Favorite Robots: R2-D2 & C-3PO + Keepon by mifga

Last crawled date: 3 years ago

While R2-D2 & C-3PO certainly need no introduction, if you haven't heard of the fabulously cute Keepon robot, then you must check out its performance in the Spoon music videos "I Turn My Camera On" and "Don't You Evah." (I'm going to pair "famous" robots with actual "robot robots" in these releases.)
A series of g-code releases of plottable/drawable "favorite robots." I'm kickstarting this effort, but I intend this to be extended/revised/and re-ordered at will by any and all. Rather than ranking these, I'd suggest you get your favorite robot in there by grabbing an image (line drawings are easiest to process!), auto-trace (or hand-trace) them in Inkscape, Illustrator, or Autotracer.org, export a DXF, cleaning it up & explode it in QCAD (even the free demo edition), and then use the scribbles tools (read about this in the MakerBot wiki) to generate the g-code needed for the release. While these images are for the MakerBot Unicorn Pen Plotter, feel free to adapt them to the Frostruder or other pen plotter tools. There are also better images out there -- I encourage you all to out do me here!
I, for one, believe there should be more "robot" things in the MakerBot community. Sure, there are actual robot
parts and even a few things that when assembled are in fact working robots … but where are more models and images of the robots that inspired us/dared us to make robots in the first place?
Because, frankly, making a robot on your robot….what could be better?
I created and printed these images (minus text) at MakerFaire NYC 2010 for any and all who requested them. These images take about 25min to print...but that is because I left a lot of details in stippling etc to create tone. I'll be happy to include SVG files, gcode files, and dxf files for those wishing to re-run these processes or hack on scribbles.py.
If anyone would work on a solid, trustworthy Inkscape-to-DXF plugin that preserves layers and doesn't fail most of the time, i would kiss you. Oh, really I would. At this time, Inkscape on Windows and Linux are doing the DXF conversion best. There are some promising plugs, but currently I have to do a lot of editing in qcad to get to where I want to be.
UPDATE: I have found new promising routes to DXF that not only produce better results, but which print CRAZY fast. So I have pulled the old DXF GCode releases of these pieces as the new ones print in, say 12 min instead of 30min. (And can handle the text more gracefully.)