Note, it is not water-tight: Just for fun I filled it with water: There’s still some sloshing around now inside the print…

• Printed with ‘natural’ PLA on Makerbot Replicator, using “medium” settings in Makerware
• Extruded at 210 deg, HPB off
• 2 shells, 5% infill
• Printed in about 5.5 hours, weights 85g, which works out to $1.91 in filament cost (for a $45 spool).

You can download the .stl for printing over on Thingiverse

I had some other experimental prints dealing with Voronoi shattering that led up to this one, which you can see in the below image:

• The print on the far right was my first attempt:  That was 12 hours in, before the printer stopped extruding  But it shows off some of the cool infill patterns and support materials:  It was a little over 3″ cubed, had it finished.
• The print 2nd from the right printed successfully:  I did a full volumetric shatter on another smaller cube.  I duplicated the object in Maya:  One of the objects I did the process where I convert the wireframe to a polygonal solid via blobby-particles.  the other object I strategically deleted different Voronoi chunks, and then merged the two together.  The final version looks like random polygonal volumes held together by spider-webs.
• The remaining prints are unrelated, but make a nice backdrop

I got the idea to model the bust of a rhino, and print it in a “wireframe” style like I’d done with previous designs. This one is produced with a different wireframe creation technique however, where I instead generated blobby particles along the polygonal edges, and converted the results back into polygons.

I tried to minimize overhang issues by tracking the angle of the edges via a Python script in Maya. Very little cleanup was needed after print: No raft or support material needed.

The frame is actually a pattern I drew on some scrap MDF (nothing 3d printed there) , jigsawed out, and then routed the edges plus slapped on some white paint. Print is affixed via epoxy.

Stats:

• Successfully printed in “natural” PLA on Makerbot Replicator.
• Sliced using Makerware, “medium” settings:
• 2 shells, 10% infill, 210 deg extruder, HBP off.
• Printed in 4hours, 41min, and weighs in at 52g… which worked out to a material cost of $2.29 (not counting shipping…).
• Print size at the neck is about 3″ wide, 4″ high, close to 6″ long from neck to nose.

You can download the stl file over on Thingiverse.

Stats:

• Printed on Makerbot Replicator.
• Successfully printed in ‘natural’ PLA with “medium” settings in Makerware:
• Extruded at 210 deg, HBP off.
• 2 shells, 10% infill (presuming there is any infill at al).
• Took 50 minutes to print, used 13g of PLA.

You can download the .stl file over on Thingiverse.

• It’s an experiment I gave myself to combine a Raspberry Pi, Makey Makey, MicroRAX, and MPlayer to create an auto-on internet radio player.
• I called it ‘Raspberry FM’ after a combination of the Raspberry Pi, and Soma FM, my favorite internet radio station.

Pic & vid of the final result (more pics at the bottom) :

The YouTube video shows off changing the volume & station.

Previous Steps

1. Install MPlayer, stream some music
2. Configuring MPlayer to play nicely with the Makey Makey, and create custom MPlayer playlists
3. Auto-login and auto-run program on Raspberry Pi startup

Final Step: Building the enclosure, putting it all together…

There are a lot of Raspberry Pi enclosures over on Thingiverse ready for printing on my Makerbot Replicator.  But I needed something to also support the Makey Makey.  I knew I could modify one of those files, but I was interested in trying a different media, my MicroRAX kit.  I’d done some mockups with it earlier (bookholder, quad-copter frame), but nothing permanent, and this seemed like the perfect use case.  And it turned out great… other than the fact I actually had to have the Raspberry Pi in another enclosure, so that it wouldn’t short-out with all the exposed metal.  Luckily I had an acrylic laser-cut case that came with my Maker Shed Raspberry Pi Starter Kit.  Had I not had that case, I probably would have printed out a minimal one.

Other things I learned is that the Makey Makey can be driven directly off the RPi’s USB port:  No external powerd USB hub needed.

The final hardware setup was thus:

• Makey Makey connected to Raspberry Pi over USB.
• Raspberry Pi powered via wall-wart.
• Raspberry Pi connected to internet via Ethernet.
• Raspberry Pi connected to stereo system over headphone-jack.
• Whole thing wrapped up via MicroRAX.

Going further…

If I was to extend this project, these are some things I’d think about:

• Switch out the tethered Ethernet for WiFi.
• Hook up a battery-pack and speakers:  Make it a portable boom-box.
• Splice in a toggle-switch for on\off.
• Have some sort of better integration with MPlayer & Python, or use some other music player entirely:  Have LED’s that represent each station in the playlist that light up showing which one your on, or even a simple LCD screen broadcasting the station name and volume level.
• Hook up awesome fruit to the MakeyMakey to make it a fruit activated radio turner.  That one should be pretty easy

Download the .stl and get other info over on Thingiverse.