I spoke with Paulo Kiefe, the founder of STEMFIE, a new site dedicated to providing 3D printable construction set components. The site, as you might gather from its name, is focused on providing an ability for students to learn principles of construction. STEMFIE provides an “open educational construction set” for making new designs. Aside: It turns out that Kiefe was one of the designers who produced the original #3DBenchy 3D model back in 2015, which is perhaps now the most-3D printed object in the universe. See a 3D Studio for 3DBenchy here. Fabbaloo: What is the STEMFIE project? Paulo Kiefe: The STEMFIE project attempts to create a new application for…

While most of us reuse old newspaper to wrap breakables, hold fish and chips, or create paper-mache sculptures of our pets, Atsushi Adachi has a much more creative use for them. A Japanese visual artist, Adachi takes old newspapers and uses them to create replicas of machines FROM THE PAST. If you’ve ever been to Japan, you may notice their newspapers are a lot thinner and harder to work with than newspapers from other countries. Apart from locally sourced papers, he also tries to find newspapers from other parts of the globe. No matter what country it comes from, however, Adachi uses newspapers from the same time period as the…

Thank you! A big thank you to everyone who took part in the SolidSmack 2020 Reader Survey. We’re sifting through the feedback to make SolidSmack even better and so glad to have you a part of it. Winner of the Gift Card is: Matt B. An email will go out shortly with information to claim your prize. Thank you again to all the SolidSmack Readers! Greetings, SolidSmack Reader! Welcome to 2020. By now you’ve composed yourself, returned to a normal schedule, and adjusted to all that’s new and amazing about living in a new decade and leaving a previous one behind. Ahhhh. There’s just one thing you haven’t done yet…

What are the tech trends for 2020 and the decade to come? Read on and watch the video for all the gadget goodness that catches a HW engineers’ eyes at CES 2020! This year’s show in Las Vegas expected over 170,000 attendees and took up literally millions of square feet of exhibit space. That’s a lot of ground for one enginerd to cover. Luckily, I was able to pull in more vantage points from some other hardware pros. Trends The Talk: 2020 Tech Trends to Watch AR and VR In this talk before the show, it was mentioned that AR is expected to overtake VR in quantity of useful applications.…

While there’s nothing particularly wrong with traditional horizontal doors, diagonally-opening “sideways-folding” metal doors look way cooler when you open them. Case in point, YouTuber Phil Vandelay’s folding metal door for his new workshop: Despite its daunting appearance, all it takes to make this futuristic door are a few sheets of metal, some metal frames, and a couple of hinges. Sounds familiar? That’s because these materials are almost exactly the same ones you need to make a normal door; the only difference being this door frame is a little more complicated. Instead of making a large rectangular door frame around a rectangular door, Phil makes a series of smaller triangular frames…

As purveyors of prime Grade A web content, the SolidSmack crew has done some of the heavy-lifting to make sure you get your Mondays started on the right track. Welcome to The Monday List. Every Monday, we link you up with some of the most insightful, informative, and socially-relevant stories to keep tabbed, bookmarked, reading listed, pocketed, or what have you to get your week started on the right foot. Be sure to check in each week for a new crop of freshly sprouted words curated straight from the source of your favorite homegrown ‘Smack. What We’re Reading This Week: Is the Viral Non-Ad Ad the Future of Advertising? A remarkable…