When you start work at frog, you are given your choice of computer type, desk type, and a selection of useful desk items, including a nice IKEA TERTIAL desk lamp with a nice, bright, CFL bulb. These lamps are great at illuminating your desk, but they also can cause pain to any coworker who happens to be on the wrong side of the shade.
As I discussed in From Novelty to Necessity, I had designed and 3D printed several copies of a reed switch holder for the Y axis of our Electro Tennis rigs. I didn’t address the fact that I also printed a modified version for the X axis; I just simply didn’t have the photos and I always like to have photos of things I write about.
When I was 10, my parents sent me to stay with my grandparents in Pennsylvania for a summer. My grandparents, apparently not knowing what to do with a 10-year-old boy, enrolled me in summer school. Yeah, total bummer.
There was a week or so before school started so they took me to a toy store to get me something to pass the time with. I picked the Tomy Little Van Goes toy — basically a bunch of interchangeable plastic plates and a holder that you put paper over and rubbed to get the outline of different vans you could then color. I thought this was great, until three days later when I got bored with it because there weren’t enough of the kinds of pieces I wanted to see.
As I’ve been thinking a lot about crafty things for groups lately, I recalled my initial joy of this childhood toy, and the frustration at not having all the things I wanted it to. Then I remembered that I have a 3D printer! What a great thing to be able to design and print!
See this:
Yeah – that’s an awesome half of a box. But not just any half of a box. That half-box fits over the end of a juice box. “Whoopty-do” you say, and I admit that by itself it’s not that big of a deal. But… what if…
As I mentioned in my first attempt at creating a very small headphone shirt clip, I wanted to revisit the design and make some adjustments based on what I had learned. I got a chance over this holiday weekend to do just that — take some more measurements, make some new designs, and print some more clips.
Other than weekends, I only make trips to our studio where my Thing-o-Matic lives every so often. If I get tied up with life, my 3D printing plans can fall behind. Such is the case with a project I’ve had on my plate for a few weeks now: the pico projector holder bar I talked about before. Well this past weekend my plate was empty so it was a good weekend for lots of 3D printing. I managed to get the other bracket — the actual piece that holds the pico projector — printed, modified, and printed again. And I learned some things in the process.
I like my Bose earbud headphones: they stay in my ear when I’m walking or jogging, and don’t bleed sound to folks around me like the stock white Apple ones. I really like the little clip that lets me attach the cable to my shirt, keeping the wires from that point on to my ears at a constant distance; I can turn my head in any direction and won’t be restricted by the wires back down to my pants pocket.
Walking to work one morning, thinking about how nice this clip is, I thought that I should try to make a similar clip for the white headphones, just to see if it could be done. And, of course, I could share it on Thingiverse.
After making the new version of my remote control holder last week, and hanging it on the wall, I saw a problem. Really, it was an aesthetic issue rather than a functional issue, but something I wanted to correct none-the-less. When the remote was placed in the holder, it would rock to one side or the other. The bottom wing was flat while the bottom of the remote is curved; the space on either side of the remote between the wings was larger than the width of the remote.
After learning that I needed to redesign the wall-mounted remote control holder due to its inherent design flaws — at least in the location it is in our home — I spent the past week trying to work out a better version.
Ten. That’s how many completed print jobs I managed over the long holiday weekend. Yes, there was also one aborted print. Ten is fantastic given my previous concerns about over-heating, bad electricity, inconsistent temperature settings, and so forth. And the outside temperature was below 100-degrees for the first time in seemingly years. This really was a good weekend for printing. Of course, just a few miles away, Texas burns; not all is cake and ice cream.
my plastic future 