The Pirate Bay may be fading away, eaten slowly by corporate legal teams, but their inspiration carries on – and not only for bigtime entertainment media. We’ve just bumped into “The Product Bay”, whose intention seems similar to the Pirates. They “want to take all of this to the next level … for real life… Continue reading Welcome to The Product Bay
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The Blueprints
The Blueprints is: a website dedicated to collecting 3/4/5-view drawings, templates and blueprints for as many objects as possible. Ranging from humans to tanks and cars to mobile phones, the goal is to provide reference material for 3D modelers, scale modelers, replica builders etc. That’s right – a very large repository (37,000+) of… Continue reading The Blueprints
Let’s Download Some Hardware!
Bryan Bishop and Ben Lipkowitz talk about their new open source venture: SKDB. What is it? It’s a open source hardware distribution framework that takes cues from the highly successful software world. The software world was held back for decades by centrally controlled proprietary paradigms, but blossomed when open source principles took hold. Today we… Continue reading Let’s Download Some Hardware!
Contraptor!
Tips flowed in this week regarding “Contraptor”, the webchild of Vitaly Mankevich and Riley Porter. According to their About: Contraptor is a DIY open source construction set for experimental personal fabrication, desktop manufacturing, prototyping and bootstrapping. Various Cartesian robots can be quickly assembled from Contraptor and used as a platform for projects such as XY… Continue reading Contraptor!
MakerBeam Makes Beams!
And a lot more, it turns out. The MakerBeam project intends on providing a massive library of open source hardware connectors, all reusable and designed to interoperate. Their first big venture is Mini-T, which is a precisely downscaled model of larger T-slot building systems. It consists of extruded aluminum beams, 1 cm on a side,… Continue reading MakerBeam Makes Beams!
Wanna Git SKDBing?
Bryan Bishop tells us of some very interesting work taking place at the Automated Design Lab at the University of Texas at Austin. As is often the case, when two different worlds collide, interesting things happen. This time it’s software management and manufacturing. In the highly complex world of software management there are monstrously… Continue reading Wanna Git SKDBing?
Yet Another Kind of Repository?
With all the chatter about 3D model repositories lately, we thought we’d add another twist to the puzzle. Could a virtual world act as a 3D model repository? There are many virtual worlds available today, including Second Life and grids built on its open source cousin OpenSim, the upcoming BlueMars, There and others. Each of… Continue reading Yet Another Kind of Repository?
3DFilter: Just a Small Box
Many years ago you might recall the early days of web search, where there were several services competing to be the best search engine. At the time, the leaders might have been yahoo, altavista and others. But they were bested by upstart Google. Not only did Google provide excellent results, but they tried a… Continue reading 3DFilter: Just a Small Box
Human Brain!
Admit it: you did something wrong sometime in your life and someone told you: “Get a brain!” Well, now you can! A recent .STL upload to the Thingiverse model repository does just that. It’s a 3D model of an actual human brain! Now before you speculate on exactly *how* Jordan Miller obtained this anatomical… Continue reading Human Brain!
3D Parts On Demand
Shapeways has announced a great new feature for their 3D printing service that should benefit designers. It’s a 3D parts model database. The database currently has approximately thirty items in it, including a variety of nuts, sprockets, gears, bearings, coils and other fundamental parts. We suspect these components would be useful in many designs.… Continue reading 3D Parts On Demand
RepRapRepository?
The RepRap guys (who design and build homemade self-replicating replicators for hobbyist use) have an interesting discussion about online 3D model repositories. The big concern is the commanding lead that Google currently has over all other 3D source material. According to the post: The Google 3D Warehouse has reached 300,000 objects, while the RepRap object… Continue reading RepRapRepository?