This test piece intentionally breaks the 45 degree rule to make it easier to tell how far you can bridge gaps on your particular printer. I find I can usually get away with about a centimeter.

This should be a reasonably accurate model of the Raspberry Pi board, except for the SD slot which is definitely estimated! Give it a wide berth and you should be fine though...

Macouno's Entoforms are weird and beautiful works of generative art and part of a project he's working on to share his script and ship some of his Fossils from the Future:

indiegogo.com/Entoforms

Relying on a quirk of Blender's subdivision operator, I found I was able to make a fairly attractive dot-based D4.

The idea here is that you have one position with three dots facing up, one with two, one with one and one with zero. To me at least it looks lovely and science-fictiony, for all you space-rogues out there...

I got inspired by the Kit of No Parts:
web.media.mit.edu/~plusea/

And decided it was high time to make a 3D printable speaker prototype. I turned the basic design of a speaker upside down and put the coil on the bottom to simplify construction. (With magnets being as strong as they are lately this is probably fine.)

You'll need a strong, light magnet (the little cube ones from makerbot are probably ideal) paper, and magnet wire.

Once my ToM is constructed, I'll edit in my experimental results, patterns for paper, updates, etc.

I was just checking in on George Hart's page to see if anything new was up and this gem was there. Astounding!

On his webpage he links a detailed paper describing the mathematical theory of objects like this one, the Mathmatica code he used to create it, and of course, photographic evidence that he not only printed it, but successfully assembled it!

georgehart.com/puzzles/SymmetricSticks/index.html

More amazing creations from George Hart!

George Hart is a curator at the awesome Museum of Mathematics. Designs are from his Math Mondays columns.

George Hart's page:
georgehart.com/index.html

Museum of Mathematics:
momath.org/

Math Mondays:
mt.makezine.com/cgi-bin/mt/mt-search.cgi?blog_id=1&Template=tag_display&tag=@Math+Monday

Posted with permission.

Still a work in progress, as I want there to be MANY mane and tail styles and possibly a couple different poses (with associated translate keys to move the wings, horn, ears, etc) but as it is, you can definitely print ponies with or without manes and tail (I figure drill holes would be best for implanting hair), and swap in a horn or wings for pegasi, unicorns and alicorns.

Update: there are now three mane types, and three tail types. The mane/tail combos were made together, but with mix-and-match this is a total of 36 possible designs, not counting "blanking" the mane and tail to make ponies which are "doll hair ready".

Confound these ponies, they drive me to Blender.

So with all the enthusiastic model mashups going on, I realized that if you wanted to make customizable ponies with unique plastic manes and tails and cybernetic prostheses, all you'd need to get started in OpenSCAD would be a halfway decently proportioned mesh.

Thus was born, the pony template.

I plan to fool around with this a fair bit myself, but in the spirit of Thingiverse, I thought I'd upload the template and see what everyone else does with it while I'm working...

The .blend file has a rig with inverse kinematics for easy posing!

George Hart has a lot of great models over at his MakerBot page: georgehart.com/rp/makerbot/makerbot.html

He's given me his blessing to post these to Thingiverse where they can get some additional exposure!

This subgroup of parts is the printable math structures-- I'll be posting the more puzzle-like ones in a separate post. He reports these can require a lot of cleaning, but otherwise come out pretty nicely!

This should be fairly challenging on no-support extrusion printers, but not impossible. The overhangs are large, but not quite horizontal, and the spherical geometry should lend a hand in keeping things sound.

Theoretically.

Haven't tested this one, but I may if the Hercules starts working again soon...

The original for this file had a few faces out of place on the bottom layer, making the STL render as a solid box. Using this file probably won't change how well it prints any, but it might get rid of one or two warnings in your slicer...

Blender has a cloth modeling system that can realistically animate planes as though they were different kinds of cloth. A fun trick I've found is putting different things between a cloth object and the floor and then printing the result of it falling for a few dozen frames.

Provided you can either get your slicer to infer that the "inside" is what's under the dome or just extrude plastic along the perimeter, these will print readily.

I've included the .blend file, but be sure to check out the excellent BlenderCookie tutorial for more details on using the cloth simulator:
blendercookie.com/2010/08/17/cloth-simulation/

Note: I think if you used Blender's "solidify" modifier you could get them in shape enough to take 'em to Shapeways...

Found this dark knight on BlendSwap:
blendswap.com/3D-models/characters/gwar/

And SuperSkein slices it although it'd never slice in a million years on SkeinForge. It might not print especially prettily (it's REALLY non-manifold) but I think it will print.

Note! This will ONLY slice if you're using SuperSkein, and you still may need to tweak some things. (Scale especially!)

I do a bit of chracter design in Blender but it's mostly useless since Skeinforge can't slice meshes with even minor manifold errors, which happen /all the time/ if you design a character with some physical complexity. With SuperSkein, this can be sliced and I'm convinced with the right feedrate setting (probably pretty dang fast) it might even look decent. The .blend file I've included has an armature you can modify in pose mode to reposition the character.

Also, you might want to try tweaking SuperSkien to "sink" the model a bit so both feet rest more firmly on the ground.

Okay, this really isn't a thing but I think it's worth uploading.

SuperSkein is a first-order model slicer that runs in Processing. It's pretty basic still, but since it's object oriented and in Processing (which could be quickly ported to C) it should be easy for the community to hack and improve.

Right now it slices models in /seconds/ that'd totally bog down Skeinforge and can slice models with non-manifold errors without a problem. It's missing nearly all of Skeinforge's features, but I've got a MakerBot to print a more-or-less-viable object from it already.

Happy hacking!

EDIT: Added 1.1 with some niceties added and one of the big basic bugs fixed.
Also also edit: Now on github!
github.com/MaskedRetriever/SuperSkein
If you want collaborator access just message me or comment!

Neat little feature in Blender2.5 these days, automated generation of toruses with the polygons twisted. To make this and other shapes, enable the plugin:

file -> user preferences -> add-ons

There's a whole bunch of plugins in the Add Mesh category that create great shapes, including a rather impressive platonic solid generator. Of course you'll need to get a recent build from graphicall.org, which I highly recommend as newer versions are very stable and close to Beta-ready.

Note on Blender 2.5's .stl support: it is also a plugin you have to enable, and for some reason objects need to be scaled up 5x before exporting. I have submitted a bug report on this...

UPDATE! There's nothing wrong with .stl support, but you need to go to apply -> scale if you've scaled your design in object mode before it will come out properly.

Download Spider Jerusalem's specs and have your home maker spit out as many pairs as you like!

Backstory:

In the comic Transmetropolitan, Spider Jerusalem is a gonzo journalist of a future where ubiquitous intelligence, nanotech and genetic engineering have transformed the world.

At the beginning of the story, he arrives in the City with a staff reporting gig that gets him the basic necessities for life in the City: an apartment and a Maker. The Maker in his apartment is basically what we all imagine our RepRaps and MakerBots will one day become: a general assembler.

He uses it to fabricate a custom-tailored suit and a pair of glasses with onboard cameras. Spider's distinctive odd-shaped 3D glasses were made by his maker as a joke, because this being the world of Transmetropolitan, it was stoned.

Be glad your MakerBot is not on drugs.

Felt a very urgent need to get this out there once I saw this xkcd:
xkcd.com/743/

As much fun as having a tiny violin might be, I'm really hoping we'll eventually have a real violin, or at the very least ample violin accessories here.

Print, preferably with colored plastic. The two pieces are designed to snap together-- if I've miscalculated please let me know so I can correct it.

Edit note! This is not an easy build due to the many delicate petals! Try scaling it up considerably bigger to make it easier!

If you've built a working RepRap, it's pretty safe to say you've earned this one.

I put four sewing loops on it for easy stitching.

Earning the Badge: If you've built a MakerBot and are able to print it, you've earned it!

Optional Criterion: If you meet the first criteria but don't feel you've really /earned/ it yet, then... ~you will know when you have~.

Hand-carved numbers on a D6 is cool. Hand-carved numbers on a mass-producable, shareable D6 is even better!

On Monday the tutorial for making this in Blender 2.51 will be up!

Sculpted in Blender using the Start Points. Should be printable, haven't gotten around to fixing my 'struder yet though...

The Start Points:
thingiverse.com/thing:1839

This one's based on Start Point C, which is expressly designed for sculpting critters with long muzzles like this one.

The Sculpt Mode in Blender has been upgraded pretty significantly for 2.5!

To celebrate, I've uploaded some .blend files which are already set up for sculpting. There'll be a tutorial on the Thingiverse Blog later, but if you've used Blender to do a few things like model scaling, opening one of these in 2.5 should be mostly self-explanatory.

The different files represent different shapes to use as start points. They all have flat bottoms and so they'll at least start out printable!