Magical Wand for Wizard or Mage #3DPrinting #3DThursday


1f5264ee8075649e47a56476a953ba22 preview featured

plokr shared this project on Thingiverse!

I designed and printed this magical wand for my son for his carneval costume. You could also find the matching magical amulet here on Thingiverse.
I used as the rod a standard (european) brommstick with a diameter of 24mm. If you use adifferent diameter (e.g. 1″), please resize accordingly.

See more!


649-1
Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!

Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!

3D Hangouts – ePaper Display Stand with @videopixil @ecken #3DPrinting

Files, code, learn guide: https://learn.adafruit.com/eink-featherwing-display-stand
Project Video: https://youtu.be/fWEJ6m8zb0c

Get Adafruit 2.13in eink FeatherWing
https://www.adafruit.com/product/4128

Adafruit Feather M4 Express
https://www.adafruit.com/product/3857

M2.5 Nylon Standoff Kit
https://www.adafruit.com/product/3299

3D Parts Library on GitHub
https://github.com/adafruit/Adafruit_CAD_Parts

Timelapse Tuesday:
Flexi-Dragon – Matthew Benoche
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3505423
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Kx-PNu1qTQ

3D Printing Projects Playlist:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjF7R1fz_OOWD2dJNRIN46uhMCWvNOlbG

3D Hangout Show Playlist:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjF7R1fz_OOVgpmWevin2slopw_A3-A8Y

Layer by Layer CAD Tutorials Playlist:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjF7R1fz_OOVsMp6nKnpjsXSQ45nxfORb

Timelapse Tuesday Playlist:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjF7R1fz_OOVagy3CktXsAAs4b153xpp_

Philippines: Researchers Create 3D Printing App for Learning Braille

To lose one of your senses, or to be born without such faculties, means being left out of so much that society and culture have to offer—until your world is opened through another route like sign language or hearing aids or in the case of the visually impaired, Braille. Now, researchers from the Philippines are exploring the world of assistive technology further in ‘Braille3D: using haptic and voice feedback for braille recognition and 3D printing for the blind.

With the goal of helping the visually impaired to enjoy more access to technology and greater ease in learning Braille, the researchers began working on a mobile educational app to include both haptic and voice feedback. The app, meant for kindergarten students, is designed around learning Braille, but also 3D printing, and it functions with their use of their smart phones. Because the students are so young, most of the lessons are basic in terms of presenting elementary Braille lessons.

Learning module for letter A

The app is made up of modules for learning the Braille characters and spelling, and users can review each character along with following example words—and then if desired, they can 3D print that word in Braille if a model is available. They can also learn to count to nine.

“The user can visit this module to learn and review the pattern for each Braille characters. Each letter shall have example words that the app will read to the student when prompted, as well as an option to 3D print that word example if there is an available 3D model for that word,” state the researchers. “The learning module for the numbers shall be presented in an orderly manner to also teach the user to count from zero to nine.

Teachers are also involved, assessing progress of the students and then assigning new exercises. They can add more example words, along with adding more 3D models into the mix. The students can 3D print through wireless communications or USB, as well as using a 3D printing application developed for this project.

“Since this process might be too complex for a kindergarten student, the teacher, or someone who has knowledge in 3D printing, must handle the 3D printing process,” state the researchers.

The potential for 3D printing in education is already being tapped around the world, with students of all ages enjoying design and printing labs, along with completing many different complex projects—and even items like prosthetics for others in need. But here, 3D printing and the use of educational models are serving as reading comprehension and literacy aids.

“Since blind people have difficulty in gathering/accessing information, 3D printing can be of aid to the visual impaired community,” state the researchers. “Moreover, 3D printed objects give the person the form and structure of the 3D model through the sense of touch. Thus, giving the justification of the relevance of 3D printing in the proposed topic. Other researches were focused on a tactile-based solution to improve touchscreen mobile interface exploration by blind users.”

The educational app, created on Android, consists of five phases, and students can select which exercises they want to do within their assigned work. They can 3D print models by choosing the machine of their choice within the systems that show up in their settings. The researchers used a da Vinci 1.0 AiO 3D printer for testing at the Philippine National School for the Blind (PNSB) and found that fabrication of a model like a rabbit took around four hours. Overall, the success rate for students engaging in this type of learning was found to be high.

In conclusion, the authors stated:

“The proponents have noted that the application is exceedingly beneficial to totally blind students because it helped them understand and gain familiarization to the Braille characters faster than the traditional devices they are using. The proponents recommend looking on more functionalities which can be beneficial to the development of this assistive technology.”

Many different 3D printing innovations have been geared toward the blind, whether in museum paintings that allow them to enjoy the artistic experience, creating campus maps for university students so they can find their own way around, or enjoying other types of educational models, and so much more. What do you think of this news? Let us know your thoughts! Join the discussion of this and other 3D printing topics at 3DPrintBoard.com.

Totally blind students’ success rate and then partially blind students’ success rate

[Source / Images: ‘Braille3D: using haptic and voice feedback for braille recognition and 3D printing for the blind’]

Formlabs Launches the Form 3 and Form 3L

Formlabs, the company that took SLA (stereolithography) 3D printing mainstream with the Form 1 in 2012, is showcasing two new machines at the Additive Manufacturing Users Group (AMUG) conference in Chicago and at Hannover Messe in Germany: the Form 3 and the Form 3L. Both are powered by a new process called Low Force Stereolithography […]

The post Formlabs Launches the Form 3 and Form 3L appeared first on 3D Printing.

Siemens and Interspectral launch metal additive manufacturing visualization software

Siemens, Europe’s largest industrial manufacturing company, has partnered with Interspectral, a Swedish software company, to develop 3D visualization tools for metal additive manufacturing. “To improve and ultimately industrialize metal additive manufacturing you need to capture, explore and understand large amounts of heterogeneous data from the process and increase domain knowledge,” said Andreas Graichen, Head of Additive […]

Markforged establishes European 3D printing headquarters in Dublin

Wasting no time with its expansion plans funded by March’s $82 million Series D round, 3D printer manufacturer Markforged has opened its first office outside of the U.S. Located in Dublin, Ireland, this new site will serve as Markforged’s European headquarters. Its establishment was supported by the state-run foreign direct investment attraction agency IDA Ireland. Darcey Harrison, […]

LED backpanel for MCR USB card reader #3DThursday #3DPrinting

RFZ shares:

Since the MCR USB card reader only has boring little green/red LEDs, I designed a much better RGB LED backpanel for it.
It requires 10 LEDs / 16cm of a regular WS2812B/SK6812/neopixel LED strip with 60 LEDs/m. Prints best with 0.5mm extrusion width. The holes of the alignment and mounting pins may be tapped with M4 threads to fix the backlight module in place with two 10mm M4 screws.
The optional cable box with screw terminals is just glued in place.
Requires matt, frosted, milky, natural filament.

download the files on: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3432195


649-1
Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!

Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!

Fallout Trash Can #3DThursday #3DPrinting

BIC123 shares:

This is a trash can as seen in Fallout 4. This thing is fully functional as a tabletop trash can.

-Print the fins four times
-Assemble by gluing the parts together
-Attach a nut as a counterweight with two zip ties

I printed this on my Prusa MK3 with 0.15 mm layer height and 20% infill using PLA.

download the files on: https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3430441


649-1
Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!

Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!

Amin Hasani’s Blue Heart Hero Makes Custom 3D Printed Assistive Devices for Amputees

Amin Hasani is the designer behind the Havenlabs utility band. Havenlabs is a nonprofit that aims to use 3D printing to aid veterans. Designer Amin now wants to take a broader approach and use his skill to aid amputees of all kinds through a commercial company Blue Heart Hero. With Blue Heart Heroes he hopes to work with the amputees themselves to develop the perfect prosthetic and assistive devices for them, their lives and their pastimes.
3D printing excels in creating specific solutions for specific problems at low cost. If you need a unique geometry, texture or functionality quickly then 3D printing is an almost unbeatable technology. Especially in polymers, we can see that in a day one can print an assistive device for a few dollars. Assistive devices need to be tough, reliable and dimensionally accurate. Creating these kinds of parts is well within the performance envelope of quotidian materials such as PLA and the everyday desktop printers that you have at home. Even a relatively simple device, tweaked well could make something like this.
The medical world has through barriers to entry and institutionalization managed to insulate itself from design and new innovative solutions. Partially this is very understandable and good we want a heavy regulatory touch and focus on safety on those products that are used in a medical context. However, this means that we get safe but one size fits all kinds of boring “medi-gray” solutions. For people who have a unique medical challenge the established system often can not provide for them. This is why 3D printing has taken such flight in assistive devices. This area often creates unique problems that require one-off solutions such as a CMU making a unique device for a Cello player or this Russian amputee who required a device to assist his freediving record attempts. Other examples include a wireless switch, an adaptable button, and a wheelchair joystick, all by assistive collective Pôle-Ergo. We even made an article on top ten 3D printed assistive devices for the disabled. In future many more medical cases and unique problems will find 3D printed solutions. Especially interesting will be the development of braces, splints, postoperative braces and to see how this percolates from richer countries to mid-tier and developing ones.

Amin Hasani now wants to make open source assistive designs for those who need them. His first customers include “a world traveler and photographer. He is publishing a book, with photos of the difficulties that amputees have around the globe. I am designing him some 3D printable attachments for his camera” Amin tells us. He aims to make custom solutions for peoples singular problems but at the same time share these designs so that many more could benefit for them. In this way, his commercial business will have positive externalities.
He mentions to 3DPrint.com that, “We don’t accept donations, we only accept funding for projects”,  “this way designers are funded to achieve better results.” What’s more, he hopes to inspire teachers to let their students take money in order to fulfill design requests. We often see things like assistive devices as either charity, something for the government to do or the realm of large faceless medical companies. By engaging the profit motive and making learning very hands-on Amin is doing something different. Ideally, amputees will become very discerning and demanding because they have to pay while students will excel because they are doing something worthwhile that pays. It may seem that a charitable solution to the same problem could be cuddlier. For some, it may also feel wrong to charge for this. At the same time, there are a lot of charities that are self-supporting bureaucracies that are inefficient and excel only in putting out ads that make us feel bad.

Why do you do this?

My mission is to identify most needed subjects and share it with colleges and have them fund their students to solve those problems. Allowing amputees to purchase designs online was a great decision because they want to be treated normally as opposed to receiving prosthetics for free as charity.

Some amputees don’t know for example they can play guitar… if they request on the website, some engineer can design them the right attachment! We’re giving amputees a chance to do anything they thought they could not do! I believe I can affect many lives world wide by giving them the opportunities they haven’t had.

What progress have you made?

So far I have designed an attachment that can apply to any kind of partial arm single amputee. This attachment is open-source, meaning that any engineer or designer can design a new attachment and upload on the website to share. I am currently working on another 3D printable assistive device that is designed for double amputees with both partial arms. To allow them to put on different attachments without another’s help. It is a very basic mechanical snapping feature. Right now I am mostly trying to invite more engineers and designers to the community and link with organizations who support amputees.

What’s holding you back?

I am a full-time H1B employee, I cannot quit my job to fully focus on this. And I haven’t discussed fund raising with any venture capital. My focus is to gather more designs and contact communities who are support amputees, to collect more requests from amputees.

What printers and material do you use?

I have a Creality Cr-10, I mostly use PLA. I am trying to save some money to buy SLA printer and print standard resin, rough, durable and flexible. I have 3 3D printers at work, I am the head designer of a company in Long Island. After I introduced 3D printing to this company, we slashed our prices by 30% and saved thousands of dollars in prototyping our new products.

Improving 3D Printing Materials with PLA/Graphene/Multi-Walled Carbon Nanotube Composites

Process scheme for obtaining mono-and bi-filler filaments for a FDM 3D printer on the base of PLA, GNP and MWCNTs.

Researchers from all over the world have come together to further the study of materials science in 3D printing, with their findings recently published in ‘PLA/Graphene/MWCNT Composites with Improved Electrical and Thermal Properties Suitable for FDM 3D Printing Applications.’ While there may be a variety of different polymeric materials available today for 3D printing, polylactic acid (PLA) is a preferred medium due to its natural qualities (plant-based), biodegradability, and its bio-absorbable qualities.

Many users see PLA as the ‘greener’ choice, and today it is highly desirable for manufacturing in a wide range of applications, including:

  • Packaging
  • Pharmaceuticals
  • Textiles
  • Engineering
  • Automotive
  • Biomedical
  • Tissue Engineering

“3D printing has been promising,” state the authors. “However, its mechanical performance as well as electrical and thermal properties must be improved in order to expand the application fields.”

The use of nanofillers to bolster the properties of PLA is common, imbuing it with higher strength mechanically, allowing for better conductivity, and stability and bioactivity too. Both carbon nanotubes (CNT) and graphene are used, with promising results as they show the ability to tune critical properties for higher performance; in fact, CNTs offer an enormous number of benefits, but especially in adding stability, whether mechanically, electrically, thermally, or chemically—obviously making them candidates for multifunctional materials. We do wish to point out that Carbon Nanotubes pose a severe health risk and that inhaling fumes from carbon nanotubes may give you cancer.

Polymer composites containing graphene also add dimensional stability, prevent microcracks from occurring, and improve the barrier above the matrix polymer.

“Recently, graphene and functionalized graphene were utilized in composites containing different fillers, and the combination of fillers have shown synergy effect in terms of the mechanical properties, thermal and electrical conductivities, and super capacitance,” state the researchers. “It was found that combining together two nanofillers, such as carbon nanotubes and graphene, leads to the formation of a co-supporting network of both fillers.”

In 3D printing, these types of materials offer better strength and conductivity, and improved printability, and are generally added to the polymer matrix by solution mixing, melt blending, or in situ polymerization. Following are the materials used:

Industrial Graphene NanoPlates, GNP (supplied by TimeNano, Chengdu, China), with purity, 90 wt.%; number of layers <30; thickness <30 nm; diameter/median size 5–7 μm; aspect ratio: ~230/165, specific surface area, m2/g: 1.42 m2/g, as well as Industrial Grade OH-Functionalized Carbon Nanotubes (multi-walled carbon nanotubes) (MWCNTs) (TimeNano, produced by CVD method) with purity, 95 wt.% OH 2.48% content; size (outer D = 10–30 nm, inner D = 5–10 nm, length = 10–30 μm); aspect ratio: ~1000; specific surface area 110 m2/g; density 2.1 g/cm3; electrical conductivity S = 100 S/cm.

The authors reported that when using the maximum amount of filler content (6 wt.%), conductivity increased by almost 7-8 decades for mono-filler systems, in comparison to pure PLA; however, the effect was more obvious in PLA/MWCNT composites. Bi-filler composites with PLA/MWCNT/GNP also show electrical conductivity due to a synergetic effect—and those values are higher than those of the mono-filler systems.

Scanning Electron Microscopy (SEM) images of cryo-fractured surfaces of the mono-filler composites, containing (a) 6 wt.% multi-walled carbon nanotubes (MWCNT) and (b) 6 wt.% of graphene nanoplates (GNP) and bi-filler composites, containing (c) 1.5% GNP/1.5% MWCNT and (d) 3% GNP/3% MWCNT, respectively at magnification 20,000×.

“Thermal transport in obtained PLA/GNP composites is a thriving area of research thanks to graphene’s extraordinary heat conductivity properties and its potential for use in thermal management applications,” concluded the authors. “The obtained composites can be considered an excellent electrical and heat conductor for a variety of applications.”

Thermal conductivity and thermal diffusivity vs. GNP and MWCNT filler content for two (PLA/GNP and PLA/MWCNT) and bi-filler (PLA/GNP/MWCNT) composites.

PLA is one of the most popular and versatile materials used in 3D printing, often preferred over other polymers like ABS because it is vegetable-based and assumed to be biodegradable (most variants of PLA are not compostable and . Researchers have performed numerous studies centered around its uses, to include effectiveness of recycled forms of PLA, new filament formulations, and innovation for applications like satellite antennas. What do you think of this news? Let us know your thoughts! Join the discussion of this and other 3D printing topics at 3DPrintBoard.com.