For the next few weeks, I will be writing and posting a series of MakerBot Unicorn Pen Plotter tutorials at wiki.makerbot.com/unicorn-tutorials both to help those who have a MakerBot Unicorn push this tool to the limit and to entice the curious to make a leap into this fruitful if unusual 2D re-purposing of your MakerBot 3D printer.

I will be alternating new tutorials with “print days” where I share loads of new things I have printed by releasing design and gcode files to Thingiverse.com. Please comment on the blog posts and Thingiverse.com releases to let me know how I’m doing — and what else you’d like me to write about.

Tutorial #01 Vector-Based Drawing

In my opinion, the MakerBot Unicorn stands proud among its peers not only because it is a swap-in pen plotter toolhead operated within the belly of a beefy 3D printing robot (already very cool), but also because of specific qualities this DIY pen plotter offers a designer: hella plotting speed, positional accuracy within the page (and from print-to-print), range of marking surfaces, range of marking implements, lightning-fast pen lifts, etc.

And most importantly, the Unicorn has a native illustrator’s “hand” (well, “horn”) that leads to a less “machine-flavored” result than I anticipated from a plotter.

In this first tutorial block I get you setup with the tools you need to jump right into basic vector design and printing by leading you through the whole process I go through to complete the print of the Cupcake exploded diagram, and along the way share a few design and printing tricks to make plotting with a MakerBot Unicorn far less elusive and mythological than getting this out of the other sort of unicorn.

— Matt Griffin

In this segment of Bad Universe on the Discovery Channel, Zach says,

If you’re in the middle of traveling between galaxies and something breaks on your space ship, you’re going to want to be able to fix it right there.

It may sound like science fiction, but 3D printers in space is a concept that’s actively being researched at research institutions right now!

For those of you lucky enough to attend Maker Faire a few weeks ago, you may have noticed one of the Bots off to the side making noise but not in fact printing anything. That noise was actually music, and the music was a 28 hour performance of Erik Satie’s 1893 “Vexations,” performed by Armin Fuchs in Dresden in the year 2000.

We named the robotic musician “Gidget” to celebrate his status as our 2000th MakerBot. Gidget is a Cupcake CNC assembled by Widget live last month. Gidget’s impressive performance may have been the most underappreciated event at Maker Faire. His programmer Matt Griffin said, “For some reason, it was extremely easy to make this MakerBot perform it – this particular one – with its really loose belt.”

Coincidentally, the New Yorker featured an article on John Cage the following week, and mentioned the inspirational influence of “Vexations” on him.

Matt made a lovely video of Gidget performing the piece, and plans to upload the code to Thingiverse so you can program your own MakerBot to sing you to sleep. Also, look for an upcoming blog post by Matt where he explains how he made this musical magic happen.

The crew at QC-Colab recently celebrated the opening of their hackerspace with the minting of their very own 3D printed coin in bronze.  David Hinkle, one of their founders, put together these two videos documenting their process for turning a plastic 3D printed object into a metal part.  Thanks David!

Part I

Part II