3D Printer Models For Universal Construction Toy Connectors 76
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Unknown Lamer
from the you-would-pirate-a-car-wouldn't-you dept.
from the you-would-pirate-a-car-wouldn't-you dept.
dangle writes "F.A.T. Lab and Sy-Lab have officially released their Free Universal Construction Kit, allowing builders to freely interconnect parts from Lego, K'Nex, Fischertechnik, and other common building sets. ZomeTool and Zoob patterns will be available after related patents expire. The makers have also spent considerable effort investigating and anticipating legal complaints from manufacturers, using an Inverse Think of The Children Argument: Some may express concern that the Free Universal Construction Kit infringes such corporate prerogatives as copyright, design right, trade dress, trademarks or patents of the supported toy systems. We encourage those eager to enforce these rights to please think of the children — and we assert that the home printing of the Free Universal Construction Kit constitutes protected fair use."
Model files are available over at Thingiverse. The designs are all covered by the CC BY-SA 3.0.
I don't think it's the copyright that upsets peopl (Score:1, Informative)
What's the deal with the Kit's name? F.U.C.K? Is it good or is it whack?
3d printing??? Uhmm... not yet, guys. (Score:5, Informative)
3d printers have a precision tolerance of something on the order of about eighty to a hundred microns, or often worse... particularly for non-commercial home 3d-printers.
Lego is manufactured to a precision of less than 2 microns.
We're probably at LEAST another 5 to 10 years away from being able to use 3d printing technologies with tolerances in the 1-2 micron range, which is what would be required to adequately fit together with Lego.
For comparison, Megabloks is manufactured to a precision of approximately 10 microns.
Megabloks routinely slip, Lego does not. I shudder to imagine how poorly these 3d printed connectors are going to work.
We're not reliably connecting to Lego anytime soon. At least not with 3d printing.
Re:Interesting, but ... (Score:5, Informative)
Nope.
Even the commercial systems used by Shapeways don't have sufficient accuracy.
Here's an old post where I looked up the numbers:
http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2395582&cid=37191528 [slashdot.org]
The problem is you can't make bricks of the same quality as Lego bricks using any 3D printer currently in existence or on the drawing board --- the tolerances simply aren't tight enough --- Lego uses _tons_ of pressure in their molding equipment, moreover, Lego is constantly doing QA on their production and will pull a mold and grind it up to re-use it at the slightest deviation --- the new Lego bricks I purchase for my kids still work fine w/ four decade old bricks from my childhood. Lego's precision for brick parts is something on the order of 2 micrometers.
By way of contrast, the printer which Shapeways ( http://www.shapeways.com/forum/index.php?t=tree&goto=1339&#page_top [shapeways.com] [shapeways.com] ) uses has a tolerance of, ``... about .1mm, but the material can change it slightly. Overall, .5 should be fine, just make sure that they are not any sort of support walls or they may get broken during shipping or printing.'' .1 mm == 100 micrometers
If you want to know what its like when the tolerances are sloppy, buy a set of Mega Blok bricks, but even those have tighter tolerance than the tenth of a millimeter which Shapeways quotes.