Today on our weekly live 3D Hangouts, we will be sharing a short “Field Guide” to celebrate the many ways that desktop 3D printing has entered into the area of music today. Here’s a quick roundup of a few other #3DxMusic projects that caught our interest to whet your appetite!
Design engineer and professor Olaf Diegel, designer of the iconic 3D printed ODD Guitars, has played a tremendous role demonstrating the potential for additive technology for designing instruments. Back in July we shared his video outlining how he designs and builds his guitars! He also tackles other instruments, and the video below where he shares a tech demo of an early version of his 3D printed saxophone project is particularly revealing where he discusses the ways that he needs to rethink his project to be more native to 3D printing and less of a replica.
…3D printing allows designs to be manufactured that could not be manufactured through traditional means. The 3D Printing technology used in ODD guitars is called Selective Laser Sintering (SLS) and builds the components by spreading a thin layer of nylon powder, that is then fused in the correct locations for that particular slice of the component. The layer is then dropped down a fraction of a millimeter, and another layer of powder is spread on top of the first, and the process is repeated until the component is built. The typical layer thickness is 0.1mm.
The hardware (pickups, bridges, necks, tuning heads, etc.) used on all ODD guitars are all top quality off-the-shelf hardware and most of them can be specified by the customer when ordering. In fact, one of the things that is great about 3D printing is that it allows quite a range of customisation by the user without adding much to the cost of the components.
ODD was started by Olaf Diegel, a long-standing design engineer, with a passion for 3D printing and other advanced manufacturing technologies. As his real job, Olaf is professor of product development, in the department of design sciences of the faculty of engineering at Lund University, in Sweden.
Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!
Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!
The Adafruit Learning System has dozens of great tools to get you well on your way to creating incredible works of engineering, interactive art, and design with your 3D printer! We also offer the LulzBot TAZ – Open source 3D Printer and the Printrbot Simple Metal 3D Printer in our store. If you’ve made a cool project that combines 3D printing and electronics, be sure to let us know, and we’ll feature it here!