RasterWeb!
The latest creation from Emma, my eldest child/mini-maker. She made this for her half-brother’s birthday. I guess he likes the Pixar film Up.
My contributions were cutting the cardboard, attaching the house to the board with spray glue, and giving suggestions. So basically I served as a consultant, but she did all the hard of the work, including the baking, painting, decoration, and putting it all together. The size of the board is about 20″ by 32″.
Oh, and of course, I took the picture. :)
Bleargh!!! Sorry, had to get that out…
I seemed to be able to do nothing right last night at Milwaukee Makerspace. I joked that the only thing I was able to make was a mess. Besides hot-gluing my own thumb (though not my ass) and having many MakerBot failures, I was able to print two things, though even those two didn’t turn out that great. I’m getting a bit frustrated with the MakerBot Cupcake, and the mysteries of Skeinforge aren’t helping.
I’m waiting for MakerGear to ship my RepRap Prusa Mendel, which of course will require assembly, and configuration, and ten other weird things, but hopefully at the end I’ll have better prints than the Cupcake. Don’t get me wrong, the Cupcake is fun, but it’s also frustrating.
So I printed the 70mm lens gear, even though I really need one that’s about 85mm, just because I’ll be using a follow focus next week, and I want to see if this works. The gear teeth look good, even if the print itself did not turn out great.
I also tried this bottle opener, and again, while it is OK, it’s definitely not great. It looks pretty sloppy. The weird bits in the centr are the Milwaukee Makerspace logo, which was way too small to even attempt to print. It also filled in some of the hole areas a bit, which I had to remove the plastic from. That may be due to me editing the STL in Sketchup and creating a new STL with my own edits. I don’t know…
I think I need to take a break from printing things for a bit, and work on some other things. Printing takes a long time, and if it’s the only thing I do at the space, I feel like I’m neglecting other projects. (I did work on my Nutellastruder a bit, of course that led to the hot-gluing of my thumb!)
Oh, we did play around with KinectToStl a bit. Again, the results were not super-impressive, but it was fun to experiment with it. I didn’t bother to read the instructions, so there may be some good times on making it work better, but that will be something to try another day.
Update: The bottle opener broke while trying to open a bottle. #fail
Could the rumors be true? Supposedly, deep in the basement laboratory workshop of the secretive “2XL Makerspace” they’ve been hard at work on a dual button system the likes of which have not been seen before in this geographical area.
At least, that’s what all the rumor sites keep saying…
We don’t know if this photo has anything to do with some stealthy dual button device, but as soon as we find out, we’ll let you know.
See Also: The (Original) Button.
In the last month I’ve made some progress in my 3D modeling education, so I thought I’d provide an update. (Besides my last post, I got some good feedback on Google+) Oh, and just a reminder, my interest in 3D modeling all has to do with creating objects I can produce with a 3D printer like the MakerBot or the RepRap.
So what am I using (or not using) now? Here’s the list:
Google Sketchup
I’ve made some good progress with Sketchup. A few tutorials (and a lot of playing around) has me creating actual 3D models. You’ll want the STL Importer and STL Exporter to deal with STL files. Sketchup is nice, and I’m sure I’ll end up using it more as time goes on, but it’s not the end of my 3D quest.
Blender
Urgh… I’ve made no progress with Blender. Haven’t even tried. I may just wait until we do a Blender class at Milwaukee Makerspace.
123D
Still no Mac OS X version.
3DTin and Tinkercad
I talked about 3DTin last time. I haven’t used it since, but it still seems like a great way for kids to get into 3D modeling. As for Tinkercad, it seems like a more advanced version of 3DTin. Make: Live covered Tinkercad in Episode 17 if you want to check it out.
Inkscape
Say what!? Inkscape is a 2D drawing application. I’m still using it. I’ll often open vector files (SVG) and export them to DXF files and then extrude those to 3D files. Here’s a great Inkscape to OpenSCAD dxf tutorial that explains it all.
OpenSCAD
I’m still just barely using OpenSCAD, mainly in conjunction with Inkscape as mentioned above. I need to dig in a bit deeper, as time allows.
So what else is there? Well, I found Pleasant3D, which isn’t exactly modeling software, but it’s what ReplicatorG might look like if it were a full-on Mac OS X application. I’ve found it useful on a few occasions.
The other one worth mentioning is MeshLab, which may have some uses when it comes to converting or transforming files. I haven’t created anything with it yet, but it sure looks impressive.
So that’s my 3D modeling software update… Anything new to report from your desktop?
I can’t imagine a world without the innovation Steve Jobs brought to it.
The first Apple product I used was an Apple ][+, which was purchased by my brother (also named Steve) in 1980 (or perhaps 1979, and probably with a little bit of help from our parents.) I fell in love with it. I wrote BASIC programs, and I saved them to cassette tapes, and I created LORES and HIRES graphics, and eventually we got a mouse for it, and I used MousePaint to do some pretty awesome mid-1980s computer graphics.
When I was in college, I got my first Mac, an Apple Macintosh IIvx, and I used the hell out of it. I designed things, did page layouts, created graphics, edited photos, and learned all the tricks of the operating system. Like my brother, instead of buying a car, or taking a trip, I got a computer… and all of that was probably more influential to my career path and what I do today than anything else.
I fell in love with computers and technology because of Steve Jobs, and I would not be what I am today without his contributions to the world.
Thanks Steve, you will be missed by many.
