About a year ago I designed and printed a 1/4 cup measuring cup. You see, I needed a good way to measure cat food. I only needed the one size, so buying a whole set of measuring cups seemed like a waste. With a MakerBot in the other room, I figured it was best to make just the one size of measuring cup.
Yesterday I taked about fixing a cat toy. Today, I should briefly mention the one I designed a couple of weekends ago. I’ve had the idea kicking around in my head for quite a few months to design a treat-dispensing cat toy. Surprisingly, there is not one already on Thingiverse. I sketched out a quick [...]
I ordered quite a lot of the wrong batteries for a cat toy. Instead of getting rid of the batteries, I hacked the toy.
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.
It does not take much to make a cat toy. Often times, they will make their own toys out of stuff around the house (even if you do not want them to) such as shoelaces. They like crumpled up paper balls. They like the plastic pull-off safety tab from the milk bottle. They like chewing [...]
In the previous Cat Scratcher post, I forgot to include the following picture, taken in a local PetSmart of similar (but more cheaply made) products: The small cat-scratchers go for $10. The larger, more fancy ones — the ones most similar to the one I designed and made — go for $25. In mine, the [...]
When you first start out with the laser cutter (for me, not in-person but via a service like Ponoko), it seems that everyone’s “hello, world” project is a set of coasters. I have done a couple of projects since then, but have had one in particular in my eye that is actually not that much [...]
Life has been busy the last couple of months and my lack of posts on this blog reinforces that. In early January, I got a MakerBot, which has been a bit of a DIY adventure — the sort of adventure that’s maybe not so fun and a little scary in places, but with time and [...]
It looks like I am a little late to the party on this one. Various technology blogs have now featured videos of cats and dogs on the iPad. (…although technically I did this on day two, but have been lazy about posting.) As with the iPhone and Meowmania post, this is the Meowmania [iTunes link] app, [...]
I like to poke fun at Etsy. It seems that for every one reasonable product, there are thousands of crafty products that are a little too “craft.” These include items made with popsicle sticks, puffy paint, shrinky-dinks, rhinestones, and assorted garbage. I am also a big fan of Regretsy for this reason. Until recently, I [...]