Make the Nintendo Switch Work for Anyone

I covered some of our community’s amazing solutions to the shortcomings of Nintendo’s blockbuster Switch portable gaming console in the magazine earlier this year, and the options have only grown since then. Still, my favorite remains the Arrow Joycon Grip by Edrice. It reconfigures the two joycons to make them feel more natural and comfortable for adult-sized hands.

Vessel Pendant by Nervous System

You have to go pretty far to find a necklace no one’s ever done before, but thankfully, superstars of 3D printed fashion/art, Nervous System, have used the magic of an open mind combined with generative design, opening the door to endless possibilities. Not quite sure what I mean? See for yourself.

The Planter Necklace Pendant by Oreosmooshy’s Shoparoo

Do you know someone in your life who is a green-thumbed gardener? Or a plant lover that can’t seem to keep even a cactus alive? Well, tell them to let their green flag fly with this Planter Necklace Pendant from creator Claire Ashcraft. This pendant is perfect for housing air plants, which, in case it isn’t obvious, basically live on air (or, ok, the moisture in air). Not to mention, they’re super hip.

Full Color BMO Lamp by blind.i.studios

So it turns out that if you use our full color sandstone material to print a model and keep it hollow, you can put a light in it to make a really unique lamp shade. It works for all of our plastics as well, but things just look so much cooler in full color. And this BMO Lampshade, inspired by Adventure Time, is the perfect example. Fully detailed right down to the vents on her back, this is a true-to-life figurine when the lights are off, and a lampshade when they’re on. It’s a must for any Adventure Time fan or lamp enthusiast in your family.

Hats off to Vincent Maxwell over at blind.i.studios for giving us such a cool take on a lampshade, as well as all of the other cool things he’s doing over there.

Framework Menorah by Craig Kaplan’s Mathematical Art

For those of us who celebrate Hanukkah, Shapeways has a wide variety of custom menorahs for sale. The Framework Menorah by Craig Kaplan is a marvel of simplicity. The stacked architectural design of this menorah makes this piece interesting even before the candles are lit. Even once the holiday is over, this still remains an attractive set piece for any living room, especially ones with a modern or minimalist aesthetic. This model is printed in our white Strong & Flexible plastic.

The Dank Memes of Ryan Kittleson’s Sculpture

Few people are as committed to creating the dankest memes in 3D printed sculptural form as Ryan Kittleson. Seen above, his Doge sculpture is an adorable piece of Internet humor given life. The brilliant Potato Jesus, Miracle Potato Chip piece takes two funny things and smashes them together: the trope of finding the images of iconic religious figures on food and other things, and the so-bad-it’s-funny “restoration” of the iconic painting Ecce Homo (AKA Beast Jesus).

But Ryan also has created likenesses of enthusiastic French-Revolution-era rapper Joseph Ducreux, as well as a bust of the triumphant Success Kid.

Mortal Coil (Top to Bottom Stretching) by Ryan Kittleson’s Sculpture

Now, I know that I’ve featured him twice in the same section. But honestly, Ryan Kittleson isn’t the only person making incredible miniatures and figurines out there. He just has some really cool, super giftable things I want to show off. This “helix toy,” as our creators call them to avoid using a copyrighted name (coughSLINKYcough), is shaped like a skull. Crafted out of our Strong and Flexible plastic, this is a complex item you don’t need to put together or paint. You (and probably your teenage cousin who’s going through a goth phase) can play with it right out of the box. It’s a reminder of not only the creativity, but the functionality Shapeways is able to deliver.

And there we are! So many categories covered, yet so many left untouched. There’s literally no end to the amount of creativity you can find here on Shapeways. And we want you to make the most of it! Find gifts they’ve never seen before. Or, if you’re still on the hunt for a gift, help someone start making on Shapeways with a Maker Kit. Happy Holidays from all of us at Shapeways, and happy gifting!

The post Time’s Up: Last-Minute, One-of-a-Kind Gifts For Your Whole List appeared first on Shapeways Blog.

Makers can be hard to shop for because, often, if they want something, they’ll make it themselves. That’s why we created the Maker Kit. The kit includes a $25 digital gift card and 3D printed samples of our most popular materials — all of which represent cutting-edge industrial 3D printing tech, light-years ahead of desktop 3D printers.

When a maker finds a new material — or a new tool — it can be a life-changing moment. And often, it comes as a huge surprise that, with Shapeways, anyone can access 3D printed steel, laser-sintered nylon, full-color sandstone, high-definition plastics, and more. Once they hold these materials in their hands, armed with $25 in printing credit, they’ll be ready to take their making to the next level.

So, inspire them to reach beyond what they think is possible — and power their 2018 projects — with a Maker Kit!

The post Blow Their Minds With a Maker Kit appeared first on Shapeways Blog.

I usually start my designs by prototyping at home with a desktop FDM/filament 3D printer. But some models are really, really difficult to print on a filament-based 3D printer, and my “Fidget Cube” model is one of the worst: it has enclosed hinges that point in every possible direction, and pieces of the model that have to somehow print floating right above other pieces. On an SLS/nylon powder printer like those used for Strong & Flexible plastic prints at Shapeways, such “impossible” prints can be printed with great success rates. But at home, different desktop filament printers, different filaments, and seemingly even different days of the week can have an influence on the success or failure of 3D printing Fidget Cubes.

In this post, we’ll track the evolution of one particularly fidgety 3D design over the past five years, from an assembly model to print-in-place on FDM machines, to multicolor variants, and finally all the way to SLS printing at Shapeways, where we will be able to level up our idea of “impossible” to include the printing of a fully-functioning Yoshimoto cube!

2013: Pieces

Our story begins with a 3D-printable Folding Cube by the legendary emmett. This model prints in eight separate pieces which you then click together to assemble.

This model is based on the popular “photo cubes” that you might have made out of paper and tape when you were younger. If you want to make a paper one, check out Magic Folding Photo Cubes on Instructables. Emmett’s Folding Cube is a beautiful model that is really fun to fidget with, but because I’m not good at rotating or visualizing objects mentally, I had a really difficult time putting the pieces together properly. In fact, I was so bad at it that I vowed never to do it again, and set about to create a remix that could print all in one piece, fully assembled.

2014: Print in Place

After a lot of trial and error, I ended up creating the design from scratch in OpenSCAD. Clearances between hinge parts and adjacent surfaces have to be just right for the Print-in-Place Fidget Cube to print successfully, and getting your slicer settings and model clearances to hit that sweet spot is a fairly advanced 3D printing challenge.

It probably isn’t going to work on your printer, with your filament, on the first try, but once you find the right settings and clearances you should be able to print these Fidget Cubes reliably with a low failure rate (or, you can obviously go straight to Shapeways). If you decide to print it at home, the Print-in-Place Fidget Cube model we put on Thingiverse is customizable so that you can tweak sizes and clearances and try to find what works for your machine.

2015: Yoshimoto

The folding action of the Fidget Cube is the same as that of the Yoshimoto Cube, an incredible model that takes advantage of the fact that a cube can be evenly dissected into two Stellated Rhombic Dodecahedra — and in fact, that those two Stellated Rhombic Dodecahedra can themselves be folded inside out to form cubes of the same size as the original cube. You kind of have to see it to believe it:

You can make a Yoshimoto Cube using origami or you can purchase a truly beautiful version from the MoMA store. Unfortunately, you can’t make a Yoshimoto Cube by carving up a Fidget Cube into two pieces, because the hinges protrude out of the shape and would interfere with the nesting of the pieces. However, we can carve out a Stellated Rhombic Dodecahadon shape from the inside of our fidget cube to form a Fidget Star that folds one way into a cube and the other way into a Stellated Rhombic Dodecahedron.

Here it is in action. This piece isn’t any more difficult to print than the Fidget Cube, but it seems a lot more impressive and surprising when the entire shape of the object changes as it turns inside out.

2016: Embedded Hinges

Next in line is the Kobayashi Fidget Cube by pkobayashi, which prints in one piece and has flat hinges! I think you still couldn’t make a good Yoshimoto Cube out of this, but this version should be much, much easier to print than the Fidget Cube. This design isn’t a remix of mine or of emmett’s, but it is definitely an improvement on both:

Designer pkobayashi later created a Dual Color version, which you print in pieces and then assemble:

2017: Multicolor

What about two-color print-in-place cubes? As of this year, that also exists. MosaicManufacturing has been making beautiful Multi-Color Fidget Star prints! Design-wise, this was made from the Fidget Star just by splitting the model into two pieces (a cube surrounded by a shell). But, printing it is a serious accomplishment:

They made me one, and it’s huge! Thank you, Mosiac Manufacturing!!

They handled the two-color printing with a Palette, a device you can use for pre-processing filament to send to your 3D printer. The Palette actually cuts and assembles pieces of colored filament at exactly the right lengths for switching colors in the correct places while printing.

If you have a dual-nozzle 3D printer then you can download Mosaic Manufacturing’s Multi-Color Fidget Star model and print it yourself. Here is one I printed on the lovely dual-nozzle Ultimaker 3. I happened to print it very small, and on fast, low-res “draft” mode, so it’s nowhere near the highest quality that the Ultimaker 3 can produce, but it still looks pretty good and it works!

… And Beyond: Shapeways!

Printing any of the Fidget Cubes above on an FDM printer can be a difficult process that involves a lot of trial and error, skill, and luck. A lot of the problem lies with the fact that the model has to print without support material for the hinges to operate, which means that the many overhangs and bridges on the model have to print without that support. These problems melt away if you print with a “powder printer” such as the SLS Nylon printers they use at Shapeways to print in Strong & Flexible plastic:

Having industrial-grade 3D printers makes a huge difference in what you can print successfully. Here’s a wonderful, tiny Fidget Cube Stress Reliever by brandutchmen on Shapeways:

Even better, with the SLS printers, we can get to the holy grail of Fidget Cubes: Nesting hinged models that combine to make a Yoshimoto Cube! VeryWetPaint created a fully functional, two-piece, nesting Yoshimoto Cube model that prints in SLS Nylon at Shapeways, called the Yoshi prime box. His open-style design very cleverly allows both pieces to be hinged so that they can nest together. It’s amazing!

Shapeways people, what’s next? Can you push this design to the next level? What even is the next level? Let us know in the comments and we’ll see which designers dare to take fidgeting to new heights…

The post Printing the Impossible: Evolution of a Fidget Cube appeared first on Shapeways Blog.

Everybody prints what they love, so I print a lot of polyhedra. For example, here is an FDM print of a Chamfered Truncated Icosahedron that I made at home. It took about five hours to print, plus another 30 minutes or so to remove the support material. (Plus, if we’re being honest… a few hours of failed prints that I did first while trying to figure out how thin I could print the wireframe.)

For an FDM print like the above, the costs are (lots of) my time, failed prints, post-processing cleanup, machine maintenance, and the initial cost of the machine. The benefits are that I can have the print later the same day, and that the cost of the FDM filament is very low (for the 90mm model above, the filament costs were likely less than $1.50). And, after cleanup, this little Chamfered Truncated Icosahedron looks pretty good:

But “pretty good” is a far cry from the “holy wow!” I can get by printing a much thinner version of this model at Shapeways:

For printing in SLS nylon, as shown in the image above, the costs are time (for production and shipping) and money (for material and machine space — this 90mm model costs about $18, plus shipping). This material ships in four business days, or two business days if you want to pay for rush processing, so it’s great to have an FDM printer at home to work out the kinks before sending and then waiting for a final order.

Printing costs at Shapeways are very reasonable if you know how to keep machine space down by making sure your model has large enough holes; see the article Tutorial Tuesday 14: Print Cheaper By Scaling… Up? for details. The benefits of SLS printing are that you can print more detailed designs at a much finer resolution with many different types of materials, and that you never have to worry about failed prints or machine maintenance.

For details on making models thinner or thicker to optimize for printing on different types of machines, check out our recent article Tutorial Tuesday 34: Thickening 3D Models With Blender. Here are the FDM and SLS models side-by-side for comparison; both of them are beautiful, and of course I love all my 3D printed children equally, but only one of these models is going on my tree later this year

Upload your own designs and see what’s possible here.

The post FDM=ASAP but SLS=OMG: Home 3D Printing vs. Shapeways appeared first on Shapeways Blog.

In case you had somehow missed the reports that have been flooding the news and social media all over the United States, the solar eclipse that’s happening this Monday, August 21st, will be observable within a band across 2,400 miles of the U.S. The 12 million people who live in the path of totality, and the millions of visitors expected to flood these areas, will have the chance to see a rare total solar eclipse, while everyone else in the country, and other countries, will see a partial eclipse.

People are obviously excited, as it’s been a pretty long time since we last had the chance to see one in America. The last total solar eclipse in the US was in 1979, and the upcoming eclipse will be the first in nearly 100 years to stretch all the way from the West Coast to the East Coast. However, there are also concerns sweeping the nation about eclipse safety, and possible vision loss if you purchase a fake pair of eclipse glasses.

“The danger is real for permanent vision loss,” Dr. Russell N. Van Gelder, professor of ophthalmology at the University of Washington School of Medicine and clinical spokesman for the American Academy of Ophthalmology, told NBC Today.

“The worry in the eclipse is that people are so interested to see one of the great astronomic spectacles that they will suppress their inner drive to look away from the very bright light.”

[Image: NASA]

However, you can still have fun and celebrate the eclipse while making sure to keep your eyes safe from harm. NASA published a list of fun eclipse activities, including 3D printable pinhole projectors.

“Why not celebrate the eclipse by making your own 2D/3D Printed Pinhole Projector in the shape of the USA and/or a US State?”

You can download the STL files here for pinhole projectors in the shape of each American state, or you can print one out in the shape of the entire country if you want to go bigger; you can also download the PDF files to print a 2D state out of paper if you don’t have access to a 3D printer but want to join in on the fun.

You can capture a really unique memory by asking someone to take a picture of your shadow during the eclipse this Monday while you’re holding your 3D printed pinhole projector. The unique image will show your shadow, the shadow of your chosen state, and “a projected image of the partial eclipse marking your location!”

NASA also suggests drilling an additional pinhole in your 3D printed projector that marks your exact location, which will obviously be much simpler if you print out a single state as opposed to the entire US. You can experiment with different sizes of pinholes, and paint or decorate your projector with your state colors and symbols. Additionally, if you’re feeling especially creative, you can secure your pinhole projector and make your own time lapse movie.

NASA is reminding people to share images of their 3D printed pinhole projectors on their Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and Flickr accounts. When you post a picture, use #EclipseSelfie and write a one or two sentence description of your image.

If you’re looking for a less patriotic route, Thingiverse user tleathrum posted his own two-piece Pinhole Solar Eclipse Viewer.

This piece does requires supports, as the “overhang of the glue tabs won’t print correctly” without them. There is also a bit of assembly required post-print, including gluing the pieces together and drilling the hole in the middle.

While these 3D printable eclipse pinhole projectors are creative and fun, remember to never look directly at the sun through them, or through telescopes or binoculars either. Check out NASA’s Eclipse Viewing Safety and Related Projection Methods to be sure your eyes will stay safe during the eclipse.

Total Eclipse Pendant by geekhaus

If you want to be 100% sure of not damaging your eyes but still want to celebrate this amazing phenomenon, you could always just watch the eclipse on TV and 3D print a cool piece of eclipse jewelry, like this Glowing Solar Eclipse Pendant by VickyTGAW that shows the different phases of the sun (use glow-in-the-dark filament for a really cool look) or the Total Eclipse pendant by mathgrrl. Discuss in the Solar Eclipse forum at 3DPB.com.

Reprinted with permission from 3Dprint.com.

The post 3D Printing to Celebrate the Total Solar Eclipse appeared first on Shapeways Blog.

While owning (and maintaining) a desktop 3D printer may sound like fun, it’s not for the faint of heart… or for those who lack fairly in-depth technical ability. Between constant leveling of the print bed, double-checking to make sure you’re not going to have a filament run-out, and the ever-possible “Whyyy did it just STOP?!?!?”, it can take some serious dedication to the project to make sure that printer is running at 100%, especially when it comes to constantly lubricating, tightening and adjusting. And while desktop 3D printing may SOUND more affordable, you really do need to shell out some serious coin to get a reliable printer. One day it’s running correct, next you’ve got a build plate full of spaghetti: 

Sometimes you need something that just works – and that’s where a service-based 3D printing platform like Shapeways comes in.

Upon uploading to a site like shapeways.com, your file is automatically processed through an incredibly intricate system. Model checks are automatically performed to estimate whether or not your file is not only printable, but also what materials it can be printed in. Yes, materials. Metals, plastics, sandstone – each material opening totally new doors of creativity.

Aside from providing pricing and lead time estimates, the system automatically checks any potentially problematic areas, and allows you to automatically fix them for the selected material, ensuring that it’s printable. That’s something you’ll only learn by trial and error on a home machine, potentially wasting filament and lots of time in the process. Then, the design is checked manually for printability by a Shapeways employee before it’s sent to the printers. Finally, each piece is hand-finished by the production staff.

Once it’s ordered, your creation arrives at your doorstep in a matter of days – a finished product of the highest possible quality and resolution in its material class. No more fiddling around with settings, layer height, slicers, or burns from loading up printers.

That said, there are also advantages to 3D printing at home, and ways that it can co-exist with a service-based model. If you’re not concerned about high-resolution finished products and have plenty of time to nurture your hobby, an inexpensive desktop 3D printer might be right for you. If you’re a product designer in the early stages of prototyping your design, having a manufacturing machine in your office can lead to a fast iteration in plastic of small- to medium-sized products. Once you’ve iterated and are happy with your design, then it’s time to send it over to a service-based platform for superior accuracy, minimal stepping, and the ability to receive it in multiple materials, ranging from plastics to precious metals.

Tell us your experiences with transitioning from desktop to service-based 3D printing, or if you use both in tandem, in the comments below!

The post Desktop and Service-Based 3D Printing: Which is A Better Fit for You? appeared first on Shapeways Blog.