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Bobbins arrive tomorrow, new software tutorial

Man, I sure hope so. Between the laser cutter, the inventory of parts I’ve build up in my warehouse, and the bobbins I’ve got everything I need. Murphey’s law says tomorrow I’ll find out the pen holder needs some wacky part I can’t make on my own.

Some users were having trouble getting their Makelangelos working in time for Christmas. I’ve written a new tutorial in the forums that walks through all the steps of installing and running Makelangelo software. Please let me know if I’ve missed anything. If it looks OK then I’ll film it with a time lapse so you can see beginning-to-end.

Edit: Arrived!

100 bobbins, top down

100 bobbins, instagram style

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Wired says the robots will take all our jobs.

Because you didn’t have enough reason to start leaning about robotics, right?
We need to prepare our kids today for a challenge that is still 20 years away.
http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2012/12/ff-robots-will-take-our-jobs/

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This holiday season I would love some debugging help.

The Makelangelo software has had a little touch up for the holidays and should be a little easier to run now. The “configure limits” screen how has a visual aid. The OSX edition has a start.command you can double click to run the program. I’m looking for someone who’s running Windows to help me smooth out the software issues by running some usability tests. All you have to do is try to run the software and tell me if either of these methods work:
– double click the DrawbotGUI.jar in /java/windows
– double click the start.bat in /java/windows
If it doesn’t work, what happens?
For you windows pros, please tell me what happens if you run start.bat from the console.
If I can sort this out I can then update the documentation and make things easier for everyone.

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Makelangelo software, simplified

The biggest issue with the Makelangelo is that starting the software is a pain. To make things a little easier I’ve made two important changes.

1. The “experimental” branch has been removed. When I’m ready with a new update I’ll publish it to master from now on. If I decide to start a Makelangelo 2.0 then I’ll make a branch called v1.0.
2. The /java folder now has an /OSX folder and a /Windows folder. Go to the appropriate folder for your computer and run the start file. On OSX you might have to increase permissions to run it.

I’d love to make the .jar files even easier to run. So far I’ve invested a lot of time trying to get rid of the start files and achieved nothing. So if someone wants to take on that challenge, please be my guest.