A cool stair design I made

I was experimenting with printable ball bearings. Then I had this thought, why not print the ball bearing recess right into the moving parts? This is the monstrosity that came out of SolidWorks. I call him Crazy Gear Face.

This mount goes on the left side of your Prusa on what ever excess threaded rod you have hanging oout. This is a great spot because you can point it at your controller, Y motor, X motor, or your print bed. If you don't have one yet and you like it, I got mine at Best Buy but I'm sure you can find it just about anywhere else.

I chopped off his head!
I don't like using support so hear is a nice way to get him printed - no support needed

He is also 1.5 x bigger the the original so you get all the detail.

I Have realized the sound on the EVO phone was poor, and worse if you want to be in front of the screen because the speaker is on the back.

This stand reflects the sound back around to the front under the phone in horizontal position only.

-O0ps-
I will be adding a area for a data/charging cable, and making a small adjustment so the phone fits without bumping the back camera hump. Oops I tried to keep it back but i didn't model the phone to check the virtual fit:(

This is a spring designed for 3d printing.

Watch the video to see it in action!
youtube.com/watch?v=UxwbQSMbEIA

The more you scale the spring, the smaller the spring constant.

Increasing your filament width increases the spring constant.

The spring can be used in tension or compression, but it must be fairly short with comparatively thick filament width to be used in compression.

It can be made extremely flexible and it is very fun to play with.

It's form was discovered by accident, as it was originally auto generated support for the middle of a hollow cylinder.

I'm still perfecting the design but it works quite well in it's current state.

I will be uploading different sizes (and source files shortly) over the next few days.

The spring was prototyped on a Fablicator.
Fablicator.com

This part was made with Tinkercad. Edit the part online at: tinkercad.com/p/acc0a012f7bc2a51/13

As these at built with hexagons you can print loads of these can put these together to make a massive Causeway

The model was created in Autodesk Inventor 2011, using only 90 degree angles to maintain its rigid appearance. It was designed to stand up on a desk or computer, and was inspired by the increasing popular game called Minecraft. Additionally, the design was meant to test the makerbot. The Creeper is a close to exact scale model of the one in the game. It was supposed to have 4 legs instead of 2 but I decided to have 2 because it would be more structurally strong.

Due to the laws of physics, the original print didn't turn out exactly as i wanted it to. As you can see by the attached images, the mouth sagged a bit because the Makerbot was forced to extrude the plastic in mid air (as it prints layer by layer). I then refined the original design to prevent this from happening by increasing the width of the bottom of the mouth.

Get yours today while quantities last! :-)

Inspired by the other Bic related items posted on here recently.

First version of my optional clamp on nozzle cooling thing for printing small parts. This version is more effective if your fan is not so strong. It only aims a fan to the nozzle.

looks cool

I've some people mention that longer prints with PLA require active cooling. This duct is intended to replace one of the small plastic sides between the front and back acrylic plates for your MK5-6 style extruder.

The smallest fan I could find at the local electronics store was a 40mm fan. However, the front and back acrylic plates are only 35mm apart. This duct gives a mount for a 40mm fan, letting it blow air into a 40mm diameter cone, which narrows to 35mm, which goes to a 35mm wide duct which would point directly at the barrel of the extruder.

It's not really an easy print and wasn't exactly optimized to avoid overhangs. That said, I printed it with minimal problems.

EDIT 2011/05/026: I just installed this part this morning. It fits between the two sides perfectly, but I'll need to adjust some of the dimensions to allow the fan part to better fit.

Proof of concept

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vortex_tube

I love things people can't figure out. Why does the airstream split and produce two temperatures?

From the wiki:

"What is usually agreed upon is that the air in the tube experiences mostly "solid body rotation", which simply means the rotation rate (angular velocity) of the inner gas is the same as that of the outer gas. This is different from what most consider standard vortex behaviour — where inner fluid spins at a higher rate than outer fluid. The (mostly) solid body rotation is probably due to the long time which each parcel of air remains in the vortex — allowing friction between the inner parcels and outer parcels to have a notable effect."

Compressed air in middle, cold air out short side, hot air out long side. Maaaaaaaaagic.

This is a magnet based polarized motor that "levitates as incandescent or sunlight hits the solar cells and takes bounces off the electrons from the sunlight to charge the copper wiring and make it magnetic. This process
counter-acts with the other surrounding magnets and makes the motor persistently spin while in the air.

This is a Makerbot business card holder. Font from dafont.com/designer-block.font. Desgined in Sketchup 8. I have included the sketchup files for those who would like to mod this. I have also put up a blank one if you would prefer not to have the logo or would like to put your own logo on. I think it would be pretty cool of these started popping up around Makerbot Industries!

Approx. Print Time: 1 hr. 12 min.

Blog: thepowerofmaking.blogspot.com

Flickr: flickr.com/photos/ccotter247/

Youtube: youtube.com/user/ccotter247

dexter by franklin.butahe [created with 3DTin]

In honor of next week's Superbowl (and my team getting in), I thought I'd upload this kicking tee. My son and I made one about two months ago. We went from idea, to model, to a non-working prototype, to a redesigned and printed working model in about two hours. Rapid prototyping is great!!!

This kicking tee folds up flat so it can be carried in a backpack, and when it folds out, the legs positively stop in a 60 equilateral triangle and the arm locks out at 90 degrees. We made it with 1/2" schedule 40 PVC we had at the house, but you can adjust the parameters in the attached SCAD for other supplies you have available.

This is a human powered air horn!

This is a unique clock design. You can tell time with by looking at a series of twelve pegs on top of the clock, or with the LCD screen, if you need a more precise time. As time passes, a belt with a bump on it passes under the pegs (all happens hidden inside it) and rises them. One pass from left to right takes 12 hours, after which it takes another twelve hours to do it from right to left.

You can read time by looking at the pegs. If it's AM, then, if the second peg from the left is up, it's 2 AM. If it's PM, then it's the opposite : the second peg on the left means 10 PM. Take a look at my images, one explains it better.

New in this version:
• Updated the drawings to make the servo arm lign up better with the switch
• Made a wooden board to build the electronics
• Made the box a bit better
• Implemented spacers to hold the microswitch.
• Made a parts list
• Used flat cable as the connecting wire for the flip switch to avoid multiple wires (or thick round wires).

These cards are created by Ninja BTL advertising agency.

An openly designed Creative Commons Licensed robot.

Note: New Version (Beta 2.1) posted 06/05/2009

New features: 12 legs instead of 8, "drop-in" center platform, 1:1.8 ratio gears, many small changes.

I only update this listing for major revisions of the walker, it's possible there's a minor revision posted at my site that is not here: 4volt.com/projects/jansen/

What you see here is the Jansen walker, a laser-cut robot, based on the Jansen Mechanism. It has 12 legs and scuttles similar to a crab walking sideways. The brain is a Arduino, and the legs are powered by 2 micro-servos modified for continuous rotation.

This project is heavily influenced by Theo Jansen's natural gearing mechanism, it’s a very efficient mechanical leg design for converting rotary motion into leg movements, and is very elegant in my opinion. The basis is the relative distance of the 12 joins, Jansen calls them "The 12 Holy Numbers". The numbers were developed with a genetic algorithm. In a couple of interviews that he wrote the evolver on a Atari STe computer and it took literally months of 1990’s processing power to find the solution.

For more info on Theo Jansen as well as some video and pictures see strandbeest.com.

I've marked this as non-commercial creative commons licensed, but it would be very easy for anyone get me to license a commercial version to almost anyone. For the most part I would just like to make sure I agree with the usage, and make sure I am aware of it.

See vimeo.com/4221721 for a video of the motion.
The home for this project is 4volt.com/Projects/Jansen/

Also, if you don't have a laser cutter, but would like a set of laser cut parts for this project see: 4volt.com/donate.aspx#jansen

Perhaps one of the funnest projects we have attempted around the .:oomlout:. offices. A five degrees of freedom robotic arm. While we have spent many hours twisting knobs to move pop cans from one point on our desk to another sadly it has not progressed much further.
The main reason for this is the sum total of math knowledge around the oomlout.com offices is about 4 (don't ask us to show our work on how we calculated this) so inverse kinematics is well beyond our reach.

We are releasing it in an imperfect form in the hope that the clever Thingiverse denizens will be able to make it better.

Why this isn't quite ready for sale:
-We lack any inverse kinematics program which makes moving the arm intelligently nearly impossible.
-Without software limits on the servos it is capable of stripping the low cost hobby servo motors (this is alright for testing as they are only five dollars) (we have stripped two in the life of our arm and both happened when we were asking it to do silly things) (this can be fixed by upgrading the servos)
-We haven't completed the 3d model or assembly instructions just yet, but by studying the photos it is possible to assemble. (think more jigsaw puzzle than lego set)
-The gripper, lets just say the gripper needs a little work.

That said it is an amazingly fun toy to play around with, and a good starting point if anyone has ever had a desire to make the perfect robotic arm (it is open source so you'd be free to make and sell your own)

(shameless plug)

For more details about becoming a Robotic Arm Developer visit our blog
(http://www.oomlout.com/blog)