3D Printed Hexbright Flashlight Mount

So the other day I got myself a Hexbright flashlight.  If you haven't seen one of these, it's an Arduino powered flashlight.  It's incredibly nerdy, as you can hack and program your own flashlight. In the sprit of hacking, I decided I wanted to make a mount for it so that I could attach it to things like my car, bike, head, etc.  To do this, I first needed a solid way to latch it to something:

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I happen to own a Makerbot, so I designed this latch in Sketchup.  It's a snap latch that holds the flashlight pretty tight:

The latch is completely designed in Sketchup.  If you'd like to check the model out yourself, or would like to have one printed, you can check it out here on Thingiverse.

Kitchen & Bath Design News October Issue

I am proud to say that the October issue if Kitchen and Bath Design News features an article I wrote about the Wikihouse, a 3D printed house that I built with the Sketchup team last month.  You can see some video and pictures here, and read the article below:

I helped build a 3D printed house!

A few weeks ago I was invited by the Sketchup team to meet then in Queens New York at World Maker Faire. Myself, and a handful of Sketchup developers were tasked with doing something amazing: Building a 3D printed house out of 3/4 plywood. I'll let Alastair Parvin, one of the creators explain Wikihouse to you:

If you want to watch the whole video above (and you should) click here

To design our house, we used the Wikihouse plugin for Sketchup.  You can get this plugin for free right in Sketchup 2013.  The plugin has pre-engineered modules in it designed by the Wikihouse folks that you can assemble like Legos.

Once you have your models assembled in Sketchup, there is literally a button you can push to have all of your parts laid out on 4x8 sheets of plywood that you can take to your local CNC shop to have made.

Our house that we built at Maker Faire consisted of 160 sheets of plywood like this, and over 1100 individual parts.  Shopbot in Virginia was kind enough to cut all of the parts for us.

One of the most amazing things about this project is that by using Sketchup, we were able to collaborate on this model from Boulder Colorado, Massachusetts, the UK and Virginia.  Because of that power, when we showed up to build it, we were able to pull it off in 16 hours.  Check out the video of us building it below:

Click here to see a gallery of pictures from the event.

I've built a fair number of things in my life, and solved a lot of puzzles.  This by several orders of magnitude was one of the most challenging and enjoyable things I've ever had the pleasure of helping build.  As Alastair says in the video above, truly believe that this could be the future of construction.  With the engineering done, and the power of design and manufacture put in the hands of all of us, we'll be able to create amazing things.

Most importantly though, this could not have been done without the team that we had.  All of us, many of whom had never met before all became close friends because of this experience.  It's one I'll not soon forget.

Guess what we're building...

I'll let the pictures speak of the awesome that is about to take place at Maker Faire in New York City this weekend.

Starting tomorrow, myself, the Sketchup team, and folks from Wikihouse will be taking these parts (over 1100!!)

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And we'll be turning them into this:

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That's right, I will be assisting the Sketchup team in assembling this real life structure.  It's made out of over 160 sheets of 4x8 plywood, and over 1100 individual parts.  You can see a video of how it works here:

Follow along with all the action here, here, here and here!

Plugin version 1.1 out!

Great news!

If you've been experiencing issues downloading components, your troubles are over.  We have found and corrected a bug that was causing that to happen in certain cases on bot the Mac and the PC.

Make sure you've got the latest version of the plugin so you don't experience this bug.  To do that, if you're on Sketchup 2013 just to to "Extension Warehouse" within Sketchup and find our plugin.  From there, instead of the "Install" button you'll see one that says "Update".  Choose that, restart Sketchup after it's over, and you'll be off and running.

Click here for a video on how to update

If you're on Sketchup 8, just download a new copy of the plugin from our download page in the link below, run the installer and you'll be all set.  You won't even have to log back in again!

http://sketchthis.net/plugin-for-sketchup/plugin-download/ As always, if you need any assistance, you can go to our site to get any support you need.