Due to a ridiculously convoluted inside joke involving racing lawn mowers, songs by Rush, and home-grown potatoes, I decided to make some articulated slugs for my family for Christmas. My main interest in this project lay in the joint design. I wanted to design a joint that would print in place, fully assembled, with no support, no visible internal workings, and with as much freedom of movement as possible. After a lot of work, I finally designed a joint, and a slug, that I’m happy with. Now I am entrusting the model to you, so that you too can begin the day with a friendly slug.
I’ve provided two STL files, one with built-in brims on the slug’s feelers and one without. I wanted to have a built-in brim on the feelers so that I wouldn’t have to enable brims in my slicing software. Use whichever you like.
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!
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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, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, 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 is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
