MakerBot announced a new service called MakerBot CloudPrint, which is intended to deliver a seamless 3D printing experience to clients. MakerBot Print Up to now MakerBot 3D printer operators would use MakerBot Print to prepare and schedule jobs for attached MakerBot devices. That tool has been around for several years, and it’s proven to be quite useful. When I tested it on the Replicator+ I found the experience using a networked slicing tool to be transformational. Instead of tediously loading prints onto a stick or card and walking it over to the 3D printer, it was then as simple as pressing “Print” in MakerBot Print, and the file would be…

I personally love running long distance but like many others who don’t, I somehow do better when I’m paced against someone else. It may just be a competitive nature but seeing someone trying to outrun me makes me want to one-up them instead. The Ghost Pacer by engineer Abdur Bhatti is made for those who are motivated by another runner but even more for runners who desire someone to pace them to improve their run and strengthen their body. Only, instead of going up against a real person, you’re running against your holographic 3D avatar. Your Personal Running Coach The Ghost Pacer device is a 90-gram, mixed reality headset which…

I know you’ve got a special place in your heart for the ol’ dry cell battery but I think we can all agree that a torus of hot plasma heated to millions of degrees Celsius is absolutely ideal for all our personal energy needs. Unfortunately, personal fusion power is quite possible yet with, ya know, decades-long research and builds of massive fusion reactors around the world yet to hit the megawatt breakeven point. But, you know what is possible? You’re very own scale model of largest tokamak in the world, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (ITER). The 3D Printed ITER Tokamak is a 1:100 scale version of the experimental fusion…

At first glance, the Herring Blade by Che-Wei Wang and Taylor Levy (also known as CW&T) looks like your typical box cutter. You slide it up to extend the blade, swipe it back to retract, and the rest is up to your very careful hands. But upon closer inspection, you’ll see how this blade is much more simple and way more stylish: Instead of a plastic stopper or positive thumb stop in other cutters, the Herring Blade uses a combination of a neodymium magnet and a precision-machined latch to keep its blade in place and smooth, simple, one-handed operation. To extend the blade, all you do is press your thumb…

When you’re bakin’ up 3D models daily, you’ve likely got your standards and purchase parts modeled up and ready to go, a system in place to create them, or a snarky intern with an old set of calipers ready to do your bidding. We’ve gone past thinking it could be found at an online model repo but, if Thangs has their way, that may soon change. Thangs is a new search engine from deep learning 3D geometry search developers Physna. Founded in 2015, they’ve spent the last several years wranglin’ their very own deep learning data tech that’s set to take 3D search beyond the attempts we’ve seen over the…

For those who are only familiar with its Minecraft counterpart, obsidian is a volcanic glass formed when lava cools so quickly that a crystalline structure is unable to form. It isn’t terribly hard to find either, so maker Patrick Adair decided to combine his love of Minecraft with his love of making things to craft his own real-life obsidian block (diamond pickaxe not required). Now, you may be thinking, I’ve never seen the purple vein obsidian like the type in Minecraft, so how did he make it? Well, Patrick’s block is actually created with a combination of obsidian, purple glow powder, and purple pigment (to give it that iconic Minecraft…