When designing around hardware, you will often find yourself importing a reference step (.step or .stp) file into FreeCAD. Usually these step files are publicly available and use of these step files is encouraged by the manufacturer to make inclusion of their products in your designs easier. Sometimes, however, the supplier may not make their step files publicly available, and only provide them upon request, or even explicitly ask you not to share this with any other party. Integrating them into an Open Hardware design is still possible, but it requires some consideration.

With the release of FreeCAD 1.1 and upcoming increased pace of releases, it is a good time to use FreeCAD for Open Hardware (and personal) projects. One thing that I have struggled with in my personal projects was keeping the preview images up to date in the README. I therefore figured it would be good to see what kind of information we can automatically extract from a FreeCAD file to make a repository with a FreeCAD file more useful at a glance or for people without FreeCAD installed.

Whether you are developing quick personal hardware designs, or working on a proper Open Hardware project, it is imperative that you use some kind of versioning system. This will in the first place serve your own effort, as you can roll back to and keep track of important functional versions, but it also allows others to potentially collaborate or explore different ideas.

I’ve recently gotten rather interested in a printing process referred to as Risographs. A risograph machine uses a (machine generated) stencil that is wrapped around an ink drum. With this, patterns of a single hue can be quickly and economically applied to paper. Multiple colours require multiple passes through the machine, and consequently introduce registration errors. The main reason to use these for art is either (1) economics for high volume printing or (2) ability to use unique inks (fluorescent, metallic).

To keep on the recent themes of lamp designs, I recently designed a simple printable model that can be used to convert an IKEA Jacobsbyn lamp from a pendant lamp to a desk lamp. I find that it does not work very well as a pendant lamp due to direct line of sight to the bulb.

I recently designed a simple lamp that can be lasercut from multiplex (or other materials if you prefer) and is built around the IKEA RÅSEGEL lamp holder .(which takes standard E27 lamps). The source files and cuttable dxf files can be found on the project’s GtiHub page.

As part of my plan to make an open hardware Maskless Lithography Aligner I wanted to get more familiar with the Texas Instruments DLP300S/301S (digital) micromirror device (DMD). This product was created for use in 3D resin printers, which use patterned UV light to pattern photosensitive resin. I will update this blog post over time with more information, so it might be worth checking back occasionally ⏰.

Recently I came across this very interesting blender geometry node set by Alan Wyatt called the traditionalist toolbag. The full version is paid, but Alan provides a nice user manual video and an explainer video that you could use to implement a basic version yourself for free.

Blender has recently overhauled its fantastic Geometry Nodes system with the release of blender 3.0. As a microtubule enthusiast, I figured it was a perfect chance to make a procedural microtubule generator.

This post will cover some behind the scences stuff of an animation I rendered in Blender that parodied the ad for the original microsoft surfacebook. Watch it here.

This article builds on my previous blog post. I will go over how I personally make protein animiations and work with Blender. Note that I am a novice with blender, so there are definitely things that could be improved. I appreciate any tips and tricks; please email be and I’ll include them.

In this article, I will go over about how I go about loading pdb structures into blender.