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Printrbot

Printrbot

You’ve heard me say that 3D Printing is the Future, and I’ve talked about the MakerBot, RepRap, and other 3D printers, but fairly recently, a new project called “Printrbot” launched, and more specifically, they launched on Kickstarter, where their goal was to raise $25,000 and when the campaign ended they raised $830,827. (3,323% funded!)

You could say there’s a lot of interest in 3D printing…

And 3D printing moves fast! I received a MakerGear RepRap Prusa Mendel about a month and a half ago, and I’m still building it.

When I say “I’m still building it” I should clarify that I only get at most a few hours each week. I’ve been told you can assemble the entire thing in a weekend if you skip meals and sleep. :)

But supposedly the Printrbot can be assembled in an afternoon. And it’s smaller, and lighter, and cheaper. All good things. I’ve heard a few questions as to the speed, print quality, etc. of the Printrbot, but I’m fairly confident it’s well designed and will be comparable to the other 3D printers in it’s price class (even though it’s probably the cheapest right now.)

At Milwaukee Makerspace we’ve got a member with a MakerBot Cupcake, I’m building a Prusa Mendel, and I’ve heard that one member backed the Printrbot project and should have one of those when they’re available.

Oh, I should also mention that a goal of the Printrbot is “a printer in every home (and school)” so right there, I’m a fan… and a backer.

If you’ve ever thought 3D printing was too expensive, keep an eye on the Printrbot project, and see what they can do to change your mind.

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CheerLight Details

CheerLight

The CheerLights folks posted about my build, but at the time I hadn’t been able to provide many details, so I wrote up some details…

CheerLights is a fun little project that is powered by ThingSpeak, a service which makes it easy to use Twitter as a control mechanism for the Internet of Things.

CheerLight Innards

Originally I just tossed a few notes up on the Milwaukee Makerspace wiki, but now I’ve got some code on GitHub and a detailed project page for my CheerLight.

CheerLight

Here’s my CheerLight connected to my MacBook Pro, ready to change colors at your command.

(And yes, my project is called "CheerLight" mainly because it consists of just one light. At least that’s the story I’m sticking with.)

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Mac-Cat-Attack!

RepRap Cat

I’ve already talked about the Top 5 Places Kitten was, but since kitten (who is now a cat, and sometimes referred to as RepRap Cat) spends a lot of time in the office with me, I thought it was time for a new list…

The top 4 Macs kitten has sat upon:

  1. MacBook Pro
  2. Mac mini
  3. G4 PowerBook
  4. Mac Pro

She also spends a lot of time on the printer, which isn’t a Mac, but has a lot of buttons to press.

The only Mac missing is the iMac, and that’s because she hasn’t figured out how to sit on top of that one… yet.

Update: I snapped this picture less than two hours after posting this.

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UI Mockup/Diagram Apps

UI Apps

I wanted to mock up a control panel for a project (a real physical control panel, not a software control panel) and remembered that I had OmniGraffle on one of my machines, so I started with that. Unfortunately it appeared that it was a demo version and was limited to 20 objects.

OmniGraffle

OmniGraffle is a sweet application, and I considered buying it, but at $99 for an individual license, for an application I probably won’t use that much, I opted not to pursue it. (Oh, and I did think about just using Inkscape, but I thought it would be more fun to use a diagramming specific application for this project.)

Dia

I found Dia, an open source, multi-platform application for creating diagrams. Dia actually looks like a pretty nice application, and I do prefer open source when possible, but I also find X11 applications a bit clunky, and while I’ll keep an eye on Dia, it didn’t quite live up to what I wanted…

Pencil

I ended up revisiting the Pencil Project, which I looked at last year, and I really like it. It’s a great application for mocking things up, and it even ties into one of my favorite sites, OpenClipArt.org.

Pencil Menus

The one annoying thing about Pencil is the menus. I’m using Mac OS X, and I’d like the menus to work as they do on Mac OS X, and these are just weird.

Here’s the output I got from each application. It should be mentioned, these are all rough, and by no means final. I really just wanted to quickly kick out a design from each application.

OmniGraffle Mockup
OmniGraffle Mockup

Dia Mockup
Dia Mockup

Pencil Mockup
Pencil Mockup

I’ll probably use Pencil moving forward and see how much I can push its capabilities. (And yes, it’s also open source and multi-platform, which is one more great thing about it.)

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Convert all the files!

Convert all the files!
Thanks Tom!

It seemed like a simple enough request… While at Milwaukee Makerspace we were discussing creating snowflakes on the Laser Cutter, and I mentioned that there should be some existing art on OpenClipArt.org, but it was down that night, so I jumped over to Thingiverse and found this snowflake.

As a bit of background, I’ve been pretty damn good at file conversions in the past. Audio, video, markup, raster images, anything 2D has been pretty simple. I mean, I’ve been using Photoshop since version 1.0.7. I know how to deal with that stuff… but 3D? It’s a whole new nightmare world!

Snowflake

The file was an STL, which is meant for 3D printing, but we needed more of a 2D vector file. I know how to load a DXF file into the Laser Cutter, so I figured I’m import this STL into Google Sketchup (via a plugin) and then export as a DXF (via another plugin) and that would be it.

Well, that didn’t work. (Oh, and by “didn’t work” I mean I was unable to open the DXF file in Inkscape. At this point I was still waiting to use the Laser Cutter so I didn’t get to try importing it on that machine. I figured that as long as I was waiting, I’d try to get a format I knew would work.) On to the next idea.

I exported the STL from Google Sketchup as a DAE file, and was able to open that in MeshLab. Once again I tried a DXF export, but that one wouldn’t open in Inkscape either. Argh!

Snowflake

So I made a radical decision… Since I could view the file in MeshLab, I just did a screen shot so I could get a nice, clean 2D version of it.

Snowflake

Of course if I had known I was going to do this, I probably could have just done it in Google Sketchup by altering the view… Still, the MeshLab method seemed solid.

Snowflake

I then took the screen shot and opened it in Photoshop, did a little editing, and converted it to black and white. (I considered creating paths, and exporting them, but at this point I wanted to go with what I knew (or thought) would work, and that meant getting a clean PNG file into Inkscape to convert it from a raster to a vector file via trace bitmap.

Snowflake

So finally, I had my SVG file! A vector file I could open in Inkscape and export as a clean DXF file that I was reasonable sure would open and work on the Laser Cutter…

Snowflake

Oh wait, at some point along the way I had created an OpenSCAD file, to test the other DXF files. They wouldn’t render due to some weirdness, but the new one I exported from Inkscape did. This made me feel a little more secure that this file would work.

So how did it turn out? I don’t know!

The Laser Cutter was in use making ornaments, and I couldn’t stay late enough to get a chance to use it.

And just to be clear… while there were many steps in the process above, the whole thing took about 20 minutes from the first file export to getting what seemed to be a good DXF file.

I’ve converted a lot of files in my time, but doing so for these CNC machine is proving to be a new challenge.

Of course half the fun is seeing if it will work, you know, on the machine… which I hope to test at some point. :)