A couple years ago I was flattered to learn that one of my projects was referenced in a TED talk by the guy that invented the Arduino. Today I learned that one of my designs has been incorporated into spray painting drone by the artist/vandal KATSU. The project is fully detailed on the Icarus One…
Category: Design
Maker Redux
For the last eighteen months I’ve been working with a group building a way for people with ideas to get things made by people with tools. Here’s the big idea: Post by Maker Redux Corporation.
Vendor provided CAD data.
I’m going to build an enclosure for my CNC mill to keep coolant and chips from going all over the floor. It took about ten minutes to model the mill table in FreeCAD but modeling all the aluminum extrusions was looking like a lot of work. Fortunately it isn’t necessary More and more vendors are…
Electronics Chassis Modeled.
I have all the little bits for the electronics chassis modeled now. I think all these parts will be cuttable for me. I still have to model the endcaps for the tube and some minor cleanup. Then it should be ready to cut. In the full assembly picture below, I don’t know why the edge…
FreeCAD design of OpenROV
A while ago I started thinking about building an OpenROV. They’ve got a very successful kickstarter campaign underway but I plan to self-source it. The project is open but the design files are all done in Autocad Inventor. I wanted to see if FreeCAD could model everything, so I started redesigning the files as fully…
Scout: A printable tribot
Here’s the first iteration of ‘Scout’. A simple printable frame for a robot based on two continuous rotation servos and an Arduino. The idea was to limit the number of printable parts and ‘vitamins’ to the bare minimum and keep the total cost for the bot below $50. I’ll use this to teach the robotics…
Fun with a $1.00 pumpkin
I actually made this pumpkin two years ago and had a blast with it. Most fun I’ve had trick-or-treating since I was twelve! I wrote it up as an Instructable this year.
FreeCAD is becoming my favorite modeling tool
It’s taken a while to get used to the interface and there’s still plenty of bugs to work around but the FreeCAD project is really moving along nicely. The sketcher makes designing parts like the ones below really simple. I learn things better with an actual project rather than just trying to copy tutorials…
No Secrets: Open-source CAM Application Bares All
Note: The following article appeared in Digital Machinist Volume 5 No. 3 Fall 2010. HeeksCAD has continued to mature since then. The current user interface may vary significantly from the images below. No Secrets: Open-source CAM application bares all. In the opening scene of the 1981 movie Raiders of the Lost Ark, explorers come upon…
Custom Grippers – Model simulation in HeeksCAD!
I really love HeeksCAD as a design tool. There’s a lot of features that are hidden like easter eggs and a new one got added today. This isn’t an obvious feature so I made a little youtube video to show how it can be used.