Our MakerCrew has come a long way in just 4 sessions. I reported in on January 28th that we printed out first item – a snowflake. Since then we have printed robots and just yesterday, an octopus.

So far we have downloaded our projects from Thingiverse. We have experimented with 123DDesign to understand how to manipulate 3D objects in the iPad space. We are limited to creating design in this app, because we cannot export our designs to files for 3d printing.  While this is still fun, our goal is to print our original designs.

One of our MakerCrew members, Chris, experimented with Blender. He found that we can create our own designs with this software, save them to an .stl file, which we will then convert to a maker file using MakerWare. As of yet, they haven’t developed an app that will work with the iPad. We are very excited to begin the process of learning how to use Blender. Thank you, Chris!

The MakerCrew is asked to download the Blender software to a computer at home and then explore it. Our net MakerCrew meeting will be on Monday, February 24 and we will meet in the Miscoe Technology lab. We will work with partners to try to unwrap Blender, which is fairly complicated. The more we mess with it at home, the sooner we will understand how to use it. So, the next goal is a little bigger than the last: learn to use Blender to design our own 3D projects! I’ll close on this note, but will leave you with the video of the octopus being printed: