Made: Makerbot Cupcake CNC

Thanks to a great deal of help from summer intern Summer, we have our brand spankin' new Makerbot Cupcake CNC 3D printer assembled and tested. I've been looking forward to this for more than a year and am thrilled to see it all coming together at last!

The full photo album of the build is here.

Early in the Y stage assembly

X & Y stages assembled


Z stage leveling


Everything assembled!

Opus 1: "Don't Eat the Cotton Candy"

Summer aligning the first print

First Print: Cid's shot glass. . .well, at least a third of it printed.

We decided to use it anyway!

A toast to celebrate!

More printing goodness.

Charlotte v1.1 Pics and Vids

Charlotte v1.1 is ready for her turn on the catwalk. She's just too hot with her matching legwear and new gear. . .





Other than the newly matching legs, the other change from v1.0 to v1.1 is the addition of the gear in the middle, demonstrating something that wasn't clear in the original. Although I'm using 4 motors to provide torque, the 4 legs on each side form one mechanism. The entire vehicle can be driven with 2 input gears.



Although she loves rug when walking in straight lines, turning is a whole different story. During the first turn below, you can even see one of the little cap washers fly off and roll away. Turning on rug just wasn't something she was happy to do.

New Legs for Charlotte

Spent some of the morning cutting some new legs for Charlotte to remedy the lockups she was experiencing and to get rid of the ABS.

Tried some UHMW PE (Ultra High Molecule Weight Polyethelene) and decided I still like the HDPE (High Density Polyethelene) better, which is nice, since it's cheaper. Here's the latest Charlotte:

When I was assembling the new legs, I realized that the large three-holed bar is easy to get on backwards. The longer dimension needs to be closer to the gear. I had one set of the original legs incorrect.

With the new legs and the arm directions all correct, Charlotte now clacks along even more purposefully than she did before!

Klann LEGO Spider v1.0

My Klann Lego Spider is a LEGO compatible prototype of the Klann linkage. The build files and details are posted on Thingiverse. At my wife's prompting, I'm christening the spider, "Charlotte Mk.i" since calling her "the spider thing" seems to be getting old.

The legs for the vehicle were milled from 3/8" plastic sheet stock. All the rest of the components are from LEGO Mindstorms, which we use to introduce freshman engineering students to robotic concepts.

Take a look at my interview with Priya Ganapati, of Wired.com, on the GadgetLab blog: Robotic Spider Melds Legos and 3-D Printing.

Weller, a machinist and technician at the McCoy School of Engineering at Midwestern State University, combined milled plastic pieces with the basic Lego Mindstorms set to create a robotic spider that can crawl and turn.

“I wanted to open students’ minds to go beyond ‘let’s put the parts together and program the robot,’” he says. “This project is more than sticking the wheels on a Lego set.”

The folks over at Hack a Day featured the spider at Lego Spider bot, pointing out the design's relative simplicity and efficiency in incorporating legs into a robot chassis, when compared to other possible designs.

In the "near" future, I'm hoping to create LEGO compatible examples of Theo Jansen's strandbeest linkage as well. After building the Klann linkage, I’ve tentatively concluded that the strandbeest would be a much better cargo hauler, whereas Klann legs make a better light scouting vehicle.