All things MakerBot! MakerBots, RepRap, and robots!
I’m not going to turn down $25 if it were sent to me.
I lodged my entry mostly because I had the idea for my printable mousetrap as soon as I read the challenge and couldn’t wait to get home and model it. But, I’m hoping I’ll win because I would love to have a MakerBot t-shirt.
Some might consider it cheating to enter a mouse trap that is probably 95% not printed in the Mouse Get! challenge. I disagree.
If your mouse trap requires anykind of bait/lure, then it’s not really 100% printed, is it? And, if it is 100% printed chances are a mouse isn’t going to be that interested. My point is that once you deviate from a 100% printed mouse trap, we’re just quibbling about percentages. 1
Some use cheese to trap mice. I’ve found peanut butter to be far more effective. To extend the above thought further, if you’re using peanut butter (or cheese) – just how much can you use in the trap? If you’re using a lot of peanut butter, why not the whole jar’s worth? If you’re using an entire jar of peanut butter, why waste the jar itself? Chances are you were going to throw the empty peanut butter jar away anyhow.
This isn’t so much cheating as it is… recycling/repurposing. 2
Printable extruder and now printable dinos! I had tried my hand at printable dinos, but I’m not in Zaggo’s league. While my designs were for printable dinos that could be as a single piece each, his are clearly more elegant and use much less plastic.
What’s interesting about the differences between our designs is that mine were based on trying to replicate the existing dinos in a printable manner. However, the dinos themselves were designed based upon the constraints of having to design three dimensional parts by layering and fitting lasercut acrylic pieces. The question I completely failed to answer, and which Zaggo addressed perfectly, is “How would you redesign this object if you only had to be concerned with the constraints of a MakerBot, not a laser cutter?”
If you aren’t constrained by having to assemble lasercut parts, why not print them in such a way that it uses less plastic? Why not print them on their sides? Even with a non-heated platform it should be trivial to get the bottom of these dinos flat. If anything warps it will be the parts that hold up the extruder. And even then the warp would only serve to keep a tight fit on the extruder by squeezing it together.
If you examine a plastruder you can see the filament and heater assembly are not perfectly centered within the unit. My guess is that’s why there are two dinos – one which reaches towards the center. However, there’s no reason a printruder couldn’t be designed so that the heater assembly was in the middle of the printruder. If this were the case you could just print up two sets of printable dinos – instead of a left/right or big/weird combo. Zaggo’s design allows for supporting either a printruder or a layered lasercut acrylic plastruder.
And we’re one step closer to a printable MakerBot!
I’ve always been a PC kinda guy ever since my IBM 286.1 PC’s are inherently more modular and hackable than Macs – I can buy any off the shelf no-name brand part and fix something myself.
That said, Zaggo’s software is making me wish I had a Mac. His Pleasant3D v2.0 software is crazy awesome. I use Google Sketchup to design and a combination of Netfabb and Blender to convert formats. But nothing I have lets me view models in the way Zaggo wrote.
Clear PLA sits
Mendel languishes alone
Plastruder hates corn
I’m not even sure I would build a Mendel if I had all the plastic parts. But for some reason I still want to have all of those parts. I have no idea why. :)
I printed up a single spring out of PLA before my extruder got clogged up. It’s my one and only Mendel piece.
Having this one piece languish next to my MakerBot strikes me as funny.
I think there’s a haiku in there somewhere.
His post reads like super efficient catalog with reviews. I’m mostly posting this so that I’ll have a permanent bookmark of his page. :)
I think it would be great to have a printable Dalek with a movable eyestalk, ray gun, and suction cup arm, and rotatable head. I’m working on building such an animal. I see the small eyestalk, gun, and arm to be the big challenges here.
I’ve got a reasonably rotatable head – by lopping off the head from the digital design files, adding a little stump, and putting a hole into the Dalek. More as this progresses.
Plus, since I’ve recently really improved my print quality (and increased print time!) I’m looking forward to re-printing this thing.
Do you have an idea for a printable object that’s been kicking around in your head? Perhaps you even designed a digital object and you’re patiently1 waiting for your MakerBot to arrive. Sure, it might be untested or even unprintable. I discovered that no matter how obscure one of my designs might be someone else is going to be interested in it. Someone is going to print it, improve it, or give you some feedback.
So, upload the design files and see what happens!
Turns out that some of my hosting problems are due to two of my websites (on my shared hosting account) are getting much more traffic than anticipated.
But, as they say, success is a good problem to have.
