Delta Robot Stereolithography Printer but ended as a more traditional Cartesian Stereolithography Printer. "I'll be honest, we're throwing science at the walls here to see what sticks. No idea what it'll do. " - Cave Johnson Stereolithography (SL or SLA from Stereolithography Apparatus) is an additive manufacturing process using a vat of liquid UV-curable photopolymer "resin" and a UV laser to build parts one layer at a time. On each layer, the laser beam traces a cross-section pattern of the part onto the surface of the liquid resin. I have wanted a 3D Printer for a while now and there are some very reasonably priced kits available like the Makerbot, Ultimaker and the RepRap project.
This project is Open Source Hardware. WikiHouse / Open Source Construction Set. Tornio Digitale — FabLabItalia. Creo Elements/Direct Modeling Express 4.0. In order to understand the preferences of our free software users, PTC utilizes data monitoring technologies to obtain and transmit data on system use and performance and for gathering metrics on users of our free software. We will share this data within PTC, its affiliated companies and our business partners, including within the United States and elsewhere for technical and marketing purposes and will endeavor to ensure that any such data transferred is appropriately protected.
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CERN launches Open Hardware initiative – Open Hardware License is here… CNC Machines | Sindrian Arts. The 2′x4′ Kikori is out! The MDO parts are available now for just $400, but hurry; I’m only offering five at that reward level. After that, they’ll go up to $500. The reason they aren’t cheaper is because only nine pieces actually change between the 4′ version and the 2′ version. However, this also means that the 2′x4′ Kikori gantry has the ability to upgrade itself by making only nine new pieces! I’m also offering the mechanical and full kits at reduced reward levels: for the first three backers the mechanical kit is only $2000, and the full kit just $2500!
In other news, since the Artisan’s Asylum is going to be moving to a new location, it’ll be closed during the month of August. I remembered that Joseph Schlesinger, one of the guys who helped me build the the blackFoot at the Asylum, had just moved MakeIt Labs (a “Makerspace/Hackerspace/Open-Access Workshop”) into a new space up in Nashua, so I shot him an email asking if I could set up the Kikori there.
Open Source Architecture (OSArc) - Op-Ed. As part of the special report on open-source design published in issue 948, Domus approached Carlo Ratti to write an op-ed on the theme of open-source architecture. He responded with an unusual suggestion: why not write it collaboratively, as an open-source document? Within a few hours a page was started on Wikipedia, and an invitation sent to an initial network of contributors. The outcome of this collaborative effort is presented below. The article is a capture of the text as of 11 May 2011, but the Wikipedia page remains online as an open canvas—a 21st-century manifesto of sorts, which by definition is in permanent evolution.The contributors to this article included Paola Antonelli, Adam Bly, Lucas Dietrich, Joseph Grima, Dan Hill, John Habraken, Alex Haw, John Maeda, Nicholas Negroponte, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Carlo Ratti, Casey Reas, Marco Santambrogio, Mark Shepard, Chiara Somajni, Bruce Sterling References — R.
Botson, R. Brighton Mini Maker Faire | Celebration of Makers in Brighton, 3rd Sept, Dome Foyer. Iris Business Card by clide. InMojo - Make. Share. Live. Open Source Hardware. Cathal Garvey demonstrating Do-it-Yourself DNA extraction in a tent. Where to Find Information About Metals and Alloys. March 31, 2011 AT 10:03 am As I’ve gotten more and more into machining, I’ve found that I often require information about metals and alloys.
I’ve collected a few resources which I’ve found helpful, and which I’d like to share with you. There are several places where you can find decent metal information — by “information”, I don’t just mean density or history of human use — I’m referring to information about working with a metal, such as machinability, weldability, heat treatment, and so forth. The standard reference for most alloys used in manufacturing is the Metals Handbook, published by ASM International (formerly the American Society for Metals). This is the Unabridged OED of metal info. The upside is that it contains pretty much all the extant information about metals and alloys, the downside is that it spans over a dozen volumes and costs $$.
ASM also offers subject guides on their website, which are free. The second resource I’d recommend is Machinery’s Handbook. Related. The Original Egg-Bot Kit - Evil Mad Science Wiki. Home | OpenEnergyMonitor. Clockwork Variations - MakerBot Industries. Lineage. Some people may be interested in the lineage of the Mendel parts that I sell. I built HydraRaptor in 2007 as a RepStrap. At first it was a milling machine made from high spec CNC components bought cheaply on eBay. I used it to mill the parts for the RepRap MK2 extruder that Adrian Bowyer designed. My only change to his design was to add a shaft encoder for more accurate control of the DC motor. It gradually replaced its own parts to evolve into a more reliable design by the beginning of 2009. After nearly a year of experience with this extruder I designed my own from scratch using a geared stepper motor and threaded pulley pinch wheel.
With this extruder I printed the parts to make myself a RepRap Mendel in March 2010. To allow me to print warp free raft-less ABS objects I added a heated bed and a fume cupboard / heated chamber. Together these two machines have printed more than 100 Mendel by December 2010. Prusa Mendel. Prusa Mendel and the Clonedels. When we started the school term, we had just finished a new Prusa Mendel. After the students saw the Prusa, it seemed that everyone wanted to make one. As part of our RepRap breeding program, I set a goal of 10 Mendels over the course of a ten-week school term (seemed like one a week would be reasonable based on last spring term’s success).
However, we ran into some electrical / control issues in debugging our first Prusa and time in the term kept ticking, ticking, ticking into the future. A year ago, I had thought about creating a set of molds to cast the plastic parts for a Classic Mendel. I concluded that there were too many parts and consequently too many molds (which would exhaust our budget for the RepRap Breeding project). The Prusa Mendel, however, has way fewer parts. As soon as each mold plate was printed on one of our 3D powder printers, two students (Scott Tandoi and Travis Nicholes) worked to make the molds.
We consider these molds to be in alpha status. Scientific American: five 3D printers. Here's What A 3D Printed Guitar Sounds Like. Small Scale Manufacturing - Practical Resources. I had originally intended to discuss sources of practical knowledge in small-scale manufacturing at a later time. This week, however, I've been getting a lot of very good feedback from readers in the U.S. who are interested in small-scale manufacturing. Some of these people are even operating their own small-scale enterprises.
So I thought I'd list the resources mentioned by these readers, in addition to listing a few other sources I have discovered. First, there is the Open Source Machine site ( a source mentioned on another website by two posters who call themselves Fleam and Jokuhl. The Open Source Machine site is dedicated to providing potential manufacturers with small, easily-built manufacturing machines that can be made from recycled and reused parts. Plans for these machines are developed for free and published on the Web without copyright or royalty or intellectual property restrictions, so that anyone can use them. Open Source Machine. BFI Challenge & Global Village Construction Set in 2 Minutes.
Global Village Construction Set. Have 3D Printing and Mass Customization Reached The Tipping Point? Its the Candyfab 6000, 3D printing in sugar. The Revolution Shall be Caramelized. In 2007, TreeHugger built a special website that looked at the future of 3d Printing and Downloadable Designs. I wrote: With digital designs we decide what we want from the best in the world, not what Mr.
Malcolm Harris at Sharable writes that this future is getting awfully close. As manufacturing technologies follow the path from factory to home use, like personal computers, "personalized" manufacturing tools will enable consumers, schools and businesses to work and play in new ways. Download the PDF here. I first heard the term "mass customization" from the architects Steven Kieran and James Timberlake, describing their reinvention of the process of prefabrication.
For some, product subversion is a welcome challenge, while others want to be more considered in the way that they consume. About « Prometheus Fusion Perfection. NYC Resistor » Electronics, Hacking, Classes, and Workspace. RepLab. Thingiverse - Digital Designs for Physical Objects.