Is that a new PrintABlok Beasts model created ahead of the kickstarter at the start of this video? Why, yes. Yes it is. I got it in my head to do a Loong (chinese dragon) with PrintAblok, and had a rough idea of how to acomplish it. Hex swivel blok that the jaw goes around to snap on both sides, covers for ball and join blocks to make the body. Of course after doing enough test builds to be sure it would work, and then doing a virtual build to see how it would look, I decided that every new element I had created pretty much needed to be remade, but it was enough to do a quick animation with (thanks to this train tutorial). Turned out so good I decided I could drop it on my videos… only I could figure out where I could put it over me talking without being too much information, so I said “screw it” and dropped it right at the front.
I forgot to mention that this tiny little printer is so small it literally sat in the footprint of my Kywoo3D Tycoon while I was testing it. Kinda crazy.
ToyBox’s stripped down interface and web interaction works, for the most part. But you know one thing is really needs? Jog controls. At least for the Z axis. I kinda said that in my “I wish” parody, but I didn’t want it to go over anyone’s head. More than once I caught my youngest boy putting his full weight on the long end of the build plate trying to push it down but just as likely to break it off that way. Of course if he pushed towards the back it would go down, or if he just removed the build plate and took his print off he’d get what he wanted. And he’s kinda blur, but the printer doesn’t necessarily stop people from doing that.
You know one way that the bright future of easy 3D printing shown to us by the ToyBox could be realized real quickly? Flashforge partnering with MyMiniFactory. Flashforge already has a wifi printing flow that’s buttery smooth and MMF already has the curated library of things. They just need to add some way of communicating that you should slice it with this-or-that common 3D printing setting, and program a simple interface for flashprint. Hmm, the phone app would be a problem. Could a slicer run on a phone?
I think Makerbot kinda tried doing this in the past, but they never really got it. Toybox really can show us the way.
Of course, you can’t do that with an STL. We’d need a file format that carries more than just the 3D print data. I wonder what it could be?
Welp, it seems my little “I wish” parody makes this video ineligible for monetization, but no worries, it was funny enough that I’m keeping it.
