Tonight had some colleagues over for dinner given it is finally BBQ weather. They came with their 5 year old and 11 year old, both exhausted from a day’s activities. Given most of the talk was adult talk, they were getting restless and cranky.
Asking if they enjoyed drawing, would they want to make their drawings and place them in a laser? Well I hadn’t used the trace function, but sure seemed the time to do it. When you are used to CAD or even trace/expand/fix in AI, GFUI trace is so easy (albeit somewhat limited)…
Absolute hit of the party. The kids were mesmerized and hitting “the button” (I did remove the army of the 12 monkeys escutcheon since that was a tad creepy for them) was pretty exciting!
The 5 year old took it all in stride that you could even do this (I mean sure why couldn’t you just laser cut something you draw?). Once I traced her drawing, we cut it out of cherry (first piece of proof grade that came out of the stack) and then I ran over to illustrator because it really needed to be mounted, and cut a rectangle with her name (misspelled since I let her spell it - right letters wrong order) and the CA glued the drawing (her holding a balloon with a card saying love next to it) onto the maple square
(forgot to take the picture of the finished parts)
This kept the kids occupied for a good hour of extra adult time, and while the adults had to endure a bit of laser exhaust (but the smoker and grill were going too, so I didn’t worry since we had apple wood smoke from one side of the deck and cherry and walnut on the other…)
It’s so awesome that the 5 yo just assumes that technology will work this way. When I was 5 nobody had walked on the moon yet (but it wasn’t long after that) and we certainly didn’t expect this kind of tech (or cell phones, etc.)
I think I could keep myself entertained in that room for more then a few hours. Between the GF and the 3D printers I could keep busy for a few days straight.
As @palmercr notes, it is an E3D BigBox Dual Hybrid, which at some point I plan on converting to IDEX but haven’t had the time.
I got it when they first debuted and it was cheaper on a special, and was way overkill, and unfortunately on my model the feature I most wanted was never shipped (the pre-heat which had a 400w heater blower to preheat the box to print in tweakier plastic, but I guess there was too much fire risk). The filtration system is nice, since I print in nylons and other high-temp polymers mostly, which I’d rather not breathe
My three year old got really frustrated tapping on Grandma’s CRT television and wondering why he couldn’t bring up PBS kids. Technology taken for granted.
