I’m a bit giddy. It would seem the spirit of open source is alive and well at MakerBot… Well, as much as it can be for a corporate-owned, publically-traded entity beholden to shareholder demands and selling product shrouded in IP protection. Be that as it may, for the first time in a long time, we’re seeing on the pages of MakerBot such words as ‘modifiable hardware design’, ‘interchangeable nozzles’, ‘experimental’ and our favorite ‘designed to be hacked’. https://youtu.be/vxApLLkKk74 MakerBot has launched MakerBot Labs. But that’s just part of it. It’s being described as a ‘new experimental platform’. MakerBot Labs is one product of this platform (you can find it on their website…
If you’re looking to breathe new life into that old FDM 3D printer you bought back in 2012, experimenting with new materials is a surefire way to reinvigorate that desktop 3D printing passion. And we’re not talking about pointless paperweights, either. When it comes to exploring the possibilities of new materials, Colorfabb makes some of the best filament on earth. And if you’re a fan of the smell of fresh cut lumber, and want to see how your crazy wavy gravy generative designs can handle the old pulpy stuff, the company’s Woodfill filament is a must. Manufactured with 70% PLA and 30% recycled wood fibers, Woodfill prints end up with…
It’s not always easy to juggle multiple hats in the design and engineering worlds—but if there is a common language that will likely end up saving you a lot of time and frustration down the road, it’s having g basic knowledge of visual communication. While nobody can become an Aaron Draplin overnight, having a strong grasp on the fundamentals of color theory and layout could easily make or break your projects—particularly when communication specific details to stakeholders. Thankfully, you don’t need to go back to design school to get started with leveling up your visual communication game. From setting up an Adobe Creative Cloud environment to building a portfolio website,…
Contrary to popular belief, not all chairs are made for the same purpose. There are Monobloc chairs made for public events, rolling chairs designed with the sole purpose of spinning around while sitting in them, and chairs with arms so comfy you never sit in them quite properly. The Hybrid Chair serves two of those multiple purposes. You see, it’s both a desk chair and a lounger. When it’s time to work, the Hybrid Chair can be positioned as an upright desk chair forcing you to sit properly. It can also be lowered into a more comfortable lounging position once you are finished with work (or just too lazy to do…
Forehead slap. This Onshape update has so many great additions. Really, it’s impossible to pick a top 3 – All 10 could be in the Top 3. But that’s also impossible, so I squeezed my eyes as tight as they could go, until tears popped out onto three new features – those are the top 3 you see below. Good ones? You tell me. I’m particularly excited about that Fill Surface Guides. You? You can see the past update history and catch the latest on the Onshape What’s New page. Here, we pick our ‘Top 3 Onshape Updates’ and provide a quick overview of each. To see our previous picks, visit our New Onshape Features page.…
MakePrintable announced an interesting integration with Cura that should make life much easier for many 3D printer operators. Recap: MakePrintable is a startup that offers a very powerful 3D model repair service. Their cloud-based software seems to be able to repair even the most awfully formed, but still STL-syntactically correct 3D models. I’ve tossed some truly terrible models at the service and found they are invariably correct when complete because of MakePrintable’s unusual algorithm. As we wrote in a previous story, MakePrintable’s new “Mammoth” algorithm involves a voxel-based approach that seems to wrap misbehaving 3D models in different ways than with most other repair tools, resulting in fantastic results, even on ridiculously…