Misadventures in Additive Manufacturing #4 - GearBot

This week in 3D Printing was all about gears!!!! Gears look really cool, so of course I printed out a bunch of gear things.

During the first half of the week I printed out these cube gears that I found on Thingiverse:

It's a fun thing to carry around and show people at school what 3D printers are capable of. Oh, and I entered it into a contest on Reddit for fun! check it out here.

I also tried printing out a better set of heart gears... except I ran out of red filament. :<

And lastly I printed out... *drum roll*

AIRPLANES!!!! :D I don't know what I didn't think of this in the first place. 

Misadventures in Additive Manufacturing #3 - VlogBot

Welcome back to my blog series about printing in three dimensions! I've been a little busy and I feel bad for neglecting my blog a little bit. So here's a video of me awkwardly stumbling around in conversation to myself:


Probably the coolest thing I've printed out so far is this gear heart. I got the model off of Thingiverse. It took almost an entire weekend to print because I had to print it one piece at a time. I recently saw a version of this on thingiverse with a motorized stand which I might try to printout for an awesome looking display.

Misadventures in Additive Manufacturing #2 - BrokenBot

Hello and welcome back to my misadventures in additive manufacturing, a blog series that documents my exploration of the wonderful and potentially very frustrating world of 3d printing. Most recently I purchased a Printrbot simple kit and got it to function in about two days.

Recently I've been trying to print this large 'cute octo says hello' that I found on thingiverse. Unfortunately the print always takes about 2 - 4 hours and it keeps stopping due to things like tangled filament. So now I have three half printed octopi.

I was getting frustrated with the print so I scaled down the octopus to 30% and printed with a less dense infill and got it printed in just 8 minutes! Which was convenient because I had to leave for the day.

Also I printed some cuddling cats. :3

Unfortunately I was printing out a small companion cube from portal yesterday and the machine stopped mid print. :< 

I received an error message saying 'timer expired' and now I always receive a 'no such file or directory' every time I try to connect. I've checked all the wire connections multiple times and I tried rebooting my system multiple times with no success. Which means that something's wrong with the printer it's self. -.- I sent a support ticket to Printrbot and I think they're sending me a new controller board. Unfortunately that means I won't be up and printing again until next weekend. :< So that means I'll have to find something to keep me busy in the mean time. Maybe I'll try to master illustrator for my graphic design class or something.

Anyways, I'll continue posting about my misadventures in additive manufacturing here soon. My next post will be when I finally get my printer up and running again! Have a picture of 3d printed bottoms of octopodes: 

Misadventures in Additive Manufacturing

I've had my eye on 3d printing for awhile... so guess what's in this box!

That's right, it's a 3d printer! A 2013 Printrbot Simple to be exact. I went to a 3D printing expo last weekend so I finally decided to get one. The printer came as a kit that I had to build myself. I got it on Tuesday around noon and I got it built to how it looks in the picture below by around  2AM that night.

Unfortunately they left out the power cable so I had to synthesize my own. I cut the plug from an old computer and I soldered it to a female bullet power connector. I'm actually really happy with how this cable turned out, just look at those heat shrinks!

I got it printing by the next day. I stared out with a calibration object that I found on Thingiverse shown on the right below. I spent some time trying to get the filament to extrude correctly and getting the bed at the right level. After looking at the object all day at school I designed a counter part for the calibration object so they could be put together to form a cube (shown on left). I made it in Sketchup and you can download the stl here to print out yourself.

I printed out a companion cube too!

I switched to green PLA filament and it works much better than the red filament for some reason.

I started printing a "cute" octopus SD card holder late last night.

Unfortunately the filament got tangled up while I was sleeping and the print didn't finish. The below picture is how far it got. I'm planning on reprinting it tonight.

Some tips I learned:

• The laser cut extruder was a pain. There was a feeder tube that sat above the hot it and they were difficult to align and a slight misalignment caused it to be too difficult to extrude material. The solution I found was to just get rid of the feeder tube, you really don't need it.

• Leveling the bed is really important. If the bed is too far from the hot tip then the first layer turns out to be squiggly and ugly. If this is happening raise the bed so it's only a few fractions of a millimeter from the print head. I actually use blue painters tape to fine tune the leveling.

A Candy Proposal

In my English class we were instructed to write a parody of A Modest Proposal by Jonathan Swift. We were to use reductio ad absurdum to demonstrate our opinions of a modern attitude. So, I wrote mine about the recent attempt to trade mark the word "Candy" by the creators of Candy Crush Saga. Enjoy. :)

A Candy Proposal

For preventing the upload of applications that damage the brand of large companies.

by Marcel Baarsch - Independent Software Developer

---

It is a woeful sight to those, who consume multiple forms of media on the internet, when they see the applications market crowded with applications that mimic those of higher quality in order to confuse them. This leaves substantial companies that develop content for mass consumption in danger of losing a small portion of it’s potential user base and suffering a slight decrease in their massive revenue. The employees of these companies instead of being able to work for their honest living are forced to employ their time in browsing online forums to beg for other software development opportunities or even offer up hacking skills in exchange for bitcoin.

I think it is agreed by large corporations and lawyers, that this monumental number of applications that damage the brand of large companies is representative of the pitiful state of the free market. Therefore, whomever can find a fair and easy method for protecting the brand of immense companies would deserve as to have his statue set of as a preserver of this market.

As for my own part, having observed the  ineffectiveness of the trademarking of entire titles, I humbly propose that large companies should be allowed to trademark single common words involved in their titles such as “candy” or “saga” and should posses the right to, through the use of legal threats, kindly ask any developer using those trademarked words to remove their application from the market. In fact, these companies should be assigned large portions of the dictionary for which they can sue any other developer using words found in their portion of the dictionary. To further the security of these brands, any small developer who infrindges on these newly assigned trademarks must surrender their application into the posession of the trademark holder so that the trademark holder may market this application as their own if they choose to do so. Afterwards, the holder of the trademark may execute the infrindging developer and use their remains to fertizile plants located on the trademark holder's property.

Ludum Dare 28 Results Are In!

A Weird Love Game Ratings:

#124	Humor	3.32
#537	Theme	2.80
#623	Graphics	2.69
#829	Innovation	2.33
#892	Mood	2.04
#906	Fun	2.15
#941	Overall	2.33
#1041	Coolness	47%

This was my third time entering Ludum Dare but it was my first time entering by myself. The Game I made is called A Weird Love Game and is actually my worst rated game yet.

http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-28/?action=preview&uid=10093

With that being said I was barely able to get my act together to release anything at all. And my game received a lot more comments than I expected and almost all of them were positive. Plus I think my game made an interesting statement and just about everybody got the point. :)

Previous Entry Ratings:

Here are the ratings for my previous entries just to get some perspective. On these other game I worked with some friends. I received some help programming as well with art and music.

Ludum Dare 25 | Bunnie

	Coolness	53%
#159	Audio(Jam)	2.81
#178	Humor(Jam)	2.50
#195	Graphics(Jam)	3.00
#220	Theme(Jam)	2.96
#248	Overall(Jam)	2.67
#254	Mood(Jam)	2.43
#263	Fun(Jam)	2.31
#307	Innovation(Jam)	1.96

Ludum Dare 26 | Potato

	Coolness	55%
#210	Humor(Jam)	2.38
#285	Audio(Jam)	2.88
#313	Graphics(Jam)	3.00
#397	Overall(Jam)	2.81
#399	Theme(Jam)	2.88
#408	Mood(Jam)	2.52
#460	Fun(Jam)	2.32
#526	Innovation(Jam)	1.95

Langauges:

It's probably noteworthy that every time I've entered Ludum Dare I used a language that I was relatively new to me. I've been having trouble finding a good language to stick to. I'm currently working with HTML5 and it's looking very promising. It seems to be view highly as the future or whatever and I've seen some impressive game made with it. Anywho, I hope to stick with it. (￣^￣)ゞ

Ludum Dare 28 Post Mortem

So I did it! I submitted an entry to Ludum Dare and I used Phaser as I previously stated. The game I made is called A Weird Love Game and is definitely a weird entry. My game isn't even really a game, you play as some pixel British guy and you run away from this girl before you fall in love with her and it's game over.

PLAY | ENTRY

This was my first time entering as a compo rather than a jam. I worked completely by myself and almost lost all motivation half way through. 

This game was initially based on my idea to make a game which was based of "You only get one... lover" which didn't work out too well. A friend suggested I make a game where you perform tasks to keep your love in love with you or else she will leave you. Well... that's weird right? Idk, I wasn't really ready for that.

So my game took a different direction. It's now some weird commentary about love and possibly marriage. I guess the message this game is supposed to convey is that falling in love with a girl is inevitable... I've seen many people crippled by "love" that's it's somewhat ludicrous from my point of view. I'm not sure if I'm going to work on this game as a post LD... it definitely needs some improvements that wouldn't be too difficult to make.

I wrote the game using Phaser as I had said before. It's weird working in Javascript as opposed to a compiled language. I appreciate the highlighting that Notepad++ has but I miss IDEs that will auto complete and stuff. Also Phaser as some weird things about it. Like the camera isn't very smooth as you may notice. I was looking at some other HTML5 libraries that I might try. 

I'm gonna use Phaser!

I found a super awesome framework for HTML5 games called Phaser! I'm gonna use it now for the upcoming Ludum Dare!

I'm in for Ludum Dare 28...

I've been missing game Jams... and I've been really wanting to make games. So I'm gonna do the Ludum Dare next weekend even if it kills me. (￣^￣)ゞ

I've kinda been in between languages. Before I was using AS3 + Flixel to make my games... which was great! :D Unfortunately, AS3 seems to be dying and no one wants to work with me in it. :<

I was looking at a few programs like Unity 4.3 and Game Maker but a drag and drop interface doesn't seem like something that would be very pleasant to work with.

So, enter Javascript. I'm slightly familiar with Javascript, although I don't know it as well as something like PHP. It does look promising for game development. It was scary at first because it's an interpreted language. But Google Chrome's console and tools like Visual Studio make it seem better to work with. I have also been looking at libraries like Crafty, ImpactJS and Ludus...

Anyways, I hope to complete a fairly decent game for this upcoming Ludum Dare and I'm excited to play any other games that come out of it.

Oh, and feel free to bug me on Twitter. @_dmitrix

Minecraft Server Running Well

My Minecraft server is going well. Just check out these blurry pictures of Shaun playing Minecraft!

Also, we kinda finished spawn.