I’ve been writing weekly 3D printing posts over at the Ponoko blog for several months now. It’s fun, but it does lessen the need for posts on my own site.

Here’s a quick rundown of some changes to my MakerBot and a few large objects I’ve printed with.

First, I printed and installed Zydac’s Z-axis Extender Kit, which allows me to print objects up to 185mm tall:

Next, after printing some large single-piece objects, I tried my hand at some large multi-piece objects:

This week I’m assembling a life-size Sword of Omens:

The hilt is done, but now the blade pieces need to be sanded, drilled, and welded with acetone.

Oh, and I’m a member of Site 3 (one of the local hackerspaces in town) now, and we’re having a silent auction fundraiser on August 20th. Come on out if you like parties and art and stuff!

In April I made:

Two sets of twisted shot glasses

In March I made:

• A keyboard joystick (sits on the numeric keypad)
  
  MakerBot – Keyboard Joystick (time-lapse)

  

• A failed skull print now used as a TTC subway token holder
   
• A bag full of mustache rings
   
• Attempted some Canada flag ear plugs based on this shirt
   
• Tried printing the waste output from a filament colour change onto some failed prints to make… I dunno, some badges or something
  
  
• A set of 4X LEGO minifigs as birthday gifts
  
• One more 4X LEGO minifig to keep, with blue Santa hat
  

In February I made:

• A glow-in-the-dark bottle opener
  End of the bottle opener print

• Duchamp’s Fountain
  
  Duchamp’s Fountain (time-lapse)

  

• Some Space Invaders and a Green Lantern ring with Maya
  
• The first three sections of a bathtub U-Boat
  
• A 2X LEGO Minifig
  
• A penrose triangle (still cleaning the excess strands off)
  
  Penrose triangle (time-lapse)

  

In January I made:

• A mustache ring
  Pink mustache ring (full-length)

  

• More bottle openers

  

• Some giant LEGO minifigs

  

• A pair of red Space Invader earrings (for when I go to a theatre and don’t want to glow in the dark with my normal pair)

  

I’m looking to upgrade to a Brutstruder in February so that I can do long prints (like the LEGO minifigs) more reliably.

Witch Way for the Commodore VIC-20 was one of my favourite games a kid. It’s a brutally unfair clone of Donkey Kong with an impressive (for the time & hardware) four screens across nine levels.

Here are the four screens:

Commercial Data Systems was a small company based out of Saskatchewan so there isn’t much information about them or their games online. As far as I know there isn’t even a standalone Witch Way ROM available to the public. My copy comes from the homebrew compilation Mega-Cart but I do own the original if anyone wants to dump it or show me how.

I think the copy I had as a kid was corrupt in some way… As difficult as the game is, the reason I never got past level four in those days is because the floors were invisible! Also it was on tape rather than a cartridge. However I finally did a playthrough of all nine levels the other day and posted it to YouTube:

I’m interested to know if anyone else remembers this game.

Update 2010-12-25:

I’ve added box scans of Witch Way and Bug Spree (also by CDS) to this folder: http://www.techknight.com/vic20/

Update 2010-12-25 part 2:

It turns out that there actually is a dump of Witch Way, separate from Mega-Cart. It’s in the Gamebase20 collection.

I made some glow-in-the-dark Space Invaders earrings on the MakerBot yesterday!

First I created cylinders in Google SketchUp that conformed to my ear size. Then I modified an existing Space Invaders design to be thinner and smaller using MeshLab. Finally, I printed out the designs using black ABS for the posts and glow-in-the-dark ABS for the invaders and glued them together with plastic model glue.

No luck photographing them glowing in the dark, I’m afraid. Here we go, I used the tips on this site to photograph the glowing effect:

Here’s a Green Lantern ring I printed this morning:

And a video of it printing:

Object source: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3550

I realized recently that I’ve never actually posted about the MakerBot, despite all of the tweets and YouTube videos I’ve made. So here’s a roundup of what it is and what I’ve done with it.

What is the MakerBot?

The MakerBot Cupcake CNC is an inexpensive 3D printer for everyone. A 3D printer lets you manufacture small objects using melted plastic and a 3D model file that you’ve created or downloaded.

What can one make with it?

Pretty much anything up to 10cm x 10cm x 15cm. Large or complex items can be created by combining multiple small parts. There are some limitations to how finely detailed an object can be but advanced users have done some impressive things.

How does it work?

A 3D model is turned into a series of instructions for the MakerBot. The MakerBot then melts a filament of ABS plastic and extrudes it according to those instructions, building a physical object layer by layer from the ground up.

Where do the 3D models come from?

Some people create them using an open source tool called Blender. Most people (I suspect), download 3D models that others have created from the Thingiverse community.

How to buy one?

The MakerBot Store has everything you need!

Photos of some things I’ve printed

Videos

Here’s a time-lapse video of the Beethoven printing out. To see all of my time-lapse videos, click through to this YouTube playlist.

When PopCap announced that Dancing Zombie would be replaced with Disco Zombie in Plants vs. Zombies: Game of the Year I disabled automatic updates in Steam.

But when the GOTY version came out, my copy of PvZ was automatically updated by Steam without my consent. So I decided to make a patch that would get rid of the lame Disco Zombie and restore Dancing Zombie to his former glory.

Download

Here it is: DancingZombiePatch.zip

Usage

To use it, just extract DancingZombiePatch.exe and run it. It will default to pointing to C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\plants vs zombies but should still work if you’ve installed into a different folder or aren’t on a 64-bit system or whatever. (It might only work with the Steam version, though.)

Obviously this is offered without warranty or guarantee that it will work or whatever else… And it will certainly stop working if the game is updated to a new version. Hopefully neither PopCap nor Valve will mind. (It’s really not cool to just change the files on someone’s computer when they’ve said not to.)

Video

Here’s a video showing the Dancing Zombie patched version of Plants vs. Zombies GOTY in action:

Screenshot

How the patch was made

The game assets are all stored in C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\plants vs zombies\main.pak.

In the original version, Dancing Zombie and Backup Dancer are represented in the art/scripting assets as Zombie_Jackson (probably shouldn’t have used that name, guys!) and Zombie_dancer, respectively.

In the GOTY version, Dancing Zombie and Backup Dancer become Zombie_disco and Zombie_backup.

However, in the update, PopCap didn’t actually delete the original Zombie_Jackson and Zombie_dancer files! So it was just a matter of pointing the animation data for the disco dancers to the originals. (Luckily the original version was still on my laptop.)

To unpack the PvZ main.pak file I used a generic scripted extraction tool called QuickBMS and a script that works with PopCap’s PopPak format.

After modifying the resources, I made a new main.pak using poppak.exe from PopCap Games FrameWork v1.3.

Finally I used PatchWise Free to compare the two main.pak files and generate a patching tool.

Update: In the latest title update, the Star Wars Clone Trooper image has been removed from common_d9.rkv. The icons and banners remain the same.

I happened to look in the Game Room directory and see a big resource file earlier today. I figured that there might be some images in it that could give clues about future content, and there was!

First I checked for PNG headers files using a hex editor, then I used this Perl script to extract them.

In the image below, you can see that it contains a number of unused achievement icons (is that one with Pac-Man, Quick Man, and Air Man an achievement for “extra mans”?), new content pack banners, and strangely a picture of Star Wars clone troopers. Maybe that’ll be used to announce the original Atari Star Wars arcade game.

Check it out: (click for full size)

I’ll update if I dig anything else out of C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Games\Game Room\common_d9.rkv.

I don’t know which implementation of 802.11n is to blame, but the Linksys WRT610N and WAP610N both crash when a wireless client using the Atheros AR9285 causes load. It’ll work for a bit of web browsing, but stream some video or download a large file and the router will reboot.

The Xbox 360 Wireless N Networking Adapter also causes the same crash, and uses the AR9280 chipset according to this press release.

Reflashing the router firmware (both devices are still on version 1.0), changing the MTU, and updating the Atheros driver did not make the problem go away. Brian Tillman had some luck when he replaced the Microsoft-supplied Atheros driver with one from HP, but that didn’t work for me.

I ended up switching my Xbox 360 back to a wired connection and setting my laptop with the AR9285 chipset to use 802.11g and that did the trick. Not an ideal solution, but the WAP610N I’ve got going hasn’t crashed once since then, and other 802.11n clients have worked fine.

Valve recently announced that their Steamworks SDK would include a feature called Steam Cloud in a future update. What Steam Cloud does is implement my own most-wanted feature – a way to keep saved games in sync across multiple PCs. (At one point I even thought I would write my own software, registering steamsync.com.)

In any event, it’s unlikely that Steam Cloud will be back-ported to many (if any) existing titles on Steam. That means I still need a solution for keeping my Peggle save file in sync between my desktop and laptops. :)

So if you’re a Live Mesh user, here’s how keep some of your PopCap Games save files in sync on Windows Vista:

Why “Effective”? Well, you could mesh individual save folders but I prefer to keep things simple. It doesn’t hurt if one of the meshed devices doesn’t have all of the same games installed as the others.

Now that GeoCities is closing, the original site for David Ayton’s CDisplay software is no longer available. However, if you check the Wayback Machine’s archive, you’ll see that install files have been hosted on my server for several years.

I plan to continue hosting this file indefinitely, so as always, you can download CDisplay 1.8 here: http://cdisplay.techknight.com/setup.zip

Update 2011-01-21:

Also, I recently set up a new official site at http://www.cdisplay.me that has CDisplay as well as links to alternative readers and DRM-free comic book sources.

With the closing of Funland last year, Union Station may have Toronto’s last downtown arcade. The games are mostly crap, but there is this one bootleg Ms. Pac-Man machine with alternate mazes:

Edit: Removed embedded video, click here to see it.

If you aren’t familiar with the mazes, you can see that something is wrong because the bonus fruit travels through walls!