What have you made and shared today?

Bathtoy by Request!

After explaining Thing-A-Day to my daughter, I asked her what she would like me to design for her for day 2. Answer: A sailboat for the bathtub.

Tool for a Working Artist!

Last night, my wife needed a circle template for an art project she was doing. This took about 15 minutes to make in total, from design to finished product. And that is why 3D printing is awesome.

Jewelry (and Tool for Future Jewelry)!

This design is intended to be an envelope to be boolean used (intersection) with other textured designs, we’ll see….

Tool for Learning About Clocks!

I figured this tool might be useful for the MakerBot Clock Makers project and for educators and students looking to explore basic gear mechanics.  (I am spending time each day designing new attachments for it.)

Keep checking back to see what other Thing-A-Day participants are sharing on Thingiverse — and get out there and make some stuff.

OpenSCAD Bathtub Sailboat

The hardest part of cranking out a Thing-A-Day for me is coming up with new ideas.  When I have an idea for a printable thing, I typically just design it, publish it, and get it out there on Thingiverse.  However, that means I generally don’t have many ideas left over for creating something new each day.

Thankfully, I have my daughter.  After explaining that February was Thing-A-Day month and that I wanted to design something that was printable on our 3D printing robot, I asked her what she would like me to design.  A saildboat for the bathtub was her answer. ¹

In many ways the challenge of coming up with something that will meet her arbitrary and completely unpredictable specifications is actually easier that thinking up an idea for something each day myself. ²

Thing-A-Day #2: OpenSCAD Bathtub Sailboat by MakerBlock

After explaining Thing-A-Day to my daughter, I asked her what she would like me to design for her for day 2. Answer: A sailboat for the bathtub. Designed in OpenSCAD, but not very parametric.

This thing brought to you by

1. Actually, her answer was a paper sailboat.  I reminded her it had to be something out of plastic, so she revised her response. [↩]
2. After all, the spirit of the exercise is to create a new thing each day, not necessarily come up with the ideas for them yourself [↩]

February has arrived and, with it, Thing-A-Day!  My goal for Thing-A-Day this year is to create a digital object every single day this month.  I’ll be using my design program of choice, OpenSCAD.  If you haven’t tried out OpenSCAD yet, this is the perfect excuse.  I’ve already put together several OpenSCAD tutorials that will take you from this:

Hollow Calibration Cube by Starno

to this:

OpenSCAD Pirate Ship by MakerBlock

in no time!¹

Before you cringe at the prospect of taking on OpenSCAD, let me point out that the above pirate ship was designed entirely with just cubes and cylinders.

Recently I had need of a way to mount an Arduino to a project box.  Unfortunately, I hadn’t finished the rest of the project yet, so I didn’t know where the Arduino would end up or how it would be mounted exactly.  I ended up knocking out a simple friction fit holder.  While there are no mounting or screw holes in it, I figured I could always just drill them later if needs be.  Since my project is still need a lot of work be elevated to a “work-in-progress” status, for the time being this mount is being held in place by my second-favorite DIY tool… duct tape.

1. Admittedly, that pirate ship took a while. [↩]

A few notable things about February:

• Always the shortest month (even during Leap Year).
• Often too cold to play outside much (well, maybe not this year).
• Contains Valentine’s Day, a day focused on sharing the things you love with those you love.
• Washington’s and Lincoln’s birthdays, actual and observed.
• Time for the annual Thing-A-Day challenge!

If you have never participated in Thing-A-Day before, here’s the quick summary: this is an opportunity to join a vocal crowd of Makers who are seizing the day, each day for a month, as an opportunity to make something new and then share it (or evidence of it) as part of their community posting effort. Several of us at MakerBot are planning to participate on our own time with a wide range of tools — and encourage you all to not only consider signing up and sticking with the challenge, but also posting your creations to Thingiverse for all of our community to savor.

A few tips. Aim … um … simple. Like 45min from idea-to-thing kind of simple. And push a bit ahead towards the next day whenever a little extra time falls your way. Oh, and take those things that you have to do anyway and twist them into opportunities to share something that, frankly, people really will appreciate anyway.

Inspire all of us and help populate Thingiverse with new and exciting things that have never been shared there before!

And don’t forget, the Thingiverse tag you should use for your posts is: “thing-a-day”

Thing-A-Day.com!

The website Thing-A-Day.com challenges people to create a new thing each day in February.  Sign-ups start on January 21, 2011 and end on midnight of February 1, 2011.

And the timing really couldn’t be better.  Now that Thingiverse has incorporated Flattr buttons, people can even reward you with “digital tips” to help keep you motivated throughout the month.  So, dust off some old designs, get inspired to create new things, sculpt something amazing on 3Dtin.com, and share it with everyone!