The Burrito Bomber Is Exactly What It Sounds Like

Yes, it’s a drone that delivers a burrito directly to wherever you are. It’s open source and you can find all the files on Darwin Aerospace’s website, or the github repository.

The Fixer’s Manifesto v1.0- From The Inventors Of Sugru

If you like the Fixer’s Manifesto then you can also look at pictures of people holding it here, if that’s your thing. If you want to fork/hack/improve it you can do that on the github page. If all of that is just to “free as in beer” for you then you can also buy a print from Sugru (it comes with a pink pen for making edits…yeah).

The Prusa i3 Is A RepRap That You Can Flat Pack

You may or may not already know who Josef Prusa is. If you’re reading this…odds are you know.

He’s taking his “3rd Iteration” (i3) RepRap to the Open Hardware Summit, and the coolest thing is that it breaks down into two flat sections!

Finally it’s easy to travel with a 3D printer. Don’t print on your desktop, print WORLDWIDE! [from Josef Prusa’s twitter]

For those who are interested in the ever increasing diversity of the RepRap family tree, the i3 seems to be based mostly on the design of Nop Head’s Mendel90.

There isn’t much information available at the moment, but it looks like Prusa has created some special components, particularly in the extruder. Here are some notes, and the github. And here it is printing a giant vase…

Using Github To Track Hardware Projects By Gary Hodgson

Unlike software, hardware projects cannot be entirely defined, or contained within, the computer. That’s a shame because there are some really great tools for managing software projects.

Gary Hodgson has prototyped his proposal for using github to manage hardware projects. He called it githubiverse and, appropriately enough, hosted it on github. Here is an example of it functioning to track Mechanical Movement #27. All the files are on github and this custom webpage displays whatever is up to date.

If the name Gary Hodgson sounds familiar, that’s because he built a DLP resin printer, which Openalia covered previously. I don’t think I’m outing him as a true geek when I point to this…

An interesting advanced use case is the ability to use the same core template across many projects.  You could fork the githubiverse-template project and edit the html/css as you wish. Then, in each project’s gh-page branch create a submodule referring to this fork.  All that’s left would be to create a _config.yml file with the details in the root project gh-pages branch and an additional entry defining the source of the jekyll site as being the submodule folder.

…as reminding me of this Dilbert cartoon.

Automated Customization with 3D Printers

A 3D printer is, at heart, a prototyping machine. They will never be able to compete on volume alone.

What they can compete on is high-volume customization. Josef Prusa, the designer of the Prusa Mendel, wrote a Python script to automatically add a custom pair of initials to the many whistles he prints out as gifts.

If you look closely, you can tell that each whistle has a different pair of letters embossed on the top.

The great thing about open source is that people do cool stuff like this and then give it away! You an download the WhistleGen program Josef Prusa wrote from his GitHub repository. Perhaps someone could modify it to take advantage of two-color or multi-color extruders.

Related Links

• Hack A Day
• Make Magazine