Thingiverse® controversies aside, I like rubber band guns. I just saw this one the other day made by Plumb B. I’ve never played Gears of War, but this appears to be a very faithful replica from the images I have seen. Aside from it’s faithfulness, I admire the way it uses a magazine to hold several1 rubber bands. I also appreciate the way the maker shows all of the inner workings and mechanisms.
Hat tip to Boingboing for the link.
I was just floored by this recent post to the Make blog. This is the most amazing rubber band gun I’ve ever seen in my life. 1 It genuinely looks like a P90 from Stargate SG-1, including the way in which ammunition is loaded. 2 Even if weren’t for how realistic it looks, the mechanism is still fantastic. It apparently has a single shot/semi-automatic and fully automatic mode. Here’s what I can’t believe – that the creator of this magnificent toy thought it necessary to obscure their face in the video. I would be proud to call this my own.
Since I’m on the topic, this next rubber band gun is also pretty cool.
The websites for the first gun is in Japanese, but the Google translation is pretty decent. The cut-away pictures show most of how the device works. Just as a head’s up, the way WordPress handles gallery photos puts all of these pictures into a single gallery even though I uploaded them at different times. The second gun appears to hold 8 shots and will “auto-return” the gun to its starting position. Although there are a few pictures of the piece from various angles, I don’t really understand how the auto-return mechanism works. If you’ve got an idea, I would appreciate your insight.
THIS is what I’ve been dying to print.
Printed Legos
How did I achieve such a feat? Printing from the SD chip. For those of you who aren’t sure how to do this, it’s a lot easier than you think. I was wondering if there was some complicated kind of upload/buffering command. I just wasn’t seeing instructions or a how-to anywhere. Well, that’s because its pretty freaking easy. I printed to a file, popped an SD chip into my laptop, copied the file to the chip, popped the chip into the ‘bot, and then chose to print from SD card option in ReplicatorG.
My first attempt to upload code to the chip was through the USB cable. While this is certainly feasible, it’s painfully slow. It took about two minutes to upload 200k through the USB cable versus less than two seconds worth of writing to the chip.
Admittedly, this wasn’t what I had tried first. I discovered that by moving the extuder board to the same side as the motherboard, I had blocked the SD chip port. Bummer. To solve this problem I unbolted the motherboard, rotated it 90 degrees counter-clockwise, put two more holes into the side of my MakerBot, and bolted it back on. 1
Now that I’ve printed up my first lego, I’m going to want to print: