I was an organiser for the Brisbane Maker Node for GovHack 2016. GovHack was held over the weekend of 29th - 31st of July and is Australia's largest open data hackathon. I was mainly there to support the makers, so I didn't have a lot of time for hacking, but here's what I made in the quieter moments:
It was great fun to remix the Queensland Museum's fantastic fossil scans and 3D print them for use in crafts and jewellery.
I started with the "Muttaburratorus", which I thought would be fun for jewellery. I printed one but it wasn't particularly recognisable at the size I was printing it - my model definitely needs more work to improve printability and would benefit from a higher resolution printer than my UP! mini.
The Ammonites turned out to be my favourites. I wanted to use a 3D printed Ammonite shell with neopixels to make a colorful pendant, with smaller ammonites for beads. I edited the Ammonite and used the mirror tool to reconstruct what the shell would have looked like and then hollowed it out to have space for lights, and holes for threading, using Meshmixer. I printed the "Ammonlite" with t-glase. The beads shown below are printed in crysta-line Ruby Red and Aurarum gold ABS.
I always thought Ammonites were some kind of marine snail, but I learnt that they are more closely related to squid. Here's an Artist's impression of what an Ammonite would have looked like:
Image CC-BY 3.0 from Wikipedia
Having learnt that, it was much more fun to turn it into a bot! Here's my Ammonite bot with brush bristles instead of arms:
The bot shell was printed in crysta-line ruby red ABS.
Not my first squid-related bot - and I'm sure it won't be my last either :)