Tinkering Camp - Day 3

Today was a very eventful day. We put our brand new 3D printer to use, finished off some battle bots, and even used Minecraft to as a building tool!You are probably asking yourself, ‘what is a 3D printer?’ Well, the idea is that you take an image from the internet and literally ‘print’ it into an object using a plastic material. There are tons of images online to choose from, and you can also design your own!

Browse Thingaverse.com for printable 3D objects.

Our Makerbot Replicator, hard at work printing

The finished 3D printed object. “It’s a traap!”

In fact, we even printed out objects that we built on Minecraft. (For those who don’t know, Minecraft is a PC game composed entirely out of building blocks) We did this by using a special Minecraft server made specifically for printing objects. You just have to build the object, add a sign-post with your email address, and hit a button which will email you the image file needed to print it! Thank you Paul Harter for this great service! We also had a visit from Derek Quenneville today, a local “3D printing evangelist/digital fabrication artist”. He showed us a bunch of models that he had printed on his printer. Here’s his blog post about his visit to our space.