Once again our friends at Shopbot invited us to join us on their stand at the Bay Area Maker Faire – our only brief was to come up with something cool and interesting to catch the attention of the many thousand visitors of all ages who attended the faire over two busy days. Given the queue of kids, parents & grandparents at the stand all day, for both days, we think we nailed it!
Armed with one of Shopbot’s new Handibots, retrofitted with the open-source G2 controller, we created a custom app for our upcoming Workbench software, which allowed kids to ‘paint’ their own designs using just a touch screen monitor. The software automatically converted these bits of graffiti into 3D V-bit carvings. The Handibot was then the ideal machine to simply slide over to a clear area of our graffiti board (a $30 spray-painted door from Home Depot) and hit Go! Forget Sharpies – we made truly indelible graffiti and it was 3D!
Our youngest contributors were just 5 years old and the touchscreen interface proved extremely accessible – in fact we quickly realised we had to hide some buttons to stop toolpaths being cut while our backs were turned!
In addition, the Trimble stand was sporting a couple of clever SketchUp designed structures, all the toolpaths for which were created in the latest version of VCarve Pro 7.5 (which now includes an intelligent SketchUp import wizard) and were cut by Bill Young from Shopbot on a Buddy.
We literally helped to make the Maker Faire!
Vectric Ltd
Precision House
2 Arden Road
Alcester
B49 6HN
Registered in England Number 05382596
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