Tag Archives: Printing

Real World Pokemon Go

Posted by Steve on August 11, 2016 2 comments

UPDATE 08/14/2016: Old Towne Manassas has about 30 3D Pokemon hidden. Some of which include some Glow in the Dark JigglyPuff and Clefairy!!

Update 08/12/2016: New batch ready to be hidden:

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NOTE:
THIS IS THE PAGE I WILL BE UPDATING AS I PLACE MORE OUT IN THE WORLD.
CHECK BACK SOON

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Like most people I have been playing Pokemon Go. It’s been a blast and Sarah, Andrew, and I have all had some great adventures in our quest to “Catch Em’ All”. We certainly met some great people and possibly some new friends in areas that we didn’t normally visit. Ventured out and increased our step count by leaps and bounds.

But I was missing out on something.

Catching pokemon on the phone is great, but one of the cool things about being out in these cool areas is seeing the sights, which you can’t do while staring at your phone waiting for the next Squirtle to pop up. After you catch him he is now confined to living inside your virtual Pokeball inside your phone. When your phone turns off, he becomes Schrodinger’s Squirtle!!

But what if you could catch that Pokemon and have something to show for it afterwards?

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As an avid fan of 3D printing, I frequent Reddit’s sub for the hobby. About a month ago one of the guys posted that he was hiding these small, easy to print, pokemon at different locations in his home town. He said the kids loved it and he liked seeing people find real world creatures. Many other folks also mentioned wanting to do the same. Since I didn’t see anyone covering the VA/Manassas area (my home town) I decided to take up the charge and fired up the print machine!

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I have been printing these for about 2 weeks now and hidden close to 100 models around Manassas VA. Mostly around Old Towne and occasionally at some of the parks. (Hint, a great place to look is at the Ben Lomand Historic Site)

Since posting about it on Facebook, it’s been shared in a number of places, so I thought I would create a post here, on my site, so that I can continue to provide updates on when I stash some and where you can potentially find some.

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Updates will be provided on the top of the page so they will be easier to find.

Some of the other runs of prints:

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I made some things!

Posted by Steve on May 22, 2016 No comments

I know I don’t post here often enough, and every time I think about it, I just kind of brush it away, but hey, I am doing it now! Mostly because A lot of the stuff I would post regularly, I do over on the Comic page. It’s no good excuse, but aside from the comic and work, most of what I have been doing has been pretty mundane.

Till now.

If you follow along on the comic, you know that I picked up a 3D Printer and have been having quite a bit of fun with it. It’s been a blast. We have made all sorts of useful things for the house and some costume pieces as well. The most exciting thing to come from it has been a dive into 3D design using 123D Design (it’s a simple CAD program) that I have used to design some game boxes for card based games like Fluxx and the Looney Pyramid games. Not to slight the boxes they come in, but the StarFluxx box used to travel with us in Sarah’s purse for play while we were out and it got pretty beat up. So I designed a cool box that holds the cards and travels well. Likewise, the Pyramid bags are cool, but they get cumbersome.

Also, on kind of a dare/challenge from my Son, who is really into period re-enactment, I made a wooden looking version of one of the Pyramid games, that can be taken to events and not look like a 20th century plastic game.

The printer I picked up is a Makerbot Replicator 2, it was on sale from Amazon for a fraction of the normal cost. It’s build area is roughly 11x6x6 (inches). Since it’s not one of the new fancy versions of their printer, turns out it’s incredibly easy to work on. If you have ever been around any sort of 3D printer, you would learn quick that all sorts of things can happen to them from jamming to parts failing. So having something that is easy to fix and repair is vital.

This is what happens when your extruder is leaking and it’s not caught in time.

Downside to buying an older version is that you don’t get all the bells and whistles, so I have had to improvise. One of the great things on newer versions is a build in camera to show the print as it’s happening. This way, if something goes wrong, you can address it quickly. Also, it’s great fun to watch something getting built. You may think it’s boring, but it really is fascinating. To make up for this shortcoming, I have setup two cameras that stream to the website and show the current build as it happens.

Sometimes I am building plain stuff, other times it’s cool stuff. So if you are interested, just click this link, or check out the tab on the top of the page for 3D printing.

In the meantime, get out there and make stuff!