Tutorials

3d Printing

• 3D Printer Tool: Set Your Extruder Steps With Ease – A guide on how to build a tool I designed for precisely comparing your e-steps with reality.
• Keep Your Nozzle Hot and Your Prints Cool – A short guide on tuning you 3d printer temperature and the advantages of active cooling.

CAD

• Making Parametric Models in Fusion 360 – How to make parametric models in Fusion 360, with some advanced CAD theory.
• Up Your CAD Game with Good Reference Photos – Taking orthographic pictures of an object for CAD, the comments are especially great on this one.

Resin Casting

• Learn Resin Casting Techniques: Duplicating Plastic Parts – How to duplicate plastic parts exactly with resin casting.
• Learn Resin Casting Techniques: Cold Casting – Mixing metal powders with resin for metal like parts.

Metrology

• Measuring Parts Badly For Accurate Reverse Engineering – How to get usable dimensions with inaccurate tools by making good assumptions. I learned a bit from the comments on this one, especially about assumptions to make for metric.

Mechanics

• Grinding Gears: Figuring Out The Ratio – Figure out the gear ratio needed for a train. Work backwards from the force.
• The Little Things I Didn’t Know About Small DC Motors – Useful things to know when putting a small DC motor in a mechanical design. I do not cover the electrical properties of these well, correctly, or at all. That was not the point of this article.

Electronics

• Iron Tips: Soldering Headphones and Enamel Wire – How to solder the wire inside headphone and other fine cables. Also applicable for enamel wire. Covers it from an assembly line standpoint.

General

• Learn To Program With Literate Programming – I still use this technique, but not as much. After a while just doing it is still the best way to learn. The rest is fluff.

Articles

3d Printing

• Filament Thickness Sensors, What Are They and What Are They Good For – Short research piece on filament thickness sensing.
• A Look Into the Future of Slicing: Part 1, Introduction – Part one of an eventually three part series covering where 3D printing could go.
• Kicking The Tires Before You Buy: 3D Printers – My attempt at dispersing some of the lies and flim flam out in the hobby 3D printing world right now.
• Ask Hackaday: Open Fire Suppression and Safety Standards – A talk about how to standardize safety outside of governmental regulatory procedures.
• Ask Hackaday MRRF Edition: 3D Printers Can Catch Fire – Report on a printer fire and a bit of rambling on the subject.
• Fail Of The Week: My 3D Printer Upgrade – Adventures in 3D printing. Shows that no matter how much you think you know you can still miss basic stuff.
• Ask Hackaday: Material Databases – A talk about the databases we wish we had.
• In Paris Buying a 3D Printer is Cheaper than Renting Machine Time – My adventure trying to get a 3D print in paris.

Materials

• Materials to Know: Acetal and Delrin – Fun facts and useful miscelanea about Polyoxymethylene.
• Materials To Know: Tooling and Modeling Board – The most expensive fiber filled foam planking you can buy. Handy.
• Materials to Know: Medium Density Fiberboard – Ruin your tools! Save money!
• Materials to Know: Baltic Birch – Not all plywoods are made equal. The good stuff.
• Parts You Should Know: A Universe Of Useful Injection Molded Standoffs – Handy Catalog of Parts
• Don’t Ignore The Art Store – There’s a lot of useful stuff at the Art Store.

Tools

• Hacker’s Toolbox: The Handheld Screwdriver – An article on selecting screwdrivers.
• Our Hands-On With The Shaper Origin: The First of Many Tools That Will Change the Way We Build – A review of the Shaper Origin, a tool I really want to own.
• The Othermill vs Import, A Technical Comparison – The original title is a better description of the article titled, “The Othermill is Something Else.” Was a lot of fun to research and write.
• A Machine Shop in A Toolbox: Just Add Time – Don’t think that complicated CNC tools are the only way to build something. A lot can be done with basic hand tools.
• Path To Craftsmanship: Don’t Buy Awful Safety Gear – All the things I learned about a certain segment of safety gear while working in factories and the heavy chemical industry. Useful stuff in the comments too.
• Wanhao Duplicator i3 Should Put an End to “Cheapest Printer” Kickstarters – My review of the cheap 3D printer I bought and used for a few months in Paris.

General

• Fail Of The Week (in 1996): The 7 Billion Dollar Overflow – A short article on the Ariane 5 Rocket Explosion.
• Maybe Your Next Robot Should Be a Cyclocrane – An interesting chapter in aviation history.
• Hacker Places To Visit: Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris – I really enjoyed this museum.
• A Realistic Look At The Death of A Standard – A comparison of how the CDROM faded from general use vs. how the 3.5mm audio jack may.
• Victorians and Fiber, Louisville’s Quest for Fast Internet – A short interest piece on some of the drama and complication around Louisville’s internet upgrades.

 

Essays

Opinion

• What’s in a tool? A case for Made in USA – What makes a tool good and how can you tell? Got 100k unique views and front paged /. and fark.
• It’s Time the Software Guys and Mechanical Guys Sat Down and Had a Talk. – I think there are some problems with how software people approach hardware.
• Continuing The Dialog: “It’s Time the Software People and Mechanical People Sat Down and Had a Talk” – Continuing the conversation based on the comments from the previous article.
• Are Today’s Engineer’s Worse? – Someone argues a lot about soup warmers in the comments. No I don’t think they are worse, but I think there is room for improvement.
• What We Are Doing Wrong. The Robot That’s Not in Our Pocket – Our software will be years better when machine intelligence gets involved. It’s not moving fast enough though.
• Death To The 3.5mm Audio Jack, Long Live Wireless – Apple is right to ditch the 3.5mm jack and we probably won’t have it standard on devices in the future.

Opinions Disguised as Advice

• Safety, Cleanliness, Documentation, and More: Habits that Make your Work Better – How to become a better craftsman. Have discipline in all things, especially some of the most boring and troublesome.
• When You Get Serious About Selling A Project, Consider an Accelerator – I drink the Kool-Aid a bit at Highway1.io.
• Path to Craftsmanship: The Art of Throwing It Away – Don’t keep things you don’t need. Don’t buy things you might need. Keep what you need.
• Life On Contract: Estimating Project Time – What I’ve learned about estimating project time.
• Life On Contract: How To Have a Meeting – Some of my thoughts on having an effective meeting.
• Path to Craftsmanship: The Art of Being Wrong – How to be wrong in engineering and life in general.

Book Reviews

• Books You Should Read: Engineer to Win By Carroll Smith – A book I really enjoyed. Puts a very practical spin on applied Mechanical Engineering.
• Program Your Brain, Hack Your Way Into Productivity – My review on The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg, Flow By Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and Getting Things Done By David Allen.
• Specifications You Should Read: The NASA Workmanship Standards – A good read if you’re into this sort of thing.

Interviews & Interest

• The OpenR/C Project – A talk with Daniel Norée about the Open R/C project.
• MRRF: Launching an Adorable Printer For Fun – Had a talk with some folks about their tiny 3D printer.
• MRRF, How Red Hat Helps Open Source 3D Printing – Had a talk with Tom Calloway about the open hardware efforts at Red Hat. The comments show everything that’s wrong with open source communities these days.
• Shaper Tools Will Blow Your Mind – Our teaser article about the longer Shaper Origin article (up in the tools section).
• How Did Pocket NC Survive and Thrive? – Talk with Matthew Hertel about his company that makes a tiny 5-axis CNC machine. A bit of a history lesson about failed hardware startups is thrown in as well.
• Mosaic Palette: Single Extruder Multi-Color and Multi-Material 3D Printing – Talking to some fellows at the Bay Area Makerfaire about their near multicolor printer add-on.
• Prusa Shows Us the New i3 MK2 3D Printer and Where the Community is Headed – Talk with Prusa about his latest printer.
• The Hacker is The Future of the Prosthetic: Hackers Helping Those In Need – A talk with two research efforts in the field of prosthetics.
• Lessons in Small Scale Manufacturing From The Othermill Shop Floor – A small rant on LEAN manufacturing processes through the lens of Othermill’s factory.

Fiction

• Dr. Noirimetla, Private Failure Investigator and the Mystery of Galileo’s Pillars – A fictional engineer solves a Noir themed engineering mystery.
• World Standard Organizations to Release Entirely Reworked Standards – April Fools article. Extremely silly.
• Hyperloops and Robot Cars, A Glimpse into The Future – A first person perspective of what it would be like to live in a world with automatic cars and Elon Musk’s Hyperloop concept.