Monthly Archives: July 2010

Rubik’s Cube Fail

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I just tried to print up the 1x2x3 Rubik’s cube puzzle from TomZ.  I really like the idea of it.

Unfortunately, it’s just not working for me.  I had to rotate all of the STL’s 90 degrees to make them printable.  Once most of the parts were printed I discovered it’s not going to fit together.  The swivelly bits on “Part 1” are too large to rotate freely inside the center cubes.  If the grooves in “Part 2” were much larger it wouldn’t fit inside the part.

At this point, it’s probably easier to start building the entire puzzle from scratch.  Here’s what I’m thinking:

  1. Make the swivelly bits on Part 1 smaller
  2. Make the grooves in Part 2 slightly larger
  3. Make a notch in Part 2 and Part 3 so that it can be put together with an M3x16 nut and bolt instead of a plastic pin

Botmill.com – NOT COOL

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Okay, you had a robo-blog.  That’s fine.  Nothing wrong with that.  In fact, I’m appreciative for some of those posts and blogs you pointed out to me.  You apologized profusely, though I don’t there’s a need to apologize for a robo-blog per se.

However, since then your robo-blogs have gotten worse.  The one associated with 3D-Printer-Parts.com, which links back to your site, is collecting anything and everything with the words “made, make, printer, 3d, 3-d” et cetera.  Oh, but that’s not the worst part.

Botmill is stealing the entire content of other people’s works and not providing any attribution.  That link is to one of my own posts (and not a particularly interesting one) copied whole cloth and posted in your own blog.

Make up your mind – do you want to be a blog aggregator or sell robot parts? There are tons of aggregators out there.  Not many are very good.  The ones that are have a real person picking and choosing.  The robo-blogs are basically packed with irrelevant or useless content.  Turn off the robo-blog and drop the fake secondary sites.  Rather than stealing the content of potential customers, why not write some of your own content.  How about posting some information about your own products?  Or some innovations of your own?  Stolen content doesn’t help you with customers, hurts your Google PageRank, and actually causes ill will.

Why not take a page from MakerBot and MakerGear?  Have a contest, give some stuff away, write some interesting things, ask them for help, show them you care, involve your customers, and form a community.

Plastic wishlist

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Glow in the dark plastic.

Don’t get me wrong, I like the idea of fluorescing red ABS.1  But, how sweet would glow in the dark plastic be?

It’s like making all of your printed plastic objects twice as useful, since they can be seen at night as well as day.

  1. Is it just me or was this a stealth launch?  I didn’t hear about it anywhere and just happened upon this new ABS plastic while checking on the availability of the new Heated Build Platform. [↩]