That’s it. I just placed a bulk order on Amazon for a pallet of thick, super-absorbent napkins. I’ll use half of them to soak up tears OF JOY, and the other half to capture the world-changing ideas worthy of being birthed on the bunching, biodegradable surface of a paper napkin. Why? Two words, combined into one – SOLIDNAPKIN. SOLIDNAPKIN is a mobile app that allows you to instantly digitize napkin sketches into SolidWorks, plus break those sketches into parts and animate them. It may seem a novelty, easily solved with a mobile camera, but think of the part between where you take the photo of your concept/napkin sketch and have…
After working with Magic Leap on the Spacebridge interactive workspace, Wacom is going back to what it does best: making kickass graphic tablets and the accessories that go with them. As we all know, 3D professionals have delicate emotions hands – not that they don’t know hard work, but it’s not quite the coal mines. Anyway, a thicker stylus just ain’t comfortable. (amirite?) Wacom’s new Pro Pen slim is a stylus built more like a classic pen or pencil and comes with an astounding 8,192 levels of pressure sensitivity, tilt recognition, and a lovely eraser. Unlike their other Pro Pen styluses (or styli) that feel like you’re holding a giant…
Markforged has introduced its latest Onyx material, the flame-retardant Onyx FR. The Boston-based company first made its name with high-strength polymer 3D printing. As with the 3D printing industry in general, though, it seems like lately more spotlight attention has been focused on their metal offerings. Certainly metal is exciting, and Markforged is demonstrably working on expansions for its metal side — but never count plastics out as an area of innovation. Polymers remain the larger segment of the overall 3D printing industry, with widespread usage across a variety of applications. High-strength offerings allow for industrial and end-use production. Markforged remains perhaps best known for its carbon fiber-reinforced strong plastics.…
As I travel around the world searching for fellow HW nerds, I’m happy to share my findings with you, dear SolidSmack reader. In this article, I bring you the best events and organizations to check out in the San Francisco Bay area. There more than, perhaps, anywhere, the term “tech” gets conflated with “software”. However, these vetted meetups hold the highest likelihood of being attended by your people — the meat-and-potatoes, wires and CAD and drones and VR and IoT and robotics type of nerds. Previously, we shared where to find hardware nerds in the Seattle-Tacoma area. Since that was published, I also discovered this Seattle VR MeetUp which should…
Get that stretch out of your system with this week’s Spotify-powered SolidSmack Radio Playlist. It’s fashioned up, ready to make you pull your shoulder blades back and knock out another week of meaningful work while you bob your head to the beat. Whether you’re in the shop milling aluminum, sketching the latest product prototypes or modeling up a 3D storm, consider these tracks as a tool for your process. This week on SolidSmack Radio we’ll fire things off with “Cornish Acid” from the legendary Aphex Twin before jumping into fresh tracks from Phuture, James Blake, Big Theif, Morcheeba, and others before wrapping up with “Ghost” from the always-soulful YACHT. Ready?…
Mondays might not be your favorite day of the week, but the good news is that we’re all in this together ladies and gentlemen. 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…