If any of your hobbies involve turtles and/or squishing things with your fingers while giggling like a schoolchild hopped up on oatmeal pies, you’re going to love our model this week. Jacob Stanton, also known as ‘jakejake’, has created a small turtle toy that squishes down and bounces around on its springy little legs. They’re so squishy, you could make a bed of them. That’s right, a squishy turtle bed. Not weird at all. The Squishy Turtle model is a simple 5-piece assembly with five additional shell variations. Each part is designed to print with ABS or PLA, with PLA using for the prints you see here. The top and…

Jet packs aren’t going to be the only way to get around in the not-too-distant future. While it sounds like pure science fiction, the days of flying cars are soon upon us. And no, it’s not Elon Musk helping to lead the charge on this one. This time around, it’s none other than Google co-founder Larry Page. Kitty Hawk, a flying car company heavily backed by the tech titan, recently posted a video documenting their first flying car prototype, the Kitty Hawk Flyer. Designed to operate over water, the “all-electric aircraft” won’t require a pilot’s license to fly. Suffice to say, the result looks absolutely promising: https://youtu.be/mMWh4W1C2PM “When we set…

Code. You don’t have to be a computer science hotshot to take the deep dive—heck, some people are up and running with their first project in a matter of weeks. But knowing where and how to enter can be half of the battle. The recently-launched Learn How to Code 2017 Bundle is the perfect entry point and includes over 156 Hours of premium coding instruction, from Python to Ruby & everything in between. Consisting of ten courses in total, the ‘Pay What You Want’ bundle covers not just specific code languages, but also how and why you may decide to choose one over another depending on the project at hand.…

Don your favorite bathrobe, cream that coffee, and get comfortable with this week’s SolidSmack Weekend Reader. The Weekend Reader features a handful of the most interesting articles featured on the ‘Smack over the past week ranging from tips and tricks to inspirational designs, processes, and more. So lay back, relax and take a load off while reading the top ten stories on SolidSmack this past week. Oh and uh…don’t forget to shed some much-needed sunlight on your face, too. How Onshape Changes Traditional CAD – Real-Time Deployment Onshape is the first full, cloud-based CAD platform. Sure, it makes it independent of hardware or operating system, but more important is 1)…

Stand-alone, desktop 3D printers seem to be going the way of the Dodo bird with the introduction of all-in-one machines, which offer more than simple printing. There are an increasing of companies who have eschewed traditional 3D printing to incorporate additional functionality. I used to think it was all a gimmick, but after seeing a few in action (ZMorph, BoXZY, XYZ Davinci), I have since changed my mind. And why not, today’s makers want something more, something akin to a machine shop on a desktop. Snapmaker is the latest, and hopes they fit the bill with their modular all-in-one platform. As outlined in the video, the 3D printer features an…

Last August, woodworker John Heisz blew up the internet after demonstrating the cutting power of a single piece of 8×11 paper when cut into a circular disc and mounted it like a 40-tooth wood shredder in an average table saw. Not only was this seemingly harmless piece of paper capable of delivering the mother of all paper cuts at 40,000 RPM, it was also perfectly capable of slicing through a piece of wood: https://youtu.be/rYfkhdKcEiE And in an age when YouTube videos documenting everything from waterjet cutting and pressing random objects are racking up millions of views, it seems only natural for there to be videos documenting what else a paper…