Hanukkah ends December 9th. There’s still time to spin the dreidel. Don’t have one? Print one out with your MakerBot. There are several designs on Thingiverse, all of them inspired by phooky’s original. The ones in the picture above were printed by smwombat.
Thingiverse user staffert took the letter designs from spooky and created his own model based on his child’s plastic models.
This top spins for more than a minute. The design was created by shwekwek, who was inspired by a bicycle wheel.
Matt Jadud is working with Operation Stick Figure Army to help blind students. Their open source software translates 2D images into 3D digital files which can then be printed. They’re looking to raise $1,815 to buy a Thing-O-Matic so that they can print their designs.
Sounds like a noble cause to me!
The days are counting down for participating in the MakerBot Unicorn Challenge. (The days are four.) At midnight on Friday night I will make one last pass through Thingiverse.com checking for challenge tags before downloading files for each participant to present to the judges. The prizes at stake for each challenge: a MakerBot Unicorn Pen Plotter kit, valued at $85.
The MakerBot Unicorn Pen Plotter is a precise, high-speed pen-plotter that can be mounted in a MakerBot Cupcake or Thing-O-Matic much like a Frostruder or a Plastruder. Taking advantage of the rigorous x-/y-axis positioning offered by a MakerBot and adding rapid-fire pen-lifts with an HS-311 Servo, this plotter creates compelling “hand/bot-drawn” illustrations. You can use a wide variety of marking tools (including diamond-tipped scribes for zinc or copper plates!) for a variety of purposes.1
To date, only a small community are rocking this tool and I’m looking to change that.
I’ve heard from a number of individuals and teams working to compete in the coding and design challenges, including folks new to the MakerBot community (if not the Thingiverse community). Few have posted so far2, but I’m looking forward to seeing the final results as people wrap up entries and post them at Thingiverse.com with the appropriate challenge tags.
Egg-Botter Dan Newman courageously posted his Inkscape Hatch Fill Extension (used to create the image used at the head of this post) only a couple of days into the contest. Even if his entry were to run unopposed for the Crosshatch Challenge, Egg-Botters and MakerBotters alike would benefit from his work. When I asked him if he would mind me posting about his early entry he wrote back to me: “If someone can build upon my work or otherwise produce an even better extension, then the entire community is better served. So, I don’t mind at all if someone has plenty of time to look at my submission and pick it apart.” Really awesome: Dan is a true open source hero.
There is also the rumor that the Gcodetools for Inkscape code team will tune a tool to offer MakerBot Unicorn-flavored gcode.
I will be bringing a number of MakerBot Unicorn bots to Botacon on Saturday, December 11th to show off work posted to Thingiverse to date, and then will announce the four challenge winners. If the winners are in attendance that day they will walk away with their very own Unicorn kit.3
More details on the four challenges are here, but below is a quick summary refresher:
Hack on Scribbles.py or Lunchlines.py or similar to create a Python Inkscape extension that allows a designer to go from a vector-based Inkscape illustration to printable gcode in one step!
Create an Inkscape extension that helps illustration designers create Unicorn/Eggbot/Pen Plotter printable hatches/crosshatch/fill patterns so that they can add tone and blocks of color to their work!
Similar to the Single-Pass favorite robot competition, but this one allows you to go crazy and involve two or more separate passes with the marking tools of your choosing! Make sure to include in your entry a picture (or at least illustration) with instructions for what types of marking implements to use for each pass.
Including, according to Will Langford who created the tool, etching PCBs. [↩]
Come on, folks — you aren’t sniping these challenges Ebay-style! [↩]
If winners are not in attendance, they will receive their prize in the mail and their praise here in the blog. [↩]
