Posts By :

mathgrrl

Origami Press #2: Yoshizawa Butterfly

Origami Press #2: Yoshizawa Butterfly 2016 1512 mathgrrl
This 3D-printed origami press is a helper for folding a beautiful and elegant butterfly model designed by Akira Yoshizawa. One of the final folds pulls the paper together past its natural fold line, which is what creates the organic, curvy shape of the finished model.

3D Printed Origami Press – Miura Fold

3D Printed Origami Press – Miura Fold 2016 1512 mathgrrl
This weekend we’ll be headed to the MOVES 2019 Conference in NYC at MoMath, organized by mathematicians Josh Laison and Robert Vallin.  This year, MOVES is origami-themed and features keynotes by Erik Demaine and Robert Lang. In honor of the occasion we’ve decided to design 3D printed “origami presses” that push crease patterns into origami paper…

Stacking 3D Models for Bulk Printing

Stacking 3D Models for Bulk Printing 840 630 mathgrrl
Sometimes printing multiple copies of a design can make it much more affordable. In this article we’ll compare the cost of printing items individually and in bulk, and show how to efficiently stack and loop objects for inexpensive bulk printing.

Stainless Steel Knots

Stainless Steel Knots 1800 1337 mathgrrl
Knots are embeddings of circles in 3-dimensional space, but they are typically studied in terms of their projections into 2-dimensional space. We can use 3D printed models to investigate knots in a more 3-dimensional way. This series includes nine Stainless Steel 3D printed knot conformations.

Print All The Pentagons

Print All The Pentagons 1096 822 mathgrrl
Some years back we created the Pentomizer, a customizable model on Thingiverse that could generate all possible irregular pentagons that tile the plane. Although we went crazy making all sorts of things out of those pentagons, one thing we hadn’t done until today is create bulk sets of all fifteen types of tessellating pentagons that people could order from Shapeways. A lot of work goes into creating, packaging, creating media for, and setting up 15 different products. In this post we’ll walk through the surprisingly lengthly process of turning a model into a released product/design on Shapeways and Thingiverse…

Tetris Houndstooth Scarf

Tetris Houndstooth Scarf 1303 977 mathgrrl
You’d think it would be easy to make a machine knitting punch card pattern based on something as simple as Tetris pieces, and I guess it is, unless you want it to be *interesting*. In this post we’ll create a two-colorable houndstooth-inspired tessellation of Tetris tetrominos that is suitable for a 24 x 48 punch card, and go from pattern to punch card, and finally to finished wearable scarf…

3D Scanning Works, If You’ve Got the $$$

3D Scanning Works, If You’ve Got the $$$ 800 600 mathgrrl
3D scanning is a serious pain and in my experience none of the solutions have worked particularly well in terms of capturing fine details… but that’s because I keep trying to make it work with free software and tools. As with so many things in life, it turns out that 3D scanning actually works, if you’ve got the money. In this post we’ll compare scanning options with Trnio, Qlone, Meshroom, and EinScan.

Punch Card Knitting Machine Patterns with OpenSCAD

Punch Card Knitting Machine Patterns with OpenSCAD 1238 928 mathgrrl
As we’ve seen in our previous posts on machine knitting, punching holes into cards can be tedious if any part of the process is manual.  Today we’ll speed up the pattern-creation process significantly by bringing OpenSCAD code to the party. With OpenSCAD we can create patterning shortcuts that allow us to quickly combine and modify basic elements like diagonals, squares, and dots to make complex designs…

3D Printed “Names Dress” – 300 Powerful Women in STEAM

3D Printed “Names Dress” – 300 Powerful Women in STEAM 1000 752 mathgrrl

Here are just some of the 3D-printed handwritten names that make up the Names Dress, part of the Sustainable Thinking exhibit at Museo Salvatore Ferragamo in Florence, Italy: This conceptual…

Designing with Weighted Random Parameters in OpenSCAD

Designing with Weighted Random Parameters in OpenSCAD 1000 756 mathgrrl
Starting from just one random number you can use code to generate snowflakes, clocks, and even entire worlds. Use our simple randomizer as a starting point for adding some controlled randomness to just about any OpenSCAD design…
Back to top