At my school I have a group of year 9 students building a VEX robot… An extra curricular after school club.
In a fit of madness we decided to not build the standard “protobot” and do a hybrid “clawbot/protobot”. All very well but part way into the build someone noticed that we don’t have the claw in our kit… Beginners mistake!
So, being a bit brave about it I said to the students that I would search the web and see if I can download the 3D CAD files so that we could print the necessary files…. And I found them!
Talk about a steep learning curve… I fired up Autodesk Inventor (I usually use Creo!) opened the .step file and exported the parts as .stl (then discovered that I could have used Creo anyway!…. Dohh)
So now they were printable files. Most of them are a bit challenging as they need support material, but with Axon 3 (alpha) the support generation looks to be superb, so I was up for the challenge…. And the photos show the results.
Having so much fun I printed most of the parts… I’ll have to leave a few for the students to do in school. I don’t think the PLA plates will be strong enough, maybe a bit of a redesign for these, but that’s an extra project for the students to do 🙂
There can’t be many clawbots out there with printed claws, maybe this is a first … If it works! I’ll post some more photos later (if we are successful of course).
Oh, nearly forgot about the new goodies mentioned in the title of this post…. I have just received (and fitted) a new bed and waste bin (commonly known at BfB as a snot box) and a new wiper (snot flicker?) to my 3D Touch…. Wonderful!…. I’ll post some more info about these later.
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Your making us 3D print something?!? You trust Cody with your machines?!? 😛
Great to see my students read my blog!
Yes both of you will be 3D printing!…. Yes, even Cody 🙂