Irrigation stakes, just add MakerBot

I discovered I needed a few more irrigation hose stakes to keep things tidy and in place. Instead of making the trip across town — waiting for the bus or fighting for parking at the local nursery — to buy a $1 bundle of plastic stakes, of which I only needed one or two, I decided to do what any self-respecting maker would do: design some.

The Universal Catapult for Seej

In the late 1700s Eli Whitney, the designer of the cotton gin, developed muskets with interchangeable parts to help the United States military. The manufacture of objects with interchangeable parts was soon a key factor in the industrial revolution. Mr. Whitney is perhaps a little anachronistic when brought alongside castle and siege warfare, but we can use the principles he championed to build a better piece of siege machinery.

Designing & manufacturing a shower caddy

Many modern shampoo bottles have a flat top that allows you to set it down top-side-down. Unfortunately, the brand of all-natural crunchy-granola urban-hippy shampoo that I use does not have such a top. I either cannot get to the last little bit of shampoo or I have to do something creative with the bottle: balance … Continue reading Designing & manufacturing a shower caddy

From Atoms to Bits to Atoms: A Cat Toy’s Journey

After staring at a cat toy for a few minutes, piecing out the geometry, I realized that this would make a great instructional design for an introduction to 3D CAD modeling using simple geometric shapes and boolean transforms.

From lines of code to glazed ceramic

This is a followup to a previous post about my “finger cup” 3D model.  I uploaded the 3D model file to Shapeways and received a version printed in ceramic! This heavy chunk of hardened clay started as about 16 lines of code.  I’m not counting comments and the lines that consist of only closing curly-braces, … Continue reading From lines of code to glazed ceramic

Netninja: looking back on 2011

Happy 2012 2011 was the year of 3D.  No, not movies, silly glasses, and headaches.  It was the year of MakerBot, Blender, OpenSCAD, and Thingiverse.  In fact, it was the year I had to convert the term “makerbot” from a tag to a full-fledged category here on the blog.  3D printing was a central concept, but … Continue reading Netninja: looking back on 2011