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Showing posts from January, 2016

3D Printing Lego Heads

As an experiment, I tried to make my own 3D printed Lego head using Tinkercad and our Ultimaker 2 3D Printer. You will need: Testors Modeling Paint EZ Digital Caliper (only if you don't use my measurements or want to teach the tool) Pre-made Lego bodies to test 3D printer Tinkercad With the digital caliper, I was able to get precise measurements using a pre-made Lego head and body.  You can introduce the students to using a caliper or you can skip this part since the measurements are already done. It wasn't exactly what the caliper measured of course because you have to leave a few .mm as wiggle room. Here is my project to copy and tinker. The hole inside the orange cylinder is the one that needs to be exact. It is 5.5mm X 5.05mm. All other measurements and shapes can be played with to make huge "Bobble-head" like Lego heads. You can easily delete the hat and ears if you want a standard Lego head or get funkier. After the meticulousness of painting

Cube 2 3D Printer Review

We have had the Cube 2 3D printers for over a year now and I think it's time to weigh in the pros and cons. For the record, we also have an Ultimaker 2 as my comparison for features. It does come with an extra price tag $ for those features but well worth the staff time I've saved. Most of our 3D printing programs with these Cube machines occur with first time users usually ages 10 and up.  Even if you don't have a Cube it is good to know the limits of any 3D printing machine before purchasing. Cube Software.... Pros: is pretty easy to use. Unlike other printing software (Cura for Ultimaker*) I've used, there are limited options so it doesn't feel daunting to work with.  Is it solid or hollow? Supports yes or no? How large?  Cubify is an easy download off the website and you can download it to as many computers as you want. Our workflow is we create an object in Tinkercad , save as an .STL file then convert into Cubify. Cubify saves the options fro