If you need something clever for a gift, consider this two-part 3D-printed Christmas ornament that has a small secret compartment. But there’s a catch: the print is a challenging one. So make sure your printer is up to the task before you begin (or just mash PRINT and find out). Want a challenging print that’s […]
[Dennis] of [Made by Dennis] has been building a Voron 0 for fun and education, and since this apparently wasn’t enough of a challenge, decided to add a number of scratch-built improvements and modifications along the way. In his latest video on the journey, he rigorously calibrated the printer’s motion system, including translation distances, the […]
American and British patents, for comparison. There’s an interesting cultural observation to be made as a writer based in Europe, that we like our sans-serif fonts, while our American friends seem to prefer a font with a serif. It’s something that was particularly noticeable in the days of print advertising, and it becomes very obvious […]
For how crucial whales have been for humanity, from their harvest for meat and oil to their future use of saving the world from a space probe, humans knew very little about them until surprisingly recently. Most people, even in Herman Melville’s time, considered whales to be fish, and it wasn’t until humans went looking […]
A long time ago, there was a big difference between PC and console gaming. The former often came with headaches. You’d fight with drivers, struggle with crashes, and grow ever more frustrated dealing with CD piracy checks and endless patches and updates. Meanwhile, consoles offered the exact opposite experience—just slam in a cartridge, and go! […]
We’re most familiar with sound as vibrations that travel through the atmosphere around us. However, sound can also travel through objects, too! If you want to pick it up, you’d do well to start with a contact mic. Thankfully, [The Sound of Machines] has a great primer on how to build one yourself. Check out […]
You’ve probably seen Lichtenberg figures before, those lightning-like traces left by high-voltage discharge. The safe way to create them is using an electron beam to embed charge inside an acrylic block, and then shake them loose with a short, sharp tap. The usual technique makes for a great, flat splay of “lightning” that looks great […]
Origami has become known as a miracle technique for designers. Elegant compliant mechanisms can leverage the material properties of a single geometry in ways that are sometimes stronger than those of more complicated designs. However, we don’t generally see origami used directly in 3D printed parts. [matthew lim] decided to explore this uncharted realm with […]
If you’ve ever experimented with a microprocessor at the bare metal level, you’ll know that when it starts up, it will look at its program memory for something to do. On an old 8-bit machine, that program memory was usually an EPROM at the start of its address space, while on a PC, it would […]