Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from January, 2014

#BuildBrighton - Printing in 3D

I've been pretty dismissive of 3D printers, chiefly because I view them as complex, fiddly, erratic, temperamental and inelegant machines. If you want a lumpy thimble made very, very... very slowly they are perfect. If you want anything even moderately useful, then you probably need a machine bigger than you can afford, and it will still be slow... and probably breakdown... or print 80% of the thimble then suddenly have a funny turn and stop, or bung up or something. They are a bit like "classic" cars, where "classic" means poorly designed, 1970's British monstrosity. However the #BuildBrighton folk organised a 3D group, so  I thought I'd rock up and see if they couldn't dispel my negativity now I actually have a part I need to make  (a collet for the "gun" on my Dalek.) The #BuildBrighton 3D printer group started with a talk from Alex about OpenSCAD , which is a simple scripting language that allows geometric primitives to be comb