Print A Drill Press For Your Printed Circuit Boards

If you make printed circuit boards the old fashioned way by etching them yourself, you may need to drill a lot of holes; even surface-mount converts still need header pins on occasion. But, drilling these holes by hand often leads to broken drill bits, which always seems to happen with …read more

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A Teeny Tiny 3D Printed Macro Extension Tube

When you hear the term “extension tube”, you probably think of something fairly long, right? But when [Loudifier] needed an extension tube to do extreme close-ups with a wide-angle lens on a Canon EF-M camera, it needed to be small…really small. The final 3D printed extension provides an adjustable length …read more

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(Mis)use This Part to Attach 3D Printed Stuff to a Shaft

Interfacing a shaft to a 3D printed gear doesn’t have to be tricky. [Tlalexander] demonstrated a solution that uses one half of a spider coupling (or jaw coupling) to create an effective modular attachment. The picture above (and this older link) shows everything you need to know: the bottom of …read more

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FiberGrid: An Inexpensive Optical Sensor Framework

When building robots, or indeed other complex mechanical systems, it’s often the case that more and more limit switches, light gates and sensors are amassed as the project evolves. Each addition brings more IO pin usage, cost, potentially new interfacing requirements and accompanying microcontrollers or ADCs. If you don’t have …read more

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STEP Up Your Jetson Nano Game with These Printable Accessories

Found yourself with a shiny new NVIDIA Jetson Nano but tired of having it slide around your desk whenever cables get yanked? You need a stand! If only there was a convenient repository of options that anyone could print out to attach this hefty single-board computer to nearly anything. But …read more

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Lithophanes Ditch the Monochrome with a Color Layer

3D printed lithophanes are great, if a bit monochromatic. [Thomas Brooks] (with help from [Jason Prius]) changed all that with a tool for creating color lithophanes but there’s a catch: you’ll need a printer capable of creating multi-color prints to do it.

A video (embedded below) begins with an intro …read more

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Behold the Crimson Axlef*cker (Do Not Insert Finger)

Are your aluminum extrusions too straight? The Crimson Axlef*cker can help you out. It’s a remarkable 3D printed, 4-stage, 125:1 reduction gearbox driven by a brushless motor. Designer [jlittle988] decided to test an early prototype to destruction and while he was expecting something to break, he didn’t expect it to …read more

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Acoustic Lenses Show Sound Can Be Focused Like Light

Acoustic lenses are remarkable devices that just got cooler. A recent presentation at SIGGRAPH 2019 showed that with the help of 3D printing, it is possible to build the acoustic equivalent of optical devices. That is to say, configurations that redirect or focus sound waves. One fascinating demonstration worked like …read more

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3D Printing Makes Modular Payload For Model Rocket

Putting payloads into model rockets can be more complex than simply shoving stuff into an open spot, so [concretedog] put some work into making a modular payload tube for his current rocket. The nose cone for his rocket is quite large, so he opted to give it a secure payload …read more

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A Better Embroidery Machine, With 3D Printing and Common Parts

In concept, an everyday sewing machine could make embroidery a snap: the operator would move the fabric around in any direction they wish while the sewing machine would take care of slapping down stitches of colored thread to create designs and filled areas. In practice though, getting good results in …read more

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