Hackaday Links: December 16, 2018

Microsoft is really leaning into vaporwave these days. Microsoft is giving away knit Windows sweaters to social media influencers. Is it for an ugly sweater contest? Maybe, or maybe Microsoft is capitalizing on the mid-90s AESTHETIC. Recently, Apple got back in their 90s logo game with the release of a few ‘rainbow Apple’ t-shirts. The spirit of the 90s lives on in tech culture.

Have a Hackerspace? Frack is organizing the great Inter-hackerspaces Xmas goodies swap! Since your hackerspace is filled with weird ephemera and random crap, why not box it up and send it out to another hackerspace? You’ll …read more

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Etch-a-Sketch 3D Printed With Cell Phone

Most of us have fond memories of the Etch-a-Sketch from childhood. [Potent Printables] wanted to update the designs so he 3D printed an XY carriage for a stylus that works with a cell phone drawing program. You can see the video below and the 3D model details on Thingiverse.

The design is fun all by itself, but it also gave us a few ideas. For one thing, if you motorized it you could make some pretty clever drawing toys. But there could be a more practical use, too.

You’d have to automate the Z-axis as well, but if you did, …read more

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Customize All the Fan Covers You Never Knew You Needed

Do you need a fancy fan cover with precisely specified attributes, but have no desire to design one from scratch? If you answered yes (or no) then [mightynozzle] has the answer. The Customizable Fan Grill Cover is a parametric design in OpenSCAD that allows adjusting the frame style, size, and grill pattern for any fan cover one may possibly need. [mightynozzle] also went the extra mile to provide a large number of pre-made STL files for a variety of designs in a wide range of sizes, so those who don’t want to fuss with customizing can simply download and print. …read more

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Robotic Laser Keeps Cat Entertained While You Hack

Whether it’s our own cat or a neighbor’s, many of us have experienced the friendly feline keeping us company while we work, often contributing on the keyboard, sticking its head where our hands are for a closer look, or sitting on needed parts. So how to keep the crafty kitty busy elsewhere? This roboticized laser on a pan-tilt mechanism from the [circuit.io team] should do the trick.

The laser is a 650 nm laser diode mounted on a 3D printed pan-tilt system which they found on Thingiverse and modified for attaching the diode’s housing. It’s all pretty lightweight so two …read more

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3D Printed Wave Lamp Forecasts the Weather

While browsing Thingiverse, [Dushyant Ahuja] found a rather pleasing wave lamp, and since a mere lamp on its own would not quite be enough, he added a means by which his lamp could provide weather alerts by means of changing its color.

It’s fair to say that the wave lamp is not a print for the faint-hearted, and it took him 30 hours to complete. However, it has the interesting feature of not requiring a support or raft. There is also a base for the lamp designed to take a strip of addressable LEDs, and he modified its design to …read more

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3D Printed Lamp Even Prints the Nuts and Bolts

The first print to come off a shiny new 3D printer is usually a toy widget of some sort that will forever sit at your desk without purpose. The alternative is a practical project that is custom and personal like this 3D Printed Articulating Lamp. [IgorF2] shares his design for this wall mounted device which was created using Fusion 360.

The complete design consists of eight parts which includes the arms, nuts, and bolts, as well as the wall mount, each of which can be printed individually. These come together to form a structure that can be attached to a …read more

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A Crash Course in Thingiverse Customizer

OpenSCAD is a great way to create objects for 3D printing (or other purposes), especially if you are already used to programming. For things like front panels, it is great because you can easily make modifications and — if you wrote your code correctly–everything will just adjust itself to new positions.

However, what if you have a general-purpose piece of code, and you want people to have the ability to customize it? For example, consider this code:

$fn=100;
difference()
{
  cube([25,25,5]);
  translate([4,4,-1]) cylinder(h=7,r=2);
  translate([25-4,4,-1]) cylinder(h=7,r=2);
  translate([4,25-4,-1]) cylinder(h=7,r=2);
  translate([25-4,25-4,-1]) cylinder(h=7,r=2);
}

That creates the plate with four drill holes you see …read more

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Stop Printing Air with a Filament Sensor

If you have had a 3D printer for awhile, you know the heartbreak of coming in to check on an 8-hour print only to find that in hour 7 you ran out of filament (or the filament broke) and your printer has been dutifully moving around for no reason. [Chuck Hellebuyck] knows and he decided to make a filament sensor he found on Thingiverse.

Finding a part on Thingiverse and printing it probably doesn’t warrant much attention. But if you watch the video, below, it is a good example of how things from Thingiverse don’t always meet your needs. The …read more

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