Whistle

Better Living with MakerBot, Episode 2 You probably all know this situation: You're supposed to ref a soccer game in less than 1/2 an hour and you cannot find your whistle. You're screwed! But from now on you're out of trouble: Fire up your trusty MakerBot and print a new whistle in 26 minutes! This object prints the pea right inside the whistle. Since the pea is connected to the rest of the object only at one tiny point, it's quite easy to break it loose after printing with a small screw driver or tweezers. I probably pushing luck a little bit with bridging the top layer. So far I printed the whistle twice without problems. As always, I added the object as .obj file (wavefront), which can be imported into AOI and Blender. The gcode file is the one I used to print the whistle on the image. The gcode file contains an experimental raft with additional "blobs" on the second (interface) layer. You might want to generate your own gcode file with skeinforge settings, tested with your MakerBot. Be sure to setup Skeinforge to create an (almost) watertight object, since the whistle won't whistle if it's full of holes... [Update] I added a second version of the whistle. "Whistle_v2" is an attempt to fine tune the object a little bit. My brother (he's a pipe organ builder) gave me some tips how to optimize the whistles mouth. Whistle v2 should start whistle with less airflow than v1 and thus be (somewhat) less loud. I also downsized the pea a little bit and changed the shape of the lanyard loop. Whistle v1 is still available for reference and also since it's more "tested"... Since you blow the whistle with your mouth, be aware of possible problems concerning "food safety" of printed plastic. See the blog post "For foodies out there" ( http://blog.thingiverse.com/2009/09/13/for-foodies-out-there/ ) for more information.