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.

Open Source Hardware – What And Why by the OSHWA

Blender’s Open Movie Project – Tears Of Steel

This isn’t exactly open source hardware. But Blender is open source…and robots are hardware…and it’s Saturday.

This is the fourth from the Blender Foundation. The movies are intended to push Blender’s open technology forwards.

For the entire creation pipeline in the studio, we will only use free/open source software. For 3D graphics, compositing and video editing we’ll obviously use Blender. The new ‘Cycles’ render engine will be used, which includes open source projects like OpenShading, OpenColor and OpenImage. For camera and motion tracking Blender uses Libmv. For imaging and drawing we expect to use GIMP, MyPaint, Krita and Inkscape a lot. Render output and footage will be using the OpenEXR format. Scripting will be done in Python. Studio database storage will most likely be in SVN. The workstations in the studio will be equipped with 64 bits Ubuntu Linux. We have our own render farm this time, running on Debian and Ubuntu.

Since we’ll work with external providers for music, sfx and mix, we can only recommend them to include free software in their pipeline, but won’t put stringent demands here.

Obviously we’re very interested to be in contact with free/open source projects of any kind, to check on what we can do together.

Printable Folding Construction Demonstrated With Robots

Sometimes you just can’t get from where you are, to where you want to be, in one step. For example, open hardware tends to work with stock materials, which means flat sheet is popular. It’s usually cheaper to obtain and work than a large block of the same material. But there aren’t very many ways to use a flat sheet if it stays a flat sheet. A couple popular ways to fold a flat sheet into a useful volume are illustrated.

Folding box by YanaPonoko. Thingiverse #17659

Parametric Flex Box by Juerd. Thingiverse #17327

Can this folding idea be taken even farther? For example, can we fold flat surfaces not just into structures, but into mechanisms as well?

Naval Postgraduate School Crushes 3D Printed CubeSat for DARPA

CubeSat is a standardized (pdf) set of dimensions for small (10 cm) satellites that are particularly popular with colleges because students can actually test their satellites in space. Normally, CubeSats are made out of aluminum. DARPA wanted to know whether or not a 3D printed CubeSat is a plausible idea. They used their Digital Manufacturing Analysis, Correlation and Estimation (DMACE) competition as a chance to test the idea.

Test cube from DARPA DMACE challenge.

Wanna see a video of a 3D printed plastic cube being professionally obliterated? Got it, and more, after the jump…