When you think of furniture designs in the far future, you might think of crazy generatively designed stools that hover in mid-air or chairs that push themselves around like a Roomba to fit your Feng Shui taste of the moment. But these designs don’t actually SOUND comfy now, do they? Apart from the unease of having a chair with a built-in rocket, reading on a piece of levitating furniture doesn’t sound like a good way to spend an afternoon. French designer Stefan Marji has another idea. Instead of creating fantastical, energy-consuming chairs, why not create ones which are made out of as little parts as possible and assemble themselves? His…

We’ve said it time and time again, but the Raspberry Pi is just so dang cool and we believe all designers and engineers should have one in their toolkit—if not on their desktop. While there is a bit of a slight learning curve, it’s nothing that today’s designers and engineers can’t handle on a leisurely Saturday. So why not start now? The Raspberry Pi Mastery Bundle includes 8 courses to get started creating your very own Amazon Echo or even a KUKA-like robotic arm for your desktop (how’s that for office bragging rights). Throw in any of your own 3D printed housing designs—like a drone—and the opportunities are limitless! For…

Well, you probably saw the LEGO Bugatti Chiron (42083) and the life-size LEGO Bugatti Chiron, but do you have the 3,599 piece 3D model of the Bugatti Chiron? If not, you’re about to. GrabCAD user, dk (“a single D, for that single dose of pimpin'”) is a LEGO modeling all-star with multiple LEGO Ideas, Architecture, and Technic sets modeled up and a handful of tutorials that break down the basics of modeling LEGO creations. It’s about time we shared one of his models and I’m glad he took on the Bugatti Chiron. The model was created using Autodesk Inventor (including iMates) with all parts numbered following the BrickLink convention. He…

This past July, we checked out the APSX Spyder Desktop CNC Machine. It’s not the only sub-$5k high-precision desktop CNC machine on the market, of course. One commentator brought up another option, the Saturn Series CNC Router from Fine Line Automation. The team at Fine Line Automation call the Saturn Series “the most advanced CNC router in their class today.” It’s being marketed as a fully assembled, 425-pound piece of industrial strength machinery made of 4mm thick welded steel tubing and plates, precision milled components, and loads more precision machining features. The Saturn Series was built to last years upon years of use/abuse cutting wood, metal, or any other material…

Last week millions were left in the wake of the fourth-strongest hurricane to make landfall. Towns were flooded, homes were lost, and businesses were destroyed. There’s a lot of clean up ahead and the affects are so vast it’s hard to know where to start. We can start though, and do it a little at a time, because that little can turn into a whole lot for people who have lost everything. One company that lost everything is Maritech Machine in Panama City, Florida. Maritech Machine, Inc., is a woman owned small business that was established in 1991, and incorporated in 1993 in the state of Florida. We are primarily…

Perhaps you wouldn’t simply hand your young kid his or her own iPhone to play Fortnight all day every day, but would you stop them from having their own mobile phone if they had to learn how to build it from scratch? What about if they had to code their own apps? The MAKERphone may look like a bare-bones mobile phone, but it allows kids 11-years-old and upwards to make their own phones from scratch. This includes soldering the circuits, putting together the hardware pieces, and coding all the phone’s apps. As you can guess, this ambitious project teaches users more than what is inside a phone. Among other things,…