Huddle around the computer a little bit, your digital detox is a farce! How can you stay away from great stuff that you can read and chew on … mentally that is! We got you covered, while you were away, busy with your digital detox diet. Don’t be shy, take a look at the week…

On the 3rd installment of “How to Network with HW enginerds in Europe,” we fly to Kiev, Ukraine! (AKA Kyiv, Ukraine.) I only had two days in this city but managed to tour three facilities and pack in four meetings, proving Ukrainians are awesome. In this short visit, I learned a lot of interesting facts…

You know that burning sensation, the one where you dump crunchy granules of fertilizer all over yourself after the spreader explodes? Yeah, that one. What to do? You’re stuck because you want to finish feeding the nitrogen-depleted grass blades, but can’t. Your afternoon plans have been foiled yet again. Well, there’s no better time to…

I know, you may be 5 layers of neon-green acrylic away from overdosing on your custom design addiction. Too bad, it’s about to get 1,000x worse. Ponoko and CloudFab have teamed up to combine the goodness of 2D laser-cut design and the multi-dimensionality of 3D printing to bring you… Personal Factory 4. This is probably…

Are you ready? Really, you may want to cancel the cheese squeezing party you’ve been planning and instead plan on squeezing out some extraordinary 3D models. There is but one reason for this. You have till Friday, November 26th to submit your model for the GrabCAD 3D Printing Challenge. It couldn’t be more simple either.…

Sculpteo, the 3D print service we featured last week, will announce tomorrow (October 19th) that their print service will be available to U.S. makers, fabbers or any other person that enjoys the feel of layered plastic.

I enjoy a good 3D print as much the next stark-raving mad 3D print fan, but there’s something cool about being able to upload a file to a faraway land via a slick interface, pay a fairly high price and get a freshly fabricated 3D print delivered to your front door. One of the latest…

You know what’s cooler than flesh-eating robots? Nothing. That’s the worse it can get. However, printing out robots and robot parts falls into a whole other class of cool which will distract you from any impending robot doom. I’ve never thought about using Shapeways to print different variations of mechanical creatures and their implements of…

You remember that time you were yelled at by that German guy for putting putting peanut butter in the print mechanism? Yeah, that was hilarious. He was like, “SLA!! Schweinhund!! nicht meine Erdnussbutter!!!” and you were like, “wha?” while spraying a goat down with a water hose. I’ll never forget that. It’s sad however that…

Oh yeah, you know you’ve gone too far when you’ve got little Johnny sprayin’ cheese spread out his nose to form building for your moon-based train station display. Those hospital trips are about to drop significantly and your family can rest their weary nostrils. Fab@home Model 2 is here. Fab@Home is a project started by…

The design process is something we absolutely CRAVE here at SolidSmack. You can throw up pretty pictures all day, but going behind the scenes and getting an idea of the work and thought that goes into a design… simply wonderful. This is a perfect example. Jonathan Bergqvist wanted to have a shoulder mount for his…

Look out folks, there’s a CNC storm a’comin’. A wee, cute little storm of laser cut, three-axis THUNDER! It’s the DIYLILCNC and it is so lil’ you’ll want to build it, give it a hug and then command it to do your gantry-mounted bidding! In the same open-source artery as the Makerbot 3D Printer, Chris…

I don’t know about you, but the Tauntaun scene in Empires Strikes Back was EPIC. In one captivating scene, it taught us the single best way to survive a blizzard is to have the carcass of a very large, very smelly animal with you. Scott Holden was equally inspired and decided to create his own…

I’m serious as printed Nutella when I say this. You’re about to get silly thoughts in your head. Silly thoughts about fabbing up this type of trinket or that type of trinket, in a really different way than ever before. CloudFab is set to provide you with more options for your sly design fabrication needs.…

I bet two old tires and a bag of tortillas you’re a Engineer or Designer that loves to model flat-pack, laser cut designs in SolidWorks, but has never ventured to have them made, yeah? Or, maybe you’re curious about a company called Ponoko, but not sure how to get started creating your designs. Well, it’s…

Prepare your drive systems and Plastruders my Cartesian coordinating friends. The great “Horn of DIY Fab” has sounded and the battle to maintain your 3D print fix and MakerBot units sold is EMINENT. Since MakerBot released it’s printer mid-April 2009, demand has been so high they’re turning to the MakerBot community to keep production of…

Plug it in and crank up the DIY make machine baby, we’re about to roll out a huge vat of speculation. Last week at the SolidSmack Posterous site, I put up a tidbit on the new Shapeways 3D Part Database. I commented that it would be interesting to see 3DContentCentral, a user-generated 3D part library,…