How do you design a toaster? By that, I don’t mean what skills and materials will be needed, but rather what the design process consists of. Would you be surprised if I suggested that it might begin with a manufacturer describing what type of toaster is required to a designer who envisages exactly what it will look like and how it will be made, then sends detailed specifications to a factory? Of course not. Countless products have been designed in that way since the Industrial Revolution.
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, or even use Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for MakeCode, CircuitPython, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell with Google Hangouts On-Air is every Wednesday at 7:30pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
So… Is there a quick path from the data used to produce an object on a 3d printer, to getting getting the object mass produced by some other mechanism? Various articles tout 3d printers as the next big thing in manufacturing, but compared to the injection molding machines that spit out Lego (or equiv) at furious rates, it seems to me as more of the next big thing in craftsmanship; too slow to really be considered manufacturing.
So… Is there a quick path from the data used to produce an object on a 3d printer, to getting getting the object mass produced by some other mechanism? Various articles tout 3d printers as the next big thing in manufacturing, but compared to the injection molding machines that spit out Lego (or equiv) at furious rates, it seems to me as more of the next big thing in craftsmanship; too slow to really be considered manufacturing.