GENOMICON

Ok, this is really just an excuse to use this photo, which has been around for ages…

Edible 3d-printed cogs. Marvelous.

Edible if you’re one of those plastic-cog eating babies, and in my experience pretty much all babies are. It’s incredible what you can get them to eat.

Anyway, some of these have that herring-bone pattern that is hard to make if you’re cutting them, but easier if you’re printing them – and it just so happens that there was a bit on the reprap site recently about using this pattern to replace the metal legs

…

Which is interesting because you can fit them together in sections like tent-poles… though obviously being the laziest bastard in the whole wide world, I do sortof wonder whether it might not be possible to achieve a similar sort of thing simply by wrapping string round a piece of bamboo.

You won’t get the precision of course – but if you can use sensors to check your location 10 times a second, then maybe you can supply offsets fast enough for this not to matter.

Not that I know what I’m talking about of course.

Speaking of bamboo… I saw this spindle thing for holding your plastic – the connector parts of which are printed

which morphed into one with threaded bolts, which is cheating a bit

and there’s also a laser-cut variant that looks quite flash

But personally I’d go back to the bamboo one because bamboo is easier to get hold of than plastic. I mean one of the original reprap requirements was that the raw materials should be easily, locally sourced. Seems a bit odd to be taking bits of stick… converting them to plastic, then making bits of stick with them… although I guess this does at least force them into the digital realm.

Anyway, all the spindle stuff comes from The Thingverse blog, which also has a cardboard one, but if it’s all the same to you, I’ll stick with my bamboo. I like bamboo.

Speaking of which, there was a thing over on the DIY drones site recently where they’ve made this cheap-as-chips little… chip, for controlling 8 servos

I think that’s quite neat – it goes verse-chorus-verse. A bit like a We are the World sung by servos… only better than either the original or the recent remake.

So there you go. Reprappery creeping forward, tiny little steps at a time.