Hasta La Ideas

While the rest of us were enjoying the dulcet tones of Bing Crosby, Amanda Ghassaei of Instructables was as busy as ever over the holiday: she posted a ‘compilation’ video of her experiments in 3D printing 12” records, for which she has unsurprisingly published the plans on Instructables, on the day after Christmas. “In order to explore the current limits of 3D printing technology, I’ve created a technique for converting digital audio files into 3D-printable, 33RPM records and printed a few prototypes that play on ordinary turntables.” Suffice it to say that it’s a significant improvement upon Fred Murphy’s diverting Fisher Price records:

This project was my first experiment extending this idea beyond electronics. I printed these records on a UV-cured resin printer called the Objet Connex500. Like most 3D printers, the Objet creates an object by depositing material layer by layer until the final form is achieved. This printer has incredibly high resolution: 600dpi in the x and y axes and 16 microns in the z axis, some of the highest resolution possible with 3D printing at the moment. Despite all its precision, the Objet is still at least an order of magnitude or two away from the resolution of a real vinyl record. When I first started this project, I wasn’t sure that the resolution of the Objet would be enough to reproduce audio, but I hoped that I might produce something recognizable by approximating the groove shape as accurately as possible with the tools I had.

The project isn’t a major breakthrough in 3D printing (per our Year-in-Review prognostication), but it’s certainly an inventive bit of lateral thinking. Ghassaei notes that even the top-of-the-line Object Connex500 cannot emulate the traditional process of stamping vinyl (video after the jump), citing digital equivalencies to denote the low fidelity of the 3D printed records, which sound something like listening to a radio broadcast through a thin wall.

Though the audio quality is low—the records have a sampling rate of 11kHz (a quarter of typical mp3 audio) and 5-6 bit resolution (less than one thousandth of typical 16 bit resolution)—the audio output is still easily recognizable… The 3D modeling in this project was far too complex for traditional drafting-style CAD techniques, so I wrote an program to do this conversion automatically. It works by importing raw audio data, performing some calculations to generate the geometry of a 12″ record, and eventually exporting this geometry straight to a 3D printable file format.

The effect is most felicitous for Radiohead’s “Everything in Its Right Place,” where the lo-fi crackle and narrow frequency range somehow underscore the warm solace of the opening track from Kid A. Daft Punk, on the other hand, sounds better with more bass as a rule of thumb, while Aphex Twin’s “Windowlicker” needs more treble; the alt-rock cuts need a more volume all around. (The song selection is something like the weeknight playlist at any given bar in the Mission or Williamsburg… not that there’s anything wrong with that: it’s easier to judge the quality of familiar tunes than obscure ones.)

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The first batch of Mixees arrive from the printer. All images courtesy of MixeeMe.

Custom avatars have always been an addicting form of participatory making. From the famous Nintendo Miis to Mad Men Yourself and South Park Avatar Creator, avatar-making has proven to be a popular practice online time and time again.

But while we ourselves wander around a three dimensional wonderland, our avatars remain stuck in the second dimension. Even if, like Miis, they seem to be free, they can never quite leap from the screen and into our hands, at least not without considerable effort.

For all those avatars itching for entree into the real world, we now have MixeeMe, a new startup that allows you to create a cute, custom avatar of yourself, your friends, your nemeses or anyone else you know and get a real live 3D printed version in the mail a few days later. It’s the brainchild of designers Nancy Liang and Aaron Barnet, two Yale grads who wanted to make a dream into reality.

“When I was little had this idea that if you could become an action figure you’re successful, you made it in the world,” explained Liang in a Skype interview with Core77. “I sat down at Google Sketchup, figured out how to make circles and cubes and put them together. After 5 hours, I uploaded my character model to Shapeways, and found that it would be too expensive to print. The modeling process was a shit show, basically.”

Frustrated with the options for designing simple 3D objects, Liang took to the web and worked with Barnet to research and develop simple 3D tools. “I decided that only do I want to make action figures, I want to make it easy for others to make action figures of themselves or their friends,” she noted. After exploring the different options, they decided on a simple interface that let customers focus on creating, rather than the technical specifics.

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For the past ten years Randy Johnson has been Editor-in-Chief of American Woodworker magazine. Johnson, a longtime furniture builder who previously ran his own furniture business, is also a huge fan of CNC; so it’s no surprise that as of last week, he came on board with ShopBot Tools as their Director of Education. Johnson was on hand at this year’s AU to man his new post.

With his extensive experience in woodworking, furniture building and CNC, there’s simply no better man to ask about what a ShopBot can do for a furniture designer. So we did:

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Most of the recent buzz around 3D printers has been of the consumer variety, but of course it’s companies like Objet that have the seriously bad-ass machines. At the Autodesk University 2012 Exhibition Hall, the company showed off their Objet 1000, which boasts multi-material printing and lays it down at an absurdly tight layer height of just 16 microns. Check out what they can make:

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We picked up on Samuel Bernier’s “Project RE_” even before he was recognized as Runner-Up in the DIY category of this year’s Core77 Design Awards, and he might just be in contention for 2013 with his latest project, “Dentelle.” Taking it’s name from the French word for lace, the project was inspired by a simple repair job:

When I moved in my new apartment, the last owner had left [an IKEA] Rigolit lamp in the middle of the living room. An object that looks like a fishing rod holding a big paper cloud. The lampshade was ripped everywhere and Scotch tape was holding it together. This huge volume was always in the way and we kept bumping our heads into it. One day, I had enough and decided to buy a new lampshade to replace the paper one. Everything was either too expensive for me or extremely ugly. Also, the closest IKEA was an hour away… by bus.

What does a designer do in such a situation? He makes! A few hours later, thanks to affordable 3D printing, a unique lampshade was made. I couldn’t stop there, so I designed 2, 3… 12 different ones, using always the same shape and changing only the color and the texture. They take between 4 and 12 hours to print, use absolutely no support material, weight between 50g and 100g and cost less than $5 to print.

As in his “Project RE_,” Bernier’s approach captures the spirit of the Fixer’s Manifesto to a tee, revitalizing a superficially damaged object with ingenuity, a bit of elbow grease (and a spool of ABS, of course).

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