Unlocking the future. And gumball machines.

Posted on February 22, 2014 by g.wygonik

One way to keep morale up in a high-pressure, high-stress work environment is through candy. Lots and lots of candy. One of the guys at the office brought in several gumball machines he has and filled them with delicious sweets, mostly different flavors of M&Ms. Unfortunately while trying to unlock one of them he pulled the key out without it being aligned properly, thus making it impossible to get the key back in the keyhole. Co-workers tried all sorts of ways to get it working, but no luck. Finally one guy remembered I had 3D printers and asked if I could help and, well, I’m always up for a challenge.

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Printing the unprintable

Posted on November 24, 2013 by g.wygonik

In the world of 3D printing, you’ll sometimes end up with models that — for one reason or another — just don’t want to be printed.

These models can come from anywhere: bad scans from Kinect or other DIY scanning solutions, objects made in 3D software that weren’t combined into a solid, or from code that creates 3D objects that were never intended to be made physical. This is a quick walk-through of how I was able to print one of these unprintable objects using a new, (currently) free app.

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The thin wall

Posted on June 16, 2013 by g.wygonik

No, not the Ultravox song, the test of 3D printer resolution.

A little background: a few days back I made a small robot pendent for my wife. She liked it, but immediately asked “what about a mech?”. I really am no good at modeling mech — I’ve tried, and just, no — so I went to Thingiverse and found a really cool MadCat mech model that I could turn into a pendent.

Since I wanted to push the resolution of the Form 1, I added a few extras like rockets in the shoulder rocket launchers and gun barrels in the arms. I also added the post and loop to make it a pendent.

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Tiny glass robots [update with 0.025mm pics]

Posted on June 8, 2013 by g.wygonik

Ok, not glass. But it certainly looks like it! This is a quick robot pendent I modeled in Blender today and 3D printed on my Form 1. It took just a little over an hour to print at 0.05mm per layer. I’ll let the pictures speak for themselves (hint: it’s awesome!)