3D Printing Professor on Patreon

Welp, I've gone and done it now.

The post really says it all. This isn't the right time to do this sort of thing. With the sale of our house taking way longer than anticipated it's getting harder and hard to maker videos. So is it a good idea to pull the trigger on a Patreon when I can't work on the promised of the same?

Is it ever the right time?

I know if I wait I'll never do it. I'll finish getting Wood Wars 3D ready, but I'll have to work on the Caesar Cipher ring. I'll finish the ring, but I'll have to work on the first project. But there'll be no pressure, so I'll finish a project after the house sells and we move. And I'll upt it off till after I've built the garage, then after the kids all graduate college.

NO. Now is the time.

I've got high hope and I hope you'll put the pressure on me to deliver. The worst thing for my stress level right now would be a successful Patreon. So stress me out.

Dr. Fluff's Robot Factory Android App Review

Genetically building robots for 3D printing Android app. If that sentance sounds more than a little buzzword laden that's because it is. Yet that's the premise behind Dr. Fluff's Robot Factory. I get the sense that the Robot Factory is testing the waters for their more robust genetic app later, apparently using dinosaurs since they've been uploading them to thingiverse and youmagine lately.

The "genetic" part of their pitch comes from the way you build things. You're given a screen of 10 different choices and you choose 2. Then the "genes" of those choices are mixed and mutated and you are presented with 8 more choices, the 2 you chose last time and 8 new "children". Through a series of choices you eventually narrow down your choices until you decide you're done and you assemble your robot. In theory you'd think this would work, but in practice I had a hard time intelligently guiding and massaging a particular trait from the choices. I think that's because Dr. Fluff uses by-the-book genetic algorythms which are known to have a problem with variable length traits being extracted from the genetic data stream. All I wanted was a top fin, but I kept getting a wild array of robots that look nothing like their parents. But my kids didn't mind that so much when they played with it and settled on whatever they were shown pretty quickly.

After assembly your robot is uploaded to shapeways and optionally an STL, clearly not optimized for home printing, is e-mailed to you. The STL I received had overlapping geometry and has no hope of printing without supports. Significant post work including running it through netfabb and careful alignment on the build plate was necessary to have a chance at success, and at that I was only able to make them look good from the front. From the back where all the supports attached is an different story (the picture I took of the prints from the back didn't do justice to the horrors presented).

Over all I'd say Dr. Fluff is promising and I'm going to keep my eye on their next app, but Modio is way better for my purposes and makes better toys (though I haven't managed to make them print just yet). I just wish that Modio ran on Android or Windows.

The future of stealing objects is... not here yet.

There is a number of people afraid that 3D printing coupled with 3D scanning technology will result in <echo filter>the end of civilization</echo filter>. Never mind that it will only be able to copy things that don't have separate moving parts, unless you take it apart first, and never mind that Everything is a Remix (totally worth the 30 minutes to watch that) and copying is how innovation happens, there are still those that are afraid that someone with a handheld scanner will be able to scan something and reproduce it at home without compensation.

Well it's happened. And the result is less impressive than you might think.

Bernat Cuni, using a camera, captured images of an Elsa toy on the other side of a window, fed those images into 123DCatch, reproduced a vaguely Elsa-like shape and 3D printed it at home. More photos and 3D view of a textured model on his blog.

Gasp, oh gee, that print looks almost nothing like the model he photographed without buying, I'm sure if he was doing this because his daughter was bugging him for that toy, he entirely failed to satisfy her.

"But this is just the beginning" IP's champions will say. "If we can do this today, what will the future bring?" It's a fair point, and my response is that you should really go back and watch Everything is a Remix. I say bring on the future where it's impossible to make money selling plastic nick-knacks. Go ahead, develop a photo-proof glass or some other ill conceived notion to protect your doo-dads and watch it eat up your bottom line. Or embrace the future and adapt your business model.

I don't normally go for the whole "3D printers are going to change the world" but, to be honest, 3D printers might just change the world.

Modio, knocking one thing off my todo list

Sorry I haven't had anything cool coming off my print bed to talk about. I have a backlog of jobs from MakeXYZ and 3DHubs to fill. I promise I'll get to something cool soonish.

In the meanwhile here's some lighter news from the world of 3D printing (as opposed to yesterday's grim post), Modio is awesome. When I made my Cymon bot I realized I had designed a generic ball-and-joint system that could be extended to a Modibot-like system. So there's another job on the job stack. But even if I had done that I would not have thought to make them all monstrously textured and whatnot.

Right now it's only available for iPhings but on Twitter there's indication that other platforms are coming, and I can't wait.