As you may know, I’ve got a MakerBot Cupcake named “Bender” and a MakerBot Thing-O-Matic named “Flexo“. There’s really no doubt in my mind I’ll be springing for a Replicator with dual extrusion. 1 Thankfully, I think there’s a way for me to make use of each of my robots, in its own special way. I figure I can keep the Cupcake rocking a Unicorn Pen Plotter, use my Automated Build Platform in my Thing-O-Matic for mass production of smaller parts, and put a Replicator to work printing new, wacky, and/or large designs.
But, why am I talking about giant unicorns?! Sandy Noble, the creator of the Polargraph,2 just posted about how he has created a vector graphics importer for the Polargraph software. This is some pretty amazing stuff. The MakerBot Unicorn has several software toolpaths that take vector graphics to GCode for printing through ReplicatorG. The end result is that a Polargraph rocking a vector graphic importer should be able to draw arbitrary shapes, without the need to draw scribbly bits.
I think it would be particularly awesome to have a DrawBot draw a frame/border and then fill it with a scribbly/pixelated drawing. Or, perhaps, draw the outline of an object and then fill it in with scribbly/pixelated shadings.
Default Series Title- Will my extravagance know no bounds?! [↩]
- Which is probably the best documented DrawBot on the internet [↩]