Christoph Laimer published another very useful project. He developed a fully 3D printable and working parametric slew bearings. Since they are developed to be sturdy they can be used in many different project where a simpler 3D printed ball bearing would fail.
Since the design is parametric, you can adapt it to fit your needs. One version even has conical bearings.
Project description:
Ball-bearings are very popular for 3d-printing. However they often fail for real applications. Using Fusion 360 I've created a parametric design of a "Crossed Roller Slew Bearing". The result is a pretty accurate and robust bearing. The bearing including the rollers is 3d-printed in separate parts. There are a few screws needed to clamp the two halves of the inner race together.
I'm always on a search for the new and interesting software tools and when I received a tweet from Punch!CAD about their ViaCAD product I decided to take a look.
ViaCAD looks like an easy to use CAD that has an acceptable learning curve and feature set. You can start from the easy models and move into more complex stuff as you learn. Since it has support for many file formats I was able to open and edit things from various sources. The community behind it and support/tutorials available helped me find answers quickly.
The price seems very affordable and there are no additional fees or vendor lock-in features. It runs both on Windows and Mac machines.
ViaCAD has some powerful 3D printing features and tools:
3D Print Check: This tool checks a part for print viability, displaying warnings or errors to the user.
Surface Normals Check: Facet normals define the inside and outside areas of a part. If facet normals are pointing the wrong way, the 3D printer may have problems creating the part. If you have a normals issue, there are several commands that can help you fix this problem.
Overhang Analysis: The Overhang Analysis tool provides a means to visually inspect modeling areas that may require structural support for 3D printing. Meshes, surfaces, and solids facets normals are compared to the work plane direction. Angles that are less or equal to 45 degrees are highlighted as red.
Wall Thickness: The Wall Thickness Analysis tool provides a means to visually inspect modeling areas that may be too thin for 3D printing. Meshes, surfaces, and solids facets are examined using ray intersections.
Preview Slices: The Preview Slices tool provides a user interface to slice models given a direction and thickness. The dialog box allows for animation through the slices and single stepping. One use of the Preview Slice tool is to verify a part has closed, non-overlapping sections, a requirement for 3D printing. The Save Slices option provides several options to save slices to DXF, STL or adds the results directly into your drawing.
Auto Position: The Auto Position tool translates the model to the positive x, y coordinate system at z=0.
Support Structure: Manually adds geometry to support material as it is created by the 3D printer. Support structures controls, include Attach Radius, Midpoint Radius, Base Radius, Base Thickness and Drag base and midpoints to modify structure location.
Show Printer Volume: Toggles the boundary of the default 3D Printer. The volume is defined within the Printer Definitions dialog box.
Printer Definitions: Sets key parameters of the 3D printer, including length, width, and height of the volume accessible by the printer. The parameters in the Printer Definitions dialog box are used for commands such as 3D Print Check and Auto Position.
Here is the ViaCAD presentation video:
For much more information go and check out the company website:
"CNC Kitchen" published this great video on how he designed gardening clips for his raspberries. He focuses on how to design thin-walled object in Fusion 360 and how to make it more weather resistant and stronger by annealing them in his oven.
Here is the video where you will learn a nice and easy design flow process and see several tools in action:
Christoph Laimer developed this useful 3d printed vise and published an in-depth video on design process and various variables that go into design process, like strength, materials, etc.
Tom Stanton show us his trials and tribulations to get a 3d printed flying wing RC aircraft in the air. Interesting watch if you are into this hobby.
Here is his first video where he goes into design and basic parts printing:
Here is the fully 3d printed flying wing being developed and tested:
The aircraft was printed from clear PLA filament with a 0,4mm nozzle at 220 degree Celsius to maximise the layer strength. Weight of the aircraft was 730g.
Disney Research released their software demonstration which shows how it is possible to automatically design 3d printable robots that can move with different cinematic and motion systems.
You basically just input what you want a robot to do and algorithms calculate the 3d printable design. I see dark future for human engineers job security.
Now it is used for small robotic creatures, but I can see it being used to developed large military mechas or smaller mission customizable war bots.
From project description:
We present an interactive design system that allows casual users to quickly create 3D-printable robotic creatures. Our approach automates the tedious parts of the design process while providing sample room for customization of morphology, proportions, gait and motion style.
The technical core of our framework is an efficient optimization-based solution that generates stable motions for legged robots of arbitrary designs. An intuitive set of editing tools allows the user to interactively explore the space of feasible designs and to study the relationship between morphological features and the resulting motions. Fabrication blueprints are generated automatically such that the robot designs can be manufactured using 3D-printing and off-the-shelf servo motors.
We demonstrate the effectiveness of our solution by designing six robotic creatures with a variety of morphological features: two, four or five legs, point or area feet, actuated spines and different proportions. We validate the feasibility of the designs generated with our system through physics simulations and physically-fabricated prototypes.
Rich makes a chainring for his bicycle but they have different uses in power transmission. Beside metal they can be also made on a small CNC from other materials like carbon fiber.
Finished carbon plate chainring for a custom bicycle:
Geniuses at MIT developed Fab Forms software that enables interactive and customizable design of 3d objects. Designed object can be customized by end user and still remain printable or machinable. Hopefully their code comes to some use in public and not forever lost in academic IP limbo.
Fab Forms description by MIT developer team:
We address the problem of allowing casual users to customize parametric models while maintaining their valid state as 3D-printable functional objects. We define Fab Form as any design representation that lends itself to interactive customization by a novice user, while remaining valid and manufacturable.
We propose a method to achieve these Fab Form requirements for general parametric designs tagged with a general set of automated validity tests and a small number of parameters exposed to the casual user.
Our solution separates Fab Form evaluation into a precomputation stage and a runtime stage. Parts of the geometry and design validity (such as manufacturability) are evaluated and stored in the precomputation stage by adaptively sampling the design space. At runtime the remainder of the evaluation is performed. This allows interactive navigation in the valid regions of the design space using an automatically generated Web user interface (UI). We evaluate our approach by converting several parametric models into corresponding Fab Forms.
Here is a great detailed tutorial by Materialise on how to use their 3-matic software to design custom cranial implants for complex skull and head injuries. Useful for both medical professionals and amateurs.
If you want to make a 3d printer from electronic waste and recycled parts from junk 2d printer, you will find this software tools very useful. They generate model of a 3d printer with FreeCAD plugin based on the parts you have. It should help you enormously to design your own custom 3d printer from available parts.
Example of the generated 3d printer:
The projects are still in development and I don't have enough knowledge to test it out but it looks very promising. There seems to be a link between those two projects but I'm not sure what it is.
You can try the web applications where you can input all of the parts and their specifications and get the output FreeCAD design:
iwillspy13 has made an Instructables tutorial on how to make 3d model of your favorite sneakers and 3d printe them in flexible filament. It is not a full copy but a copy of a inside that fits your feet. Those shoes are probably not usable as the material will probably fall apart when used but it it an interesting project. We need better materials for DIY shoes :-)
Chad Bridgewater is a maker that uses old machines and converts them into 3d printers and other digital fabrication devices. They have a great retro style. See his previous work here, it is a must-study if you are a fan of more rough and raw retro design.
Now he is converting an old metal toolbox into a custom 3d printer. I really like the look and convergence of old and modern. The box he uses is a Huot toolbox that was once used as a "Blower Repair Kit", the toolbox has a fold-down front panel door.
Here is a latest video presentation from video series showing each step of the process:
Antimony is new open source CAD developed by Matt Keeter. Design in Antimony is done by connecting nodes in a graph, each node is defined by a customizable script and nodes usually represent a primitive shape or transform. It is still under development and it is not meant as a professional CAD software for higher level applications. It will be interesting to see how it will develop in the future. If you are enjoying OpenSCAD or any other programmatic CAD (and probably have a slight masochistic note) you will want to try this as an alternative.
It is described as:
Antimony is a computer-aided design (CAD) tool from a parallel universe in which CAD software evolved from Lisp machines rather than drafting tables
... but you will understand it better when you watch the video:
It currently runs on Linux and Mac but you can get it on Windows with help of a virtual machine.
Here is a great contest for all you guys interested in 3d printed satellites and space. It has some great awards also.
One of the contest entries.
The contest is organized by Stratasys, MakerBot and GrabCAD.
About This Challenge
The goal of this challenge is to design a small satellite frame optimized for additive manufacturing. By using the benefits of design for additive manufacturing (DFAM) principles:
Mass distributions and materials can be rethought to minimize weight
Part count can be reduced to improve producibility
and ultimately, cost can be reduced.
Awards for TOP 10 places:
1st Place
- $2,500 cash - Your design printed by Stratasys Direct Manufacturing - Makerbot® Replicator® and material pack. - Featured story in Stratasys online communication and use of your design as an example part in Stratasys trade show and conference appearances.
2nd Place
- $1,000 cash - Your design printed by Stratasys Direct Manufacturing - Makerbot® Replicator® and material pack
3rd Place
- $500 cash - Makerbot® Replicator® and material pack.
4th - 10th Place
- $100 cash - Makerbot T-Shirt - 3D Printed Sample Part
Nikolaj Møbius from Fablab RUC developed a simple and cheap DIY digitizer 3d scanner that can record points in a physical space and convert them into a 2D vector drawing for laser cutting or 3D printing.
It is made with three rotary encoders and gets a points measures controlled by Arduino. Since it currently does only measures more suitable for 2D capture it is ideal for CNC or laser cutting with very good results. Since the software is in early development phase we can expect better 3d scanning or 3d point cloud capture soon.
Check out the project homepage with very detailed build guide and software:
It looks very easy to build even for the beginners.
Here is the description of current limitations:
So far the system is designed to record a 2D surface and convert it into a PDF vector file. The Z axis is simply ignored in the output. Since the system actually records in a 3D space it is possible to export a 3D object for post processing. This is mainly a matter of implementing a another export method.
However, since the arm is not able to reach around an object in a 3D space it will not be possible to record all the points necessary to make a full 3D object (Update: In the source files we have a version with a rotating platform now). One possible workaround would be to implement a rotating base which would enable the arm to approach the object from all sides. Further, the software is only a usable prototype, but could be evolved into a much more solid tool.
I like the plywood frame arm!
For a similar (but less documented) project look at:
