Hacktastic

Step-by-step instructions for using a Cricut Joy craft cutter to create machine knitting punch cards.

Overview of basic ribber bed adjustments and circular knitting on a double-bed Brother KH-260 knitting machine.

A catalog of our adventures with a Brother KH-260 knitting machine, starting with basic setup and swatching.

Detailed instructions and tutorial video for crocheting a simple multicolor stash-busting blanket with careful edge work.

A space-filling riff on Tinna's Terrazzo Afghan that builds the pattern out from the center.

3D-printable models for all 50 states and DC, each with the same area but heights determined by number of electoral votes.

A guide for making online math course content more interactive and engaging in Canvas.

This mask design has a comfy fit, sewn-in nose wire and filter, and minimal exposed seams. And if I can sew it then so can you.

A guide for using LaTeX typesetting for mathematics in both the new and legacy Canvas engines to make online quizzes.

A tutorial for creating 2D-laser-cuttable SVGs from a 3D-printable STL files, using the free in-browser modeling program Tinkercad.

A 3D-printed origami press to assist with folding a beautiful and elegant butterfly model designed by Akira Yoshizawa.

A 3D-printed press that stamps mountain and valley crease patterns into origami paper to pre-fold a clean Miura base.

How to stack and loop 3D models so they print in bulk for far less, optimizing per-part pricing for affordable batch prints.

Nine mathematical knot conformations 3D printed in stainless steel for an ICERM Illustrating Mathematics art exhibit.

Bulk sets of all fifteen tessellating pentagon types, plus a walk through prepping a model into a finished, sellable product.

A two-color houndstooth tessellation of Tetris tetrominoes, taken from punch card to finished machine-knit scarf.

Comparing 3D scanning with Trnio, Qlone, Meshroom, and a pricey EinScan, to scan a Ganesha statue.

Using OpenSCAD code to combine diagonals, squares, and dots into complex patterns for knitting-machine punch cards.

A compostable 3D-printed art dress woven from the handwritten names of 300 women in STEAM, exhibited in Florence.

Using a single random seed and style weights in OpenSCAD to grow complex, variable 3D-printable designs like snowflakes.

Building randomized multiple-choice mastery quizzes with coded answer keys, using nothing but plain LaTeX documents.

Modeling the same thing four ways: Tinkercad, Fusion 360, OpenSCAD, and Thingiverse Customizer.

Best practices for making local backups of your online work from Thingiverse, Shapeways, Etsy, YouTube, WordPress, and more.

A reprint of the six-day Giant Spiky Perko Knot that compares dissolvable and breakaway supports on a tricky model.

Three different ways to design a custom 3D-printed clock face that works with an inexpensive battery-powered clock kit.

A guide for using the OpenSCAD sweeper library to contruct closed curves in space, particularly knot models.

A customizable design that generates over a billion unique 3D-printable snowflakes from random seeds and style parameters.

Dudeney's classic hinged dissection that folds a triangle into a square, 3D-printed in one piece with the hinges already assembled.

A parametric art generator that builds randomly oriented wedge panels, inspired by Mary Martin's constructivist piece "Inversions."

Punch card patterns for vintage knitting machines created with Stitch Fiddle and Silhouette Studio.

How auto-checks, human checks, and prototyping work together to make strong but delicate models.

A customizable filament-sampler model, built by routing one design through Tinkercad, Fusion 360, Blender, and OpenSCAD.

The simplest non-tetrahedralizable polyhedron is a twisted triangular prism that you can build in just two lines of OpenSCAD code.

A workflow for repairing broken 3D meshes when Meshmixer and MeshLab tools aren't enough to fix your problems.

A tiny 3D-printed spacer that makes an ultra-fine Sharpie sit snugly in a Silhouette craft cutter.

Modeling the newly discovered "scutoid" in OpenSCAD with a reusable polyloft module.

A field review of the new SONY Digital Paper for reading technical math papers and books.

A saddle surface for calculus students to hold, exported from Mathematica and shaped to a circular domain in Tinkercad.

A 3D-printed South Africa keychain made for a U.S. Embassy speaking tour — nine provinces, with Lesotho as the keyring loop.

An overview of methods for punching custom cards for vintage Brother knitting machines with code and a craft cutter.

A college gen-ed math course where students explored fractals, infinity, and Prince Rupert's cube in JMU's 3D printing classroom.

A walkthrough of designing and printing in full color using Meshmixer hand-painting and the XYZ da Vinci printer.

3D-printed hex boxes sized to match Catan's land tiles, with snap-fit lids, to corral all your settlements, cities, and knights.

The start of the machine-knitting saga: a 1980s Brother punchcard knitting machine from eBay.

A method for printing dissolvable PVA only at the support interface instead of on the whole support, to save on materials and cost.

A step-by-step Fusion 360 tutorial for designing 3D Celtic knots by contructing splines that connect a grid of mathematically-placed dots.

A tutorial for thickening the weak spots of a 3D model in Meshmixer so it survives printing in stainless steel.

Full-color 3D printing with Tinkercad models and the new XYZ da Vinci Color 3D printer that colors with CMYK ink.

3D-printed "fat coins" that can land on their edge — experiment with the ratios to find the fairest three-sided cylinder coin.

Reflections on where projects begin, and the messy hunt for the thing that's just right to make, like new wedding rings.

A roundup of this year's beginner-friendly 3D design tutorials for making quick, personalized prints with the whole family.

A design tutorial on exploring what Vectary is good at, then letting the software guide what you make instead of fighting it.

A new(!) reversible multicolor knit stitch invented for scarves that you can knit without looking at your hands during colloquium talks.

A tutorial for designing custom vases that introduces two key Fusion 360 tools.

A set of six organic snowflake ornaments, procedurally grown in OpenSCAD with purposeful random imperfections.

A guide for making personalized 3D-printed snowflakes with the Snowflake Machine, an OpenSCAD Customizer with a billion variations.

A tutorial for wrapping text around a ring using a clever application of specialized sheet metal design tools in Fusion 360.

Best practices for scaling up a 3D design from FDM printing to a wide variety of Shapeways products.

A design walkthrough for triple-wrap bangle bracelets using a trivial torus knot parameterization and flexible 3D-printing material.

A classroom report on teaching a fractals unit to non-major gen-ed students in JMU's 3SPACE 3D-printing lab.

A designer's cheat-sheet for finding sides and angles of non-right triangles using the Law of Sines.

A full-color, print-in-place 'impossible screw' remix whose two pieces twist freely but can never come apart.

A timeline for Shapeways shop owners on when to get holiday products listed and ready before the Christmas rush this year.

A hands-on test of the XYZ da Vinci Color printer, with cubes inked in CMYK layer by layer during desktop FFF printing.

A tutorial for optimizing designs for 3D-printed porcelain, where cost tracks surface area instead of volume.

A tutorial for 3D-printing presses that cast food-safe silicone candy molds, with Fusion 360 fillets to keep corners air-free.

A tutorial for turning photos into 3D-printable lithophanes using a hidden image-to-height feature in the Cura slicer.

An introduction to 3D Slash, a playful in-browser modeler where you build designs by smashing and stacking blocks.

A tutorial for building printable Dungeons & Dragons miniatures from scratch with the Hero Forge online customizer.

A guide for stamping custom heraldry onto tabletop miniatures using a relief emboss in Meshmixer.

A side-by-side comparison illustrating when to prototype at home on FDM and when to send out for higher-quality SLS.

A guide for thickening or thinning a 3D model in Blender to make it printable, without rebuilding it from scratch.

An introduction to Onshape, free cloud-based parametric CAD that gives hobbyists and educators a Solidworks alternative.

A guide to Wings3D, a free open-source low-poly subdivision modeler with surprisingly professional tools.

A look at Tinkercad's circuits feature for designing 3D-printable objects around LEDs, batteries, and Arduino.

A walkthrough for cleaning up overlapping Structure Synth geometry into a solid, printable model, using a tentacle bowl.

An overview of MakePrintable, a cloud service that repairs hopelessly broken 3D model geometry into printable meshes.

A designer's cheat-sheet for finding the sides and angles of right triangles in your 3D designs.

An introduction to Structure Synth, which grows staggeringly complex 3D models from a few lines of EisenScript code.

Advice on making 3D-print product photos look real instead of rendered, so buyers trust the piece actually prints.

A demo of the Shapeways Pendant Creator for turning a 2D line drawing into a printable 3D relief.

A look at BlocksCAD, a Scratch-style block coding tool for building 3D models right in your browser.

A guide to Terrain2STL for turning real-world elevation into 3D-printable relief maps, like a porcelain Shenandoah Valley.

A tutorial for scanning real objects into full-color 3D prints with the Trnio photogrammetry app, using a Ganesha statue.

A look at Morphi, a friendly iPad 3D design app simple enough for kids yet capable enough for real modeling.

A gear guide to cheaply improving phone photos of your 3D prints with a light tent and a clip-on macro lens.

A Grasshopper recipe for wrapping a flat band around a cylinder, with code for making a custom bracelet.

An introduction to Grasshopper, the visual batteries-and-wires parametric design plugin for Rhino.

A roundup of the best beginner and intermediate SketchUp resources for designing models of buildings.

A recap of Construct3D at Duke, where 250+ educators leading 3D-printing programs gathered to build a community.

A spiky 3D-printed morph between the two famous Perko knots, with tooth-track extrusions added in TopMod.

A tour of Mathematica's 3D-printing features for turning mathematical structure into printable models, and even jewelry.

A first look at Fusion 360 for designers stepping up from Tinkercad, with examples of what it can make.

An explainer on why scaling a model up can sometimes lower its Shapeways print cost, thanks to machine-space packing.

A how-to for painting color onto plain STL files in Meshmixer, using the Perko Morph as an example.

An overview of the Shapeways variants feature for offering multiple sizes or styles within a single product listing.

A guide to TopMod for sculpting 3D-printable art by remeshing, wireframing, and stellating object meshes.

An overview of using Cinema 4D for 3D printing, from beginner basics to exporting clean STL and VRML models.

A five-year history of one nearly-impossible fidget cube design, from clip-together to print-in-place, and then even multicolor and SLS.

A pointer to the most useful Shapeways forums for getting help with models, meshes, and design software.

An intro to Sculptris, a free digital-clay sculpting tool for making organic 3D-printable characters and busts.

A case for using many 3D design programs together in sequence, walking through five models that span over a dozen tools.

A walkthrough of turning one parametric OpenSCAD snowflake into many printable products, sizes, and materials.

A guide to the Shapeways CustomMaker tool for adding personalizable text and image fields to your shop designs.

A how-to for three quick MeshLab fixes: reducing triangle count, fixing orientation, and clearing bad geometry.

An introduction to OpenSCAD, a programming language for building 3D-printable models entirely with code.

A beginner's first project in Tinkercad, from dragging shapes to ordering a print, in the time it takes to drink a coffee.

A technical primer on full-color sandstone printing and prepping video-game character models for printing with this versatile material.

The kickoff of the weekly Tutorial Tuesday column, curating the best 3D design tutorials for getting started.

The origin story of JMU 3SPACE, the first college-level general-education 3D printing classroom, from idea to curriculum.

An experiment in speeding up the Ultimaker test robot by pushing the limits on Cura's slicer settings for speed.

A holiday build that turns models from the Snowflake Machine into customizable 3D-printed snowflake cookie cutters.

A dispatch from the UnKnot conference, where mathematicians designed and 3D-printed original knot models.

A set of four 3D-printable cube puzzles, from easy to diabolical, handed out as a solve-it-and-keep-it challenge at Maker Faire.

A collection of 3D-printable Girih tiles, strapwork, and mosaic pieces for constructing woven Islamic patterns.

A walkthrough of redesigning desktop-printer snowflakes into Shapeways-ready models for industrial SLA and SLS printing.

A guest post by 11-year-old Calvin Riley on unboxing the Ultimaker 2Go and working through print failures one fix at a time.

A littleBits/Minecraft build recreating the Star Wars trash compactor scene, controlled by 3D-printed Remote Control Pants.

A parametric snowflake generator in OpenSCAD that grows over a billion unique 3D-printable flakes from a single random seed.

A guide to baking any Thingiverse mesh into OpenSCAD with a Blender add-on, so an existing model can drive a Customizer.

A method for turning any Thingiverse model into a blocky low-voxel print, routing it through Tinkercad, Minecraft, and Printcraft.

An introduction to the Pentomizer, which builds 3D-printable tilings from any of the 15 known convex pentagons.

A six-minute video starter project that builds a whole family of parametric bowls and pen holders from scratch in OpenSCAD.

Design-battle entry #2: A Five-Cent Hammer that gets its heft from five US pennies embedded right into the print.

Design-battle entry #1: The Fidget Star, a print-in-place Fidget Cube remix that prints folded as a cube and opens into half a Yoshimoto Cube.

A pi-flavored illusion cup that is shorter than its circumference, made with new OpenSCAD tools.

Notes on managing mesh topology, starting with the non-tetrahedralizable Schönhardt polyhedron.

Field notes on learning Maya from scratch, including a "make 50 forms" assignment and an articulated desk lamp.

A beginner's journey wrangling three.js and WebGL to render a spinning 3D polyhedron in the browser.

A method for scaling a polyhedron to ornament size in Tinkercad with the Ruler and Align tools.

A quick maintenance fix: tightening a saggy X-axis belt on a Replicator 2 to turn stringy, lumpy prints back to smooth.

A tutorial for exporting polyhedra from Mathematica's PolyhedronData to create LED-light ornaments.

A Customizer that turns a one-twelfth doodle into a 6-fold symmetric snowflake, mimicking how you cut folded paper.

A whole menagerie of Menger sponge models, Levels 0 to 3, in versions tuned for filament, resin, powder, and Shapeways printing.

OpenSCAD code for producing a series of parametric trig bracelets with wildly varied shapes, from ovals to flares.

A milestone: The NYC Level 3 MegaMenger sponge finished at MoMath, one of the worldwide sites contributing to a distributed Level 4.

A confession about tape: where and how to use a few judicious strips to keep a business-card Menger build from collapsing.

The next rung of the business-card Menger build: assembling twenty Level 1 sponges into a Level 2 by the fast-fractal method.

A letter about a fancy gala and an analog inverse-iteration Julia set machine built at MoMath's Chaos Ball.

Step-by-step instructions for joining twenty Level 0 cubes into a Level 1 Menger sponge, with tripods, panels, and tabs.

A starting point: one Level 0 Menger sponge, six folded business cards, the first of 160,000 cubes in the global MegaMenger build.