I am working on a new necklace for my mother’s birthday. This one will feature a family tree design with a leaf with the first initial of each child and grandchild. I hope to print this in silver or white gold at iMaterialize.
While performing a recent upgrade to add a heated build plate to my trusty Replicator 2 I made an (almost) fatal mistake: I put the new 9amp power supply plug in upside down! Needless to say, the sound and smell that came out of the printer was excruciating. While this was a dope-slap moment on my part – I partly blame MakerBot for not properly keying their power supply plugs. I thought all was lost. Luckily, my retired electrical engineer of a father is much better with these types of issues. He talked me down and proceeded to prod the motherboard with his multi-meter. Since MakerBot closed-source their MightyBoard design a few years back there is no public schematic for this board. Never fear! My father was able to diagnose the problem and hack a solution. First, we were somewhat lucky in that the burned components were mostly on the BotStep daughter boards – which are cheap to replace. However, we were unable to get the 5V circuit to come back – so dad hacked up a separate power supply. Now my MakerBot has two plugs! Now I am struggling with getting the print head to home properly, but that is for a future post… here is a shot of the hacked board:
I logged into Thingiverse today and was pleased to find that one of my Things from last year was remixed. I had designed a toy mobile phone for my daughter; with press-able buttons and a spot for mini sticky notes to send “texts.” Thingiverse user Richard Spehr remixed it and made his own version.
This piezo pickup was inspired by my first ever 3D printed design: a guitar pickup that was designed to hold an old “oyster” style pickup. I wanted to make one that was more general and could hold a standard sized piezeo speaker. It is built for the 4″ (103mm) diameter sound hole on my Yamaha. If you are interested in modifying for a different size, I designed it with Autodesk Fusion 360 and made the design public.
Check out the video of it in action:
Designigans is a site dedicated to inspiring children to design things. All children are curious little inventors. This site will demonstrate how children can use design thinking, digital tools and 3D printing bring their inspirations into the real world. We will use this blog to chronicle our experiences with home 3D printing as well as teaching others how to think, design, and print in 3D. Welcome aboard!