While you can bring your custom SketchUp designs to life with the STL plugin and a 3D printer, you can also import pre-made content to modify prior to print. When it comes to vacuum cleaner maintenance, it turns out that cheap plastic is great for replacing cheap plastic. To my pleasant surprise, the piece worked perfectly. I exported the model to STL, opened the file with Replicator G, exported the file to Alpha (we’ve named our three Replicators Alpha, Bravo, and Charlie) and let the MakerBot do the rest. After about an hour of SketchUp modeling, we had what looked like a perfect replacement. I told him to stop by my desk with the broken piece and pair of digital calipers. He sent me an email and asked if we could try replacing the piece with our 3d printer. To repair the piece, he had to replace a whole section of the vacuum (hence, the $120 price tag). Omar owns a vacuum cleaner that had a small, uniquely shaped plastic piece that broke. One tale that sticks out in my mind, however, is when we helped our friend Omar save $120. Our experiences range from high-five successes to epic failures. Our very own do-nothing machine you'd be surprised how addictive this isĪt the SketchUp office, we’ve been experimenting with MakerBot Replicators for a while now. We're just scratching the surface with this technology that brings digital back to analog, and for the moment, the STL file format is a lynchpin between 3D models and print-ready objects. You can now take designs and make them a reality in the comfort of your own creative space. All three responded with a resounding “yes!”īut, what’s the big deal with STL, anyway? There are many who believe, and so do I, that we're on the verge of a new age in fabrication and prototyping. So we emailed the original plugin developers, Jim Foltz, Nathan Bromham, and Konrad Shroeder, and asked if they would be interested in letting us combine their tools into a single open source plugin. But as 3D printing has continued to boom, we’ve been thinking of ways to make this file exchange easier. Reading and writing STL files from SketchUp is something that users have been able to do for a while with the help of two separate ruby plugins. MakerBot CEO Bre Prettis is a pretty cool customer, so I took it as a good sign when he yelped with excitement at SketchUp's 3D Basecamp 2012 after the announcement of SketchUp’s STL plugin.
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