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mathgrrl
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College-level math exploration in 3D at JMU 3SPACE
College-level math exploration in 3D at JMU 3SPACE 842 640 mathgrrl
This fall’s liberal arts math course at James Madison University used 3D printing and design as the basis for exploring fractals, infinity, and other mathematical curiosities. The students learned Tinkercad, OpenSCAD, and other 3D design tools to construct mathematical objects from scratch, investigated the mathematics of those objects, and presented their work in blog posts and showcases… // Ultimaker Education
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Rainbow Triple Wrap Bracelet
Rainbow Triple Wrap Bracelet 640 480 mathgrrl
Today we put our XYZ da Vinci Color printer to the test! For the last six months I’ve worn a 3D-printed Triple Wrap Bracelet all day and all night, and it’s great. Mine was printed on a super-fancy HP Jet Fusion printer at Shapeways, and a slightly thicker model would be a pretty nasty torture test for any desktop 3D printer. Plus, we’re going to use Meshmixer add some color… // Hacktastic
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Hex Bowls for Settlers of Catan
Hex Bowls for Settlers of Catan 640 480 mathgrrl
Settlers of Catan + Cities and Knights + Expansion Pack + House Rules = Complicated. To help mitigate the chaos we keep our settlements, cities, roads, and knights in tidy 3D printed hex-boxes. The boxes have snap-fit lids with a slot to help with opening. We 3D printed boxes to hold our standard Catan pieces, extra Catan pieces, 3D Catan numbers, and some extra bits and pieces for our House Rules… // Hacktastic
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Getting Started on the Brother KH-881 Punchcard Knitting Machine
Getting Started on the Brother KH-881 Punchcard Knitting Machine 640 440 mathgrrl
Just before the new year we bought a punchcard knitting machine from the 1980’s from eBay. It’s a Brother KH-881, one of the last Brother models before electronics were added to the machine. Step 1 of our plan: Figure out how to use a punchcard knitting machine! This is the first in a series of posts to catalog this journey and maybe make it slightly easier for anyone else that wants to walk the same road… // Hacktastic
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Dissolvable Support Interface is Everything You Need
Dissolvable Support Interface is Everything You Need 640 480 mathgrrl
I’m totally in love with dissolvable supports for complex models, but… the dissolvable PVA material is (a) expensive, (b) increases my print times, and (c) takes a long time to dissolve. In this post we’ll discuss a tip about how to make all three of those things better! In a nutshell, we’ll be setting Cura so that only the interface between the model and the supports uses the dissolvable PLA… // Hacktastic
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Creating Celtic Knots with Fusion 360
Creating Celtic Knots with Fusion 360 640 480 mathgrrl
Today we’ll do a step-by-step walkthrough tutorial on designing 3D Celtic knots from scratch with Fusion 360. Our technique will be to make a grid of dots, then connect the dots with splines, then shift those splines up or down at the crossing points. This gives us a thin curve that traces out the desired knot, and we’ll be able to sweep a circle around that curve to make a round 3D tube… // Shapeways Magazine
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Unreasonably large bounds on Reidemeister move sequences
Unreasonably large bounds on Reidemeister move sequences 600 456 mathgrrl
On this episode of My Favorite Theorem, cohosts Evelyn J. Lamb and Kevin Knudson talk with Laura Taalman, a math professor at James Madison University, to raise a glass to a lavishly impractical theorem about knots: a 1998 theorem of Haas and Lagarias that gives unreasonably huge bounds on the length of trivializing sequences of Reidemeister moves… // My Favorite Theorem podcast
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Targeted Thickening with Meshmixer
Targeted Thickening with Meshmixer 846 644 mathgrrl
Why would you want to thicken just part of a model? One reason is that sometimes a 3D model might get rejected from Shapeways during the pre-production process due to weak geometry or thin connections; this happened to us recently with a polyhedral Snub Cube design. In this post we’ll walk you through one way to thicken targeted areas of a 3D model using Meshmixer. // Column at Shapeways
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Multicolor 3D Printing, from Tinkercad to XYZ
Multicolor 3D Printing, from Tinkercad to XYZ 640 480 mathgrrl
Today’s post is about something that is flat-out easy and in addition somehow actually works. Specifically, we have some good news: You can create color 3D designs in Tinkercad and import them directly into the XYZ da Vinci Color 3D printer for printing! I know, that sounds obvious, but in general color printing is hard and even getting the right kinds of files exported can be a tricky business… // Hacktastic
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Three-Sided Cylinder Coins
Three-Sided Cylinder Coins 628 472 mathgrrl
Today we 3D printed some cylinder coins for students and classrooms to experiment with after watching Matt Parker’s video “How thick is a three-sided coin?”. These fat coins can land on their edges as well as their faces. Try out different thickness-to-diameter ratios and search for the fairest three-sided cylinder coin! Download free 3D-printable files or order cost-optimized prints from Shapeways… // Hacktastic
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