Awesome Geometry

Elipso is a drawing tool inspired by Archimedes’ ellipsograph, designed to draw perfect ellipses with ease. Created by Makers Cabinet, it’s CNC-machined from solid brass and features an adjustable steel arm, magnetic base, and tool holder for pens or pencils. Elipso’s smooth mechanics, durability, and timeless design reflect the brand’s craftsmanship.

Cory from Fortress Fine Woodworks found inspiration for this table from a classic toy – the Spirograph. After gluing pieces of rustic walnut wood to form a tabletop, he 3D-printed a set of giant gears and used them as a guide for carving a pattern with a router. It took him multiple passes and patches to get clean lines, but the result was worth the effort.

House Design Ideas takes us on a tour of a unique small home. Shown here as a 3D rendering, the Pentagone is shaped like a dodecahedron, meaning each of its 12 sides is a pentagon. The 915 sq. ft. home has a kitchen and living space on the first floor, with two bedrooms, a full bath, and a laundry room upstairs. Floor plans are available, but not full blueprints.

For the last 12 years, Google Japan has been having a little fun with silly and impractical keyboard designs. Their latest concept is a keyboard that’s basically a Möbius strip – a twisted keyboard that loops back onto itself. It has 208 keys and has to be picked up to access them all, but it’s also awesome. Best of all, you can build your own. Turn captions on.

This set of nested rings is basically a super Spirograph. Draw mesmerizing geometric patterns by combining rings and placing your pen in any of its numerous holes. The tools are precision laser-cut from 5052 aluminum and come in silver or black anodized finishes. Add on the Planarc 2.0 set to create numerous additional shapes.

This duo of stainless steel tools helps with measuring, drawing, and other everyday tasks. The wallet-friendly Horizon Helvetica features inch, cm, pixel, and pica rulers, a compass, a protractor, a t-square, a set square, and an isometric grid. Its sibling, the Horizon Key, has a bottle opener, hex bolt wrenches, a mini saw, a spoke wrench, a screwdriver, and more.

Alan Becker’s Animation vs. series is consistently entertaining. After his stick figure drawings schooled math and physics, it was time for a geometry lesson. As the video progresses, the shapes that our orange hero faces get increasingly more complicated and challenging to defeat. At least they have a special sidekick to help guide the way.

A Möbius strip is a twisted object that loops back onto itself, so it has only a single side. Brandon from Inheritance Machining shows us how he made a similarly perplexing object out of a single block of steel. Like the strip, his Möbius cube has one continuous side, but it was far more complicated to engineer and craft than its source of inspiration.

Greg Blanpied makes CNC-machined and laser-cut functional art fabricated using parametric math and geometry. Among his amazing pieces is this elegant bowl, which acts as a zoetrope when filmed or spun beneath a strobe light. He’s also created a zoetrope vase.

AltDynamic is back with two larger sizes of its Superegg desk plaything. The machined metal eggs feature a superelliptical shape, and now come in 2.4″ (Mighty) and 2.88″ (Mega) variants. Each can be ordered in stainless steel, copper, or titanium, with mirror, satin, or machined finishes. Mini and Classic sizes are also available during this Kickstarter campaign.

This set of geared shapes works like a Spirograph but lets you create more complicated and diverse patterns. The Planarc 2.0 Spiral Maker set includes 10 gears, three rings, and an outer frame to help you draw countless geometric designs. The basic set is made from acrylic, but there’s an aluminum version for a little more money.

Object manipulator SHAO shows off an amazing stage prop that can smoothly change shapes in the hands of the right performer. Designed by flow arts prop maker Thomas Foyk, this series of interconnected rods can morph from a cube into various other geometries.

Mathematician and maker Henry Segerman shows off more of his fascinating interactive mechanisms. This series of interlocking straight gears uses a rack-and-pinion mechanism to transmit motion. Henry posted the models to 3D print your own recursive racks on Printables.

There’s a good reason that wheels are round: friction. But basic physics are never going to stand in the way of mad builder The Q. His latest creation is a standard bike frame with one major modification – it rolls on custom-made square wheels. It rides pretty smoothly, but it also doesn’t work how we assumed it would.

Most of us are familiar with pentagons, hexagons, and octagons, but did you know there’s a name for a 1000-sided shape? Thanks to its numerous vertices, the chiliagon looks like a circle to the naked eye and only reveals its true nature when viewed close up. Micheal from Vsauce offers a quick take on this unusual shape.

We’ve been spellbound by the many unconventional LEGO structures posted on the Brick Bending channel. For this creation, they linked together 3696 1×2 plates with 72 2×2 plates to create a spherical rhombicuboctahedron. You’d never know where this build was going if we didn’t tell you first.