Toddler Mobility Trainer

Project with TOM Global & Makegood Nola

For the last 3 years, my wife and I have a Memorial Day weekend “Tiki Party”. We normally host 25-ish folks. I just got my first printer, and my wife asked if I could make little tikis with the date to hand out as party favors. I found a design I liked, scaled it down, added text, and bought some wood fiber PLA to print with. Test prints were fine. This morning I realized I have started to print a “Tiki Turd” army, lol. Alternate fiber choice incoming……

My youngest daughter is trying. She stayed up late last night trying to make a straight wood grain texture in blender for our next project. Another couple if coats of stain and I think it'll look the part!

Printed for a local reenactment group.

This has been a multi year project of mine. It's a fully functional autonomous Starship model that uses cheap sensors, servos and the software was built from the ground up. The entire body is 3D Printed except for a few carbon rods in the intake area. Everything was designed to be as light and stiff as possible. I even chose ABS as it's density is slightly lower than PLA reducing weight.

Basically messed up sanding/painting the normal look so i decided to make it into a damaged helmet instead. I rubbed some Rub N Buff around it, picture dosent look that good but it looks pretty decent to me in person. Anybody got any tips on ways to make it look more battle worn before i put the final pieces on? Thanks

Hello, Reddit! I'm Haden with MIT's Center for Advanced Production Technologies, back with another cool 3D print. I shared last week how we used a 2-photon polymerization system to 3D print structural color at the nanoscale. This week, I'll explore the other extreme of the length-scale -- 3D concrete printing, or 3DCP.

This week's highlight was load testing a topology-optimized 3D printed truss architecture. Which is a very fancy way to say a lightweight cement span for, e.g., a pedestrian bridge. You'll note the process is often called "concrete printing," but I use "cement" here. This is because the actual printed material is mortar (in this case, calcium sulphoaluminate) and does not feature the large aggregate (i.e., rocks) used to make true concrete. Aggregate would pose insurmountable challenges during printing (as it would affect the extrudability and layer quality, in addition to mechanically damaging the mixing-pumping system), and therefore "3D concrete printing" is often a misnomer.

This funky looking shape actually has a quite of bit of design intent behind it, as the shape has at least two important manufacturing constraints: (1) The geometry must be a 2D profile projected into 3D (to avoid overhangs that would collapse during printing), and (2) the toolpath must be continuous (as the machine cannot stop mid-print due to the continuous reaction of the cement mix). Additional volumetric constraints are also imposed. All in all, the design was intended to carry a load of 2,000 lbs. Actual load was a bit more due to variation in the concrete blocks used to load the truss, closer to a full metric ton. In the photo, the truss is only around 50% loaded.

The algorithm alone, however, is not enough. Optimizing the layer width and deposition spacing to ensure high-quality interfaces between the deposition tracks is crucial, as weak interfaces would fail before material failure. This required a precise marriage of design intent, toolpath planning, and machine operation to achieve. Reference targets are applied to the truss, and the black sheet is used for a clean visual background, as digital image correlation techniques could be used for failure analysis. These are ultimately redundant, as the truss handled the load with ease, and now is waiting to be packed up and shipped to its new home.

My speculation is that this type of approach will be instrumental in facilitating adoption of 3DCP applications. The process is arguably slower and less resilient than conventional forming methods for infrastructure, but by optimizing material placement in space, we are also optimizing for productivity as a by-product. Beyond, these architectures open up new horizons at the intersections of creative intent, architecture, and structural engineering.

This work is led by MIT PI Professor Josephine Carstensen, in collaboration with MIT's Center for Advanced Production Technologies. We collaborate closely with Autodesk through the Autodesk Technology Center Research Residency Program, and the majority of the physical work - from printing to testing - was done at their Boston Seaport location.

One week. Over 20 pieces. Over 30 prints including fails. A ton of epoxy and super glue and even more filament. Makes a two liter bottle of soda look tiny...

Honestly might be the coolest thing I've built yet

Sea trials to be done after waterproofing. Submarine itself is on my Thingiverse (Luci_the_Demon) if anyone wants to download it