I have cupcake #40 with the wooden pulleys for belts. It was an incredibly fun project, assembling, soldering, general fuzing around to keep the thing working.

I have cupcake #40 with the wooden pulleys for belts. It was an incredibly fun project, assembling, soldering, general fuzing around to keep the thing working. It requires probably 2 hours of fiddling for each hour of printing. It felt momentous because it kind of was, me and perhaps a hundred other people toiling away, bringing the future to reality. i'm sad to see the state they're in. I hope, dearly hope, that that spirit of the year or so i spent caring for my cupcake is how humanity ends up, at least for some of humanity. building kits, patching code, struggling with the odd issue. It really felt like pushing the frontier of the human experience. we can't all expand the frontier of theoretical knowledge, but we can all push a frontier. It's a lovely place to be. Sitting in my basement week after week, heck, month after month trying to get a good sequence of prints, that was a great time in my life. I don't think much will come of 3d printing of abs plastic. Super customized shapes are just not that interesting. Perhaps VR will simplify the design process, which i kind of hated. At the start, right at the beginning of makerbot, they were wonderful.