Vote Now – Formlabs 3D Design Awards

This morning I’ve woken to some exciting news – 3 of my products, which have been featured right here on my blog, have been announced as finalists in 3 separate categories of this years Formlabs 3D Design Awards!!

If you’ve enjoyed following my 3D printing projects, I would love it if you could take 30 seconds to follow this link to the voting page, click on the big green START button, and select my 3 designs. Winners are determined by quantity of votes from the public, so get voting now! The 3 products are:

1. Art and Design Category: X-Men Cyclops Goggles (pictured above)
2. Engineering Category: Garmin Virb X Floaty Mount
3. Education Category: Pine 64 Snap Enclosure

Make sure you take some time to check out the other designs as well – there is some stiff competition in each category, and some great models to download and 3D print.

Thanks in advance for your support 🙂

– Posted by James Novak

Star Wars Death Trooper

Sometimes you just see a 3D print and think OMG, I NEED THIS!

Enter the Star Wars Death Trooper model by Paul Braddock, available on MyMiniFactory. Having repaired my Cocoon Create 3D printer (again!) in my previous blog post, and also upgraded my version of Cura (losing all of my print settings refined over the last year), this was a great model to iron out the kinks and get back to normality – I hate being without a working 3D printer.

From a technical standpoint my print isn’t perfect with the wall thickness far too thin, leaving some holes and messy details (eg. if you look closely at the eye socket of the skull). My new Cura settings still need some tweaks. However given all the hurdles, it’s still a pretty damn cool print that is really brought to life by the addition of a bit of black paint, and a simple coffee stain for the skull. I recommend checking out the original by Paul to see all the details of the design that aren’t captured well in my print, he’s done a brilliant job of finishing his print to give it an aged bronze look that shows every little scar and crack of the smashed Stormtrooper helmet.

If you want to make one for yourself, don’t forget to upload a photo of your 3D print to Pinshape by May 12th – there is a competition to win 1 of 40 rolls of filament (ABS or PLA) or some Resin if you use an SLA printer. You get an entry for every 3D print you upload of anything on the website!

– Posted by James Novak

3D Printing Workshops Galore

University and school might be winding down for the year, but I’ve been as busy as ever running workshops on 3D printing and attending conferences – the silly season indeed!

I was a mentor at an event called GLO@Logan, a 3-day startup style workshop for teams of year 9 students from high school’s around the Logan area of Queensland. The project briefs looked at the future of health care, and how technology can be used to better enable people suffering from debilitating disease or age-related problems. A huge congratulations to the team from Loganlea State High School (top right image) who won first prize for their mobile app (which they actually created using MIT App Inventor) which was designed for people in wheelchairs to plan their route to restaurants, bringing in Google Street View images and reviews to help them plan their trip and locate wheelchair friendly restaurants. I was very impressed to see that within a couple of hours of the day 2 practical workshop they already had a rough prototype working on a tablet and had divided tasks nicely within their team. It’s very rare to see a group work so well or efficiently at university, so well done!

For some students like those from Flagstone State Community College, this was also their first opportunity to see a 3D printer in action – and they embraced the technology immediately. You can see their prototype in the top middle image which combines 3D printed pieces, Lego Mindstorms EV3 and a mobile phone, the idea being a robotic dog to act as a companion for elderly people including the capacity to make emergency calls should the person fall and injure themselves. Congratulations on winning second place.

I really hope to see some of these students come through the design courses at university, the ideas and prototypes of all groups were as good, if not better, than many I see from university students.

We also ran a 3D printing workshop at the CILECT Congress 2016 (the International Association of Film and Television Schools Congress), and what really amazed me is that none of the people who attended the session had ever seen or used a 3D printer before! I really thought film and 3D printing went hand-in-hand these days, particularly when you see the work of Legacy Effects in major movies like Iron Man and Robocop which rely heavily on 3D printing. But from the feedback I think the workshop definitely opened everyone’s mind to the potential of the technology, and need for it to be brought into the education of future film makers.

Most recently Createworld offered the opportunity to meet with educators and practitioners at the intersection of design and technology over 2 days of presentations and workshops, and this was also the first showing of the InMoov robot hand I’ve been building over the last few months (click here to check out the full development of this project). It now has a plywood stand which is great for hiding all the raw electronics. I also used my Wiiduino project from last year to showcase ideas like gamification, visual programming languages and customisation for 3D printing, alongside a few students from my Human Machine Interfaces class and fellow PhD researchers. I look forward to this event growing even bigger next year, it’s early days for this conference but the ideas and projects are very high quality.

Lastly a sneak peek inside the new 3D printing facility at Deakin University Waurn Ponds campus, where they have everything from desktop through to metal 3D printers and everything in between. The top left image is overlooking just some of the 3D printing facility, with more equipment in other rooms including a Virtual Reality room and labs for building robotics. I was there for the DESTECH conference and was blown away by the facilities, like a kid in a toy store! There are plenty of high-profile research projects coming out of here already so watch this space.

Looking at my calendar over the last month it has been a whirlwind of events, and it’s finally time to sit back, unwind and process it all over a few (or more!) drinks in the lead up to Christmas. 2016 has shown that 3D printing continues to grow and inspire, and I’m finally seeing some positive steps within schools, although there is still a long way to go. My printer has been running pretty constantly between these events so stay tuned for some project updates very soon.

– Posted by James Novak

3D Printed “Marshmallow Challenge”

Have you ever done the Marshmallow Challenge? Chances are you’ve done something similar at school, or if you’ve ever been to a team building workshop it’s a pretty popular creative exercise. Basically teams must build the tallest freestanding structure they can in 18 minutes using 20 sticks of spaghetti, a yard of tape, a yard of string and 1 marshmallow on top. Tom Wujec has been running these challenges for many years and presented a great TED talk if you want to find out more about the challenge and what can be learned from it.

Well now I’ve put my 3D printing twist onto the challenge, running what turned into a very competitive series of workshops for the Intro to 3D Printing course at my university. Teams were given a selection of materials we had readily available for model making (20 paddlepop sticks, 1 paper plate, 2 paper cups, a few drinking straws, a length of masking tape and a length of string) and given a very simple brief – build the tallest freestanding structure possible during the 2 hour workshop. The catch:

Teams were each given an UP Plus 2 3D printer and laptop with Solidworks, and could print as much as they wanted to help build the structure.

Now that makes things interesting! These are first year students only new to CAD and 3D printing, so what can they both design and print in such a limited time? Do you print lots of small things, or 1 big thing? How can you tweak the 3D print settings to get things printed as quickly as possible? What do you do when your print doesn’t work? It turns out that this challenge can teach you a lot about 3D printing, and how to rapidly test, prototype and build without wasting any time like in the normal 6 week projects.

As you can see from the photos, the results are very impressive! The winning team built a structure up to 249cm, which basically meant they used all the materials end-to-end and could not go much higher even if they had more time. This team 3D printed small little rectangular connectors for the paddlepop sticks, and with a lot of delicate balancing, managed to get their structure stable at the very last second. Much much higher than I expected when I set this challenge! They were in a very close battle with the team that came second for the day, reaching 238cm with a slightly different connection method where they used 3D printing to connect the paddlepop sticks to the cups. What you might notice with the top 3 teams is that 3D printing was used for small connecting elements that could be quickly printed, whereas some of the other teams (eg. 4th place who I only have a photo of part of the structure) were 3D printing much larger bases and simply ran out of time to push their structures quite as high.

All of the students were very involved and motivated by this task, it’s something I will run again in future classes and 3D printing workshops as a way to push the limits of the 3D printers and break them out of being so precious about what comes off the printers. It also gets them thinking about how to combine 3D printing with other methods of prototyping, you don’t necessarily need to 3D print every part of your design as it’s quite a slow process, particularly for FDM machines. Feel free to make your own twists on this challenge in the classroom, and I’d love to see your results! Maybe the 3D Printed Marshmallow Challenge will be the next big thing?

– Posted by James Novak

Enabled by 3D – Twisty Pen Grip

It’s competition time at MyMiniFactory and I thought I’d use it as an excuse to spend an afternoon creating something new and simple to 3D print. The “#enabledby3d” competition brief calls for an “item that makes an everyday chore easier, or an enabling device, allowing those with disabilities greater accessibility.”

I decided to focus on something most of us take for granted – writing and drawing with a pen. If you have arthritis or some other sort of hand dexterity problems from injury or illness, picking up a cheap standard pen and using it can be frustrating, painful or even impossible. One option is to pay a lot more money for large diameter pens, or buy those slide-on grips which look ugly and draw attention to the fact that you may have grip difficulties.

So what I’ve created is a simple sheath that slides over the full length of a standard Bic pen or similar, significantly increasing the diameter of the pen and changing the geometry so that it may be more easily maneuvered. The sheath prints without needing any support material, and the cheap pen simply sides inside ready to use. What I hope is achieved by this design is something that not only enables people with hand dexterity issues, but something that is appealing to anyone – in this way the design doesn’t seem like an assistive device, but something desirable that someone might be using simply to stand out and be unique. Rotate the model around below to see all the details, particularly the spiral top.

Bic Pen Twisty Grip by edditive on Sketchfab

If you like the Twisty Grip head over to the MyMiniFactory page to give it a like to increase my chances of winning the competition! Better yet, you can download this design for free and print it for yourself, or for someone you know who could benefit from it. As soon as the competition ends I’ll also post it to the other 3D printing file sites I normally use, but for now please help share this design and have some fun making it for yourself. Print in bold colours to stand out, or use different coloured materials to designate different pen colours – the choice is yours.

– Posted by James Novak

UPDATE 28/11/2016: The STL file to print this design is now also freely available on Thingiverse, Pinshape, 3D File Market and Cults. Enjoy!

Shattered Faceted Light

As featured on Pinshape’s ‘Pick of the Week‘

You may have already seen, or even downloaded, my Lightbulb Lampshade which I created a while ago to give a new lease of life to an old Ikea lamp. Now I’ve create a new version to fit the competition criteria of the latest Pinshape Design Competition for a low-poly design. Of course this means you can also download the file for yourself completely free, just click here to download from Pinshape, or here for Thingiverse 🙂

The model was printed on an Up! Plus 2 3D printer, using the 0.2mm layer thickness and minimal support material. As you can see in the image to the left, there really was only a small amount of support material generated in the middle to support the top section, and this broke away very easily. You can also see a small break near the bottom where the printer must’ve bumped the model as it was printing, but thankfully it kept printing. Overall it took about 4 hours to print. If you’re planning on making one, the minimum diameter inside the design to fit over your light fixture and light-bulb is 31mm – if you need it larger, just scale up the design before printing.

Above you can see the process of creating the 3D CAD model, this time challenging myself to use Rhino for the complete development rather than my usual Solidworks. This was to create the more complex form in a shorter amount of time. From left to right the process was:

1. Use Revolve to create the light-bulb form.
2. Convert this to a Mesh.
3. Reduce Mesh to create the faceted effect.
4. Use the Line tool to connect the points of the faceted mesh.
5. Use the Pipe tool to add thickness to the lines.
6. Add some solid sections to fill in some of the gaps, then Join all the pieces into a single mesh ready to export to STL.

If you make one please share your photos back on Pinshape or Thingiverse so I can check it out!

– Posted by James Novak

3D Printed Wood vs. Plastic

Well here it is – my 3D printed wooden phone amplifier fresh from i.Materialise, which won their 3D printed wood challenge! Now it’s time to have your say:

Which sounds better? 3D printed wood, or 3D printed ABS plastic?

On first impressions it’s definitely a fragile material, a bit like something between MDF timber and an egg carton. The graininess can be rubbed off like sand, and you can already see one of the dots in the ‘i’ has broken off. But it smells really nice, I just can’t quite put my finger on what it reminds me of. But definitely very wood-like.

For those wanting to print one yourself, the plastic version is freely available for you to download from my Thingiverse or Pinshape profiles. This wooden one is slightly different to meet the requirements of the printing process, but I may add this to the i.Materialise shop very soon so you too can enjoy the natural sounds of timber.

– Posted by James Novak

Winner – 3D Printed Wooden Amplifier

It was a while ago now that I first 3D printed a phone amplifier and stand, sharing my design on Thingiverse (see the original design and video here). Well after seeing i.Materialise’s new wood material, and a competition to launch it, I just had to bring it back! What could be more cool than a 3D printed wooden amplifier, mixing the old-school with the new-school?

It did take some work to modify the original design to meet the criteria of the wood material, including thicker wall sections and more exaggerated details, and you can see the render I submitted above on the right. The final print from i.Materialise on the left looks awesome, I’m looking forward to hearing it play music when it arrives – I’ll have to post a video comparing the sound of the wood vs. plastic versions, so watch this space.

See the full i.Materialise article, along with the other winning designs here.

– Posted by James Novak