I thought I would teach myself some OpenGL during this holiday week. For the uninitiated, OpenGL is the common core 3D rendering that all recent video cards support. Unless you’re doing game development or scientific visualizations, you typically don’t need to mess with it. (And even game developers frequently use higher-level tools to hide the picky … Continue reading Experiments in OpenGL
Category: MakerBot
Hex math cheat sheet
I do a lot of design work for 3D printing (see also: the MakerBot category on this blog). For some reason, I keep finding myself repeatedly doing a lot of math related to hexagons and the triangles that compose them. The first few times, I did the trigonometry by hand. Over time, I offloaded that to Google … Continue reading Hex math cheat sheet
On 3D Printing Lego Robot Accessories
This past week, the engineering department of my company (Elemental Technologies — we’re hiring engineers, by the way) had our annual off-site. This year we did something a little different and had a Lego competition. The previous week, we were given time with the Lego Mindstorms kits to get familiar with the components and programming language. The … Continue reading On 3D Printing Lego Robot Accessories
Halloween goggles
Last Halloween I built some animated light-up steampunk/mad-scientist goggles. This year, I finally got around to documenting the project.
3D Printed Medieval Barbie Armor
Zheng3’s Kickstarter project is to design 3D printable medieval armor for Barbie dolls. I see this as being a great transition to help girls ease their doll play from “let’s go shopping” to a much more active and kick-ass “let’s fight that nasty dragon and save the village.”
![Introducing the Trinket Platter [Update]](https://netninja.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/image2-604x270.jpg)
Introducing the Trinket Platter [Update]
I needed a way to mount a Trinket and power jack, so I designed and printed one.
Octocat MRI
When working with 3D printers, you start with an object file. The object is a solid chunk of 3D geometry. To get that out to the printer, it needs to be “sliced” into layers. This is similar to a laser printer. There, you start with a PDF or PostScript that defines a circle here and … Continue reading Octocat MRI
Son of RatRacer: Mouse Car
After the initial failure described in yesterday’s blog post about the RatRacer, I thought I would scale down the problem a bit. I figured it would be easier to iterate through design tweaks when big parts took 20 minutes to print versus 120 minutes per part. If I ended up with a sound design for … Continue reading Son of RatRacer: Mouse Car
On designing and building the Rat Racer
As you might have guessed from the previous post about attic rats, I had a few leftover rat traps. And what does one do with leftover traps? I supposed you could do something cool with ping pong balls, but I did not have nearly enough traps or ping pong balls. I have a vague childhood … Continue reading On designing and building the Rat Racer
Attic rats lead to custom-printed vent covers
On using a 3D printer to deal with rats…