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Crafty Curios

Light Up Ralph

June 18, 2016
Crafty Curios
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IMG_3020

3D printed with plastic and conductive silver on the Voxel8 Development Kit

IMG_2995

Designed with Blender

Screen Shot 2016-06-17 at 10.26.32 AM

For a while now, Harry has been trying to get me to 3D print a light up Ralph, the mascot of Thoughtbot. While folks have 3D printed Ralph before, they didn’t have access to printers that can print conductive traces. Luckily, I work for Voxel8, a company the makes 3D printers that specializes in printing electronic devices.

I used the Voxel8 Development Kit to print Ralph.

For modeling, I turned an SVG of Ralph into a 3D model via Blender. Then I used Curves to create the traces. That’s it! It’s really awesome that Voxel8’s slicer, Euclid, is smart enough at path planning that I didn’t have to manually create tracks for the silver to sit in.

Design and printing took about an hour each. Once Ralph came off the printer, all I needed was an LED and a battery, and viola!

IMG_3021

This Ralph was printed in a single try. If I spent a little more time, I could’ve improved the design and print quality, but I’m kinda lazy.

Anyhoo, there you have it, a light up Ralph!

3D Printed Ocarinas

December 25, 2015
Crafty Curios, Fun N' Games
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One of the awesome perks of working for Voxel8 is the abundance of 3D printers around. When we’re not printing technical demos, we’re printing silly things. The current silly meme in the office is ocarinas.

ocarina

Harry is definitely into the 3D printed ocarinas. He brought one home to show his folks during the holidays. 😄

Washi Lab

July 3, 2015
Crafty Curios, Iron Chef SynBio
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Lab tape usually comes in sharp neon colors but I’d wanted something more personal, subtle, and fun. So, I got some lovely washi tape from uguisu.

Pros:

  • They are a tad less sticky than regular lab tape, but still adhere well to everything from glassware to cardboard boxes.
  • VMR lab markers write very well on them, as do Sharpies.
  • They leave no residue when peeled off, just like regular lap tape.
  • They can survive in the -4C freezer as well as 37C warm shakers. Though, if they become a little bit harder to peel if left in the warm room (still won’t leave residue). I haven’t tested the tape in -80C freezers.
  • They have beautiful patterns.

Cons:

  • Washi tapes are a bit sheer. It’s harder to cover up text in the background.

Overall, I think it’s delightful to use washi tape in lab. It’s a small, neat combination of science and crafts. One look at the oxalis design, and you’ll know those plates are mine.

How to Turn 2D to 3D

June 26, 2015
Coding Bits, Crafty Curios
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Here’s my approach for how to turn 2D images into 3D models.

There are web apps that will do this for you, but my approach gives you a lot more control and may produce higher quality models.

Also, it only uses free and open source software. 😀

Requirements:

Steps:

First we start with an image. I have here the logo of Julia, obtained from Wikipedia.

Julia logo

Open the image in Inkscape

Inkscape

Select the image and navigate to Path > Trace Bitmap

Trace Bitmap

Adjust the Trace Bitmap settings. Trace Bitmap will turn your image into a vector. Update will show what the final output will look like. Hit OK to confirm changes.

settings

Save the newly traced image as an SVG file.

Julia vectorized

Open Blender. Import the SVG using File > Import.

Import

Your SVG will imported as a very small Curve object, so you’ll need to zoom in to see it.

Imported SVG

Navigate to the Curve settings.

Curve

Adjust Extrude to be 0.005 to make the object 3D.

Extrude

Tada! A 3D object!

Julia 3D

Changing the object color to white might help you see it better.

Julia white

With this 3D object, you can save it in a popular 3D format or do more manipulations on it.

This method is pretty straightforward and allows you to adjust a lot of individual parameters, like bitmap tracing.

Hope it helps!

3D Printed Glasses

February 27, 2015
Coding Bits, Crafty Curios
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It’s been a while since I started my project to 3D print glasses frames, and I’m really excited to share the results.

3D printed glasses frame

Here is my 3D printed glasses holding real prescription lenses!

In the first iteration of this project, I took an image and created a 3D printable glasses frame, using code and Blender.

A single click is all it took to procedurally generate the 3D model.

SVG to glasses

Since that first iteration, I learned a lot more about the actual design of glasses frames and improved my algorithms.

I decided to test my algorithm by copying a pair of frames I already own.

Using an image of the front view of my glasses frame, my Blender script created this 3D model:

generated glasses

I manually added lens grooves to fit my prescription lenses.

grooves

I popped the prescription lenses out of my frame and popped them into my 3D printed frame.

original frame without lenses

They fit astonishingly well.

3D printed glasses frame

To make your own, check out the previous post for instructions.

To create lens grooves for your 3D model:

  1. In Edit mode, use the Knife tool on a nosepad to create a boundary between the nosepad and the frame

knife

  1. Use the Loop Cut and Slice tool to create three edge loops. They will be boundaries of the lens grooves.

Here’s the first loop:

Loop Cut and Slice

The next two loops will be on both sides of the middle loop.

  1. Select the middle edge loop and and scale up in the XZ direction. This will create the groove itself.

  2. Do this for both sides.

After creating the lens grooves, your glasses frame is ready for 3D printing.

3D printed glasses

Here’s a video of adding the lenses to the 3D printed glasses:

Since the lenses fit the 3D printed frame pretty well, I can say the algorithm/script creates an accurate enough glasses model for the frame portion. However, there’s more work to be done to make better bridges and nosepads, since the nosepads aren’t quite large enough. For now, the script creates nice prototypes.