Xmas Brain Decoration

Let me start this off by agreeing with you – yes, this is a weird idea!

But when you work at the Herston Biofabrication Institute and spend most of your days working on neurosurgery and other medical projects, it hopefully makes a bit more sense why anyone would 3D print a “Merry Xmas” brain to decorate our office Christmas tree.

The design of this was quite simple and was based on some tutorials I’ve previously written about mashups and remixes – basically, taking 2 (or more) different files and joining them together in a new and creative way. The brain itself was downloaded here, and then the letters were quickly modelled in Solidworks and exported as individual STL files. All of this was then combined in Meshmixer, which is my go-to software for this type of mashup project (and it’s free for anyone looking to do the same).

This was 3D printed on my Craftbot Flow IDEX XL 3D printer in PLA, with a small hole drilled on the top afterwards to thread a piece of string through. And of course, I’m giving this design away for free to anyone crazy enough to also want a 3D printed Xmas brain decoration! Just click the links below to your preferred 3D print file website and enjoy:

Thingiverse, Cults, MyMiniFactory, Prusa, Pinshape.

Merry Christmas and happy 3D printing 🙂

– Posted by James Novak

3D Printed Outdoor Lights in PETG

It’s official – my entire house now uses 3D printed light covers!

If you follow this blog you may have seen some of my previous indoor light covers, featuring a 3D scanned sea urchin shell and a pineapple. Of course, I couldn’t stop with indoor lights, especially since the outdoor wall-mounted lights on my house looked like the cheapest fittings available. They were desperately in need of an upgrade.

Luckily the fitting includes a piece that is easily unscrewed to accommodate standard DIY light covers. A few simple measurements, including the diameter of the fitting and distance of the protruding light bulb, meant that I had everything needed to create my own design in CAD. For this one I decided to use Fusion 360, just to keep my skills up as I’ve done a few projects in Solidworks recently. The only other limitation was the size of the Prusa MK3S+ build volume (250 x 210 x 210mm), as I wanted the light cover to be 3D printable in a single piece.

Putting all of this information in Fusion 360 gave me a starting point, and of course I began experimenting with a few simple ideas. The one that stuck was this collection of lofts that twist in different directions. Not overly complex, just a clean design that is easy to clean (a complex lattice would just invite spiders!) and protects the lightbulb from sun/rain. Because these are mounted quite high on the walls, what I really wanted was a cool effect when you are looking directly up at the light from below – see the top right image.

Something else I experimented with for the first time with this design was 3D printing using PETG filament – specifically, PETG from eSun. Why? Mainly because PETG has good UV stability so should last while out in the elements and sunshine. But what I’ve really enjoyed is how easy it is to print with – no warping, good adhesion to the build platform and no smelly fumes while printing. Happy days! I actually used the default PETG settings in PrusaSlicer and they seem to be dialled in nicely (no surprises really, thanks Prusa). The material also has a translucency, so the light shade has a bit of a glow when the light is on as you can see in the photos. If you’re looking for more details about the material properties and slicing settings for PETG, this article is a good starting point.

And of course, I’m giving this design away for FREE! Download from your favourite 3D file marketplace: Thingiverse, Pinshape, Cults, MyMiniFactory or PrusaPrinters.

Happy 3D printing.

– Posted by James Novak

3D Printed Pineapple Light

3D printing light covers and lamps are always fun projects, you can’t really go wrong.

Continuing from a previous post where I outlined the process of designing sea urchin light covers for my house, I’ve still been wanting to design another light cover to mix things up so each room isn’t the same. Enter the pineapple light! 🍍

Unlike the previous process of designing the sea urchin light from scratch using a 3D scan, this time I was able to find something on Thingiverse that was almost perfect – this model of a pineapple. The bottom part had a really nice geometric pattern that saved me hours of mucking around in CAD and designing the same thing from scratch. This is one of the things I love about the 3D printing community – the open sharing of 3D models to be remixed (also known as a mashup) just like a song or video into something new and creative. You can read more about remixing in one of my previous tutorials.

Similar to the sea urchin light, all the pineapple needed was to be scaled to the right size, hollowed, given a thickness, and have a neck piece added to connect with the light fitting. This neck piece was directly imported from my previous project in Meshmixer (free CAD software), and both pieces were joined together. Nice and easy!

Just like the sea urchin light, these pineapples were 3D printed on a Prusa i3 MK3S in a natural PLA from eSun – it’s a translucent material which I found from previous experiments to work really well for light covers when given a very light dusting of white spray paint. The painted exterior still allows the light to shine through nicely, but just helps define the form better than the natural finish on its own. If you want to see exactly how this compares to the natural filament on its own, or a pure white PLA, check out my sea urchin light post. This design can also be 3D printed without any support material.

Best of all, you can download my pineapple light cover completely free from Thingiverse, Pinshape, Cults and MyMiniFactory! Just like the original design of the pineapple which helped me in this project, I hope this remix will help you in your own project – even if you don’t have the same size light fitting as me, with a bit of editing in Meshmixer or another CAD program, you can easily modify this design to suit your own needs. Enjoy.

– Posted by James Novak

3D Print some Aloha

At this time of COVID-19 lockdowns, panic buying and general insanity, we could all do with a bit of aloha. Aloha of course is the traditional Hawaiian greeting, but it also has many other meanings and uses including love, peace and compassion.

If you need a little aloha, you can download this to 3D print for free from Thingiverse, Pinshape, Cults or MyMiniFactory.

This was actually designed to stick on our front door which is freshly painted in a very tropical blue. The design process was very simple:

1. Create the outline in Adobe Illustrator.
2. Export as a DXF file.
3. Open in Solidworks.
4. Extrude.
5. Export as a STL file for 3D printing.

Print it large, print it small, and spread some aloha vibes.

– Posted by James Novak

 

Surviving COVID-19 with 3D Printed Toilet Paper

Most of us would agree that some of the events of the last couple of weeks have overshadowed the seriousness of COVID-19 (Coronavirus). In particular, the panic buying of toilet paper, which seemed to start here in Australia and spread like the Coronavirus itself around the globe, has been quite ridiculous to watch. While there is a serious side to this issue, it’s become one of those situations that you have to have a sense of humour about in order to get through.

In response, I thought it would be fun to start 3D printing toilet paper rolls (aka. loo rolls). What started as a single 3D model last week, quickly turned into a series of different toilet rolls that can all be downloaded for free and stockpiled to your heart’s content! Simply select your preferred 3D file platform to download: Thingiverse, Pinshape, Cults or MyMiniFactory.

Collect them all:

1. Hotel Triangle: For a touch of class and those 5-star vibes.
2. Hanging Square: Fully stocked and ready to go.
3. Neat Perf: The clean-cut toilet roll.
4. Half: Nervous times, time to print some more.
5. Last Square: Oh dear….

They were all modelled in Solidworks at half the size of a regular roll of toilet paper. If you prefer a different size, just scale them up or down (i.e. scale 200% to be the same size as a real roll). Great to carry with you everywhere you go for any unexpected emergencies 😉

Divide them amongst your family members, share them with your neighbours, be generous and take a few spares to work – we’re all in this together during Coronavirus 2020.

– Posted by James Novak

 

3D Printed Model Aircraft Stand

What good is a model aircraft if it’s stuck on the ground? Planes are made to be in the air!

Unfortunately in our recent interstate moves the stand for this model aircraft was lost. But as I’ve said many times on this blog, including the previous post, 3D printing to the rescue! Projects like this really tick all the boxes for me:

1. From idea/need to the final solution can be done in a matter of hours.
2. No need to spend a lot of money buying a replacement (if you can even find one). With 3D printing you can make your own for next to nothing.
3. Bring the product back to life. While there was no need to throw this aircraft away now that it had no stand, some products are not so lucky. If you can replace a missing part, you can extend the use and enjoyment of it.
4. Share it – chances are someone, somewhere, may be looking for exactly the same part. Just as I’m doing here, by sharing what you make, you might save one more product from going to landfill.

Having said that, you can freely download and edit this model aircraft stand from your favourite 3D printing platform: Thingiverse, Pinshape, Cults or MyMiniFactory.

It was designed in Autodesk Fusion 360, and features 2 pieces that print nice and flat, making them strong and durable. Fitting them together is tight, you may need to shave off a little plastic with a file or knife depending on your print quality, but this ensures that you won’t need any glue, and it should hold a good amount of weight without wobbling. The critical dimensions you may be interested in are the size of the stand tip that slots into the aircraft: It measures 6.0mm long (front to back direction of aircraft), 2.3mm wide (wing to wing direction), and 6.0mm tall as pictured below.

If you need a different size, please feel free to make modifications to the files uploaded to the various 3D printing platforms, and then re-share them as a remix. I’m not an aircraft collector and don’t know how many different geometries there may be for stands, this was just the one we needed. Hopefully it is useful for someone else.

– Posted by James Novak

Hex Business Card Holder Tiles

A new office and a new excuse to design and 3D print something! Like many people I end up with piles of business cards that I don’t know what to do with. They clutter my desk, get lost, and ultimately end up in the bin. Sure, there are loads of fancy solutions at stationery stores, and plenty of apps to digitise them, but where’s the fun in that?

Now that I have pinboards wrapping my desk I decided to design a simple, easy to 3D print hexagon business card holder that could be pinned up out of the way. After all, everyone loves hexagons right? While the design is extremely simple (a few extrudes and cuts in Fusion 360), the trick was to model it in a way that would allow it to be 3D printed without any support material – so, as you can see from the layers in the photos, they are (perhaps counter-intuitively) printed in the same orientation they are used. This was an important thing to consider during the design process, with no horizontal beams and all angles >30° from horizontal, and is an important part of what’s known as Design for Additive Manufacturing (DfAM).

There is a small hole and recess to fit a thumb tack, and you can 3D print as many as you need. As usual you can freely download and print this design for yourself from Thingiverse, Pinshape, MyMiniFactory or Cults, and I’d love to see photos of how big you can make your Hex Business Card wall!

Happy printing 🙂

– Posted by James Novak

 

3D Printing Pop Culture & Viral Objects

As regular readers of this blog will know, I’ve been involved with 3D printing, making, education and various online communities for a while now. Which is why it’s very exciting to share my latest piece of writing, a book chapter titled “The Popular Culture of 3D Printing: When the Digital Gets Physical” which I wrote with former colleague and fellow maker Paul Bardini from Griffith University.

As the name suggests, the chapter looks at the popular cultural context of 3D printing, rather than the more technical aspects featured in most academic writing. As makers, we are both really interested in the growth of 3D printing and spread of 3D printing files on platforms like Thingiverse, MyMiniFactory and others, so we got a bit scientific and collected some data. The results are very interesting!

Firstly, one of the things we did was collect the total number of files available from a range of 3D printing file repositories, as well as other more general 3D file repositories. Above is the data we collected (on 26th August 2018) which clearly shows Thingiverse to be the largest specific 3D printing file website. This is no surprise given that the website began in 2008, well before most competitors, building a network effect that still seems to be going strong despite some of the most recent challenges Thingiverse has been experiencing. However, there are plenty of other much larger libraries of CAD files that could be searched for 3D printing files, and even though some will be specific to certain CAD software, there’s always a way to make these 3D printable.

Given the size of Thingiverse, we then looked at the most popular designs on the platform, collecting data (you will have to check out the full chapter for this!), and then calculated the average downloads per day for these designs. The graph above shows this data against the date the design was uploaded to the platform. Some of the names you may recognise: #3DBenchy, Baby Groot, the XYZ 20mm Calibration Cube and the Xbox One controller mini wheel. But what does it all mean?

Well, the short story is that objects uploaded to Thingiverse today will be downloaded in higher volumes per day than objects uploaded earlier in Thingiverse’s history. The trend line is increasing, matching the growth of 3D printer ownership; more people are downloading more things, with the Xbox One controller mini wheel recording 700 downloads per day when it was newly released. However, #3DBenchy is by far the most downloaded design of all time, right now having been downloaded over 900,000 times on Thingiverse alone, as well as being available on almost every other 3D file platform. This has lead to our classification of it as a “viral object.” Similar to viral videos and viral media campaigns, a viral object extends these concepts into the physical world through 3D printing, being first spread rapidly through online file sharing communities, then turned into physical objects in their thousands despite each being made in a different location, by a different machine.

This raises some interesting questions:  A viral video or piece of advertising made up of digital bits can easily be deleted, but how do you delete a viral object made up of physical atoms? Simply discarding 3D prints into landfill is unsustainable, and new solutions are necessary that make recycling of 3D prints affordable and accessible to the masses. It is also worth looking at the quantities an object like #3DBenchy is being downloaded and 3D printed, which is clearly in a magnitude similar to injection moulding and the mass production paradigm that 3D printing is supposed to disrupt. While it’s useful to have an object to calibrate and compare 3D printers, it’s also interesting to see that people still want to print and own the same object, rather than being truly individual.

The trend for viral objects is certainly one to watch, and the chapter provides a detailed analysis of this and other emerging trends related to 3D printing and pop culture. If you’re interested in reading the chapter, you may use my author discount code “IGI40” to get a 40% discount, or if you’re at a university you may find you already have access through your library subscriptions. Paul and myself certainly welcome your feedback and thoughts 🙂

– 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!