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mathgrrl
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Origami Press #2: Yoshizawa Butterfly
Origami Press #2: Yoshizawa Butterfly 2016 1512 mathgrrl

Our second origami press is a helper for folding a beautiful and elegant butterfly model designed by Akira Yoshizawa. One of the final folds of this butterfly model pulls the paper together past its natural fold line, which is what creates the organic, curvy shape of the finished model. This press enables the folder to make this crucial fold very cleanly and thus produces a more reliable butterfly model…
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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…
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Pi Approximation Day – A Holiday for Hacks and Amateurs
Pi Approximation Day – A Holiday for Hacks and Amateurs 500 370 mathgrrl

The 3D printing community is full of self-taught hacks like me who are DIY “expert amateurs,” meaning that we have lots of experience doing things that are a bit out our league. As recently tweeted by @stevenstrogatz, “if it’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly”…
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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. Shapeways prices depend on many factors, including how much space is taken up in the printers, how much material is used, and other processing considerations. Understanding pricing and then designing to optimize price can make ordering your own prints more affordable, and allow your store products to be more accessible and attractive to customers. 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.
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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: Tritangentless Trefoil, Figure Eight Stick Knot, Cinquefoil Lattice, 5_2 Lissajous, 6_2 Petal Knot, two (7,2) Torus Knots, 8_19 Hyperboloid Stick Knot, and Midway Perko Knot…
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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…
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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…
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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.
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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…
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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…

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