Here’s a video of the rubber band gun that I put together.
Rubber Band Guns
I was home with my kids while my wife was out of town and my 7 year old was really pushing me to print stuff out. He picked out a rubber band gun, but I did not think it was a very well designed. I printed it out, but was still on the hunt for a better design. I found one, but thought it could still be improved. Here’s a link to the gun I ended up making.
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2429439
Look Before You Print
I started printing a robot yesterday and part of it did not stick to the bed, causing me to cancel the print. I started it again this morning only to realize that something was wrong. I found this piece of plastic stuck to the nozzle and things were printing very well.
Let that be a lesson to me.
Weather Station Complete… Sort of
I got my weather station all soldered together and mounted in the solar shade. I designed a block to sit on top of the shade that will hold the battery. I also printed out an adapter for the solar shade to mount it on top of a metal conduit that I planted in the edge of my garden. I thought I was all done until a few days went by and I got a notification from Wunderground that my station had stopped reporting. The battery I am using has a solar panel, and I was hoping that it would charge the battery faster than the weather station drained it. Apparently not. There is a way to put the control board into deep sleep for a certain amount of time, but it required soldering another wire on the board. I took the weather station apart and added the wire, only to find out that my battery goes to sleep before the weather station wakes up again. Now, I need to figure out how to reduce power usage low enough for the battery to charge, but not too low that it thinks nothing is connected. Back the interwebs for research.
Tapping the holes to mount the board.
Conduit adapter. It was tight going onto the conduit, but just the right size to slip inside the weather station. This makes it real easy to bring the whole station inside when I need to work on it, or charge the battery.
Adding the wire for the deep sleep mode.
New Fidget Toys
One of my sons wasn’t happy that his fidget spinner was too big for his hand, so I found some different versions. I like this one with the keychain rings. It’s really satisfying and addicting to rotate it.
Here’s a link to my build on Thingiverse. It also has a link to the source files.
Multicolored 3D Prints
My 7 year old son has always been very creative and has figured out how to use my CAD program to model simple things. Recently, he wanted to make something with his name on it. He modeled a block and then wrote his name from scratch. I scaled it up and printed that out for him.
The next day he wanted to modify it. He changed the shape of some of the letters and rounded the edges. He also wanted the text to be a different color. I decided it was time to figure that out. My slicer (Cura) has a plugin to pause at a certain height. Unfortunately, my printer (Printrbot Simple Metal) does not have any inputs, so there is no way to resume the print. I found a few websites that talked about how to modify the g-code. I just inserted code, similar to below, before the layer that I wanted to be a different color. When the printer moved off to the side, I swapped colors and manually pushed filament through until the new color came out.
G4 S001 ;Pause for 1 second
G1 X100 Y10 ;Move to (x, y) location (100, 10)
G4 S025 ;Pause for 25 seconds
The print automatically resumes at the end of the pause. The results came out real nice, though I should have scaled up the model again.
