3D Printing

I got my first 3D printer in 2014 from the RigitBot 3D printer Kickstarter campaign. (As an aside: the creator of that Kickstarter has a sad story if you want to read the Kickstarter updates). Despite skepticism around Kickstarter campaigns at the time, I actually received a RigidBot and used it for a few years. It was really cool to be able to create 3D objects. At the time there were not a lot of 3D printing resources at the time.

I created a few models initially in OpenSCAD because it appealed to me as something that I could check into a git repository. Most other 3D programs saved in a proprietary binary format for which changes couldn't really be tracked. One of the things I released as open source is the parts for RigidBot that I had created.

Model repositories

One of the great things about 3D printing now is that there are tons of places to get models to print. In the beginning there was only Thingiverse, but they caused some controversy when MakerLabs, the owner, started suing other 3D printer makers and MakerLabs trying to claim ownership over the user uploaded models. So I present this alternative list of sources if you don't want to deal with Thingiverse.

• Yeggi – this is more of a search engine for 3D models. It seems to have introduced use of a vLLM to describe objects which, in turn, makes them more searchable.
• Printables – owned by Prusa Labs features high quality models
• Thangs – offers memberships to creators can be compensated for their creations.