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Store updates, 2014-11-22

Maker Faire Tokyo

Come down and see the Makelangelo this weekend at the 2014 Tokyo Maker Faire! Yuichiro san will be there to answer all your questions and show you some great robot action. Arigato gozimasu.

Black Friday

Black friday, Cyber monday, call it what you will. From November 28 to December 5 (inclusive) I’m going to offer free shipping on all orders in Canada, continental United States, and Alaska. Remember that December 5 date! It is the cutoff date for all orders expecting to arrive before December 25. It’s a conservative estimate so everyone is happy.

Production updates

I just ordered 500 motors, which is more than I’ve ever ordered before. Scale, scale, scale!

I’m streamlining processes here, too. Thursdays are going to be manufacturing days – packing kits in advance so that they are ready when orders come in. Until now I made kits on demand, which sometimes threw the rest of my plans for the day into a scheduling mess. With a day dedicated to making kits I can relax the rest of the week, because filling an order will take all of 5 minutes and still be in the mail in time for the afternoon pickup.

To celebrate I’ve also optimized all my laser cutting files on our most popular kits. Where I used to make one of each part at a time, I now make 9-20 of one part from a sheet, with almost no waste material left over. They get stacked in the morning and put in kits in the afternoon. I’m really looking forward to finally finishing my robot arms and having them move wood in and out of the laser cutter for me.

Research & Development

Fridays are totally dedicated to that 20% time of improving kits and writing code. This past friday I finally patched a long time bug that loomed over me like the sudden feeling of someone standing right behind you. The Makelangelo signs every picture it creates, but some signatures were crazy sizes. No more! The developers-only version is patched and it will soon roll out to everyone else.

Final Thoughts

I just got back from watching Big Hero 6. I am pretty jealous of Hiro’s 3D printer. It can print metal AND carbon fiber so well you can’t see the lines. That’s crazy good!

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How to translate Makelangelo

The latest github commit for Makelangelo adds multilingual support that’s both easy for translators and for users. It should work in all right-to-left languages.

How to add a translation to your favorite language

1. surf to ./languages/ in your installation.
2. copy english.xml to [english name of your language].xml.
3. open your new file in a text editor.
4. change <name>name of the language as it should appear in the software</name>. French could be written as Francais, chinese could be written in chinese characters.
5. change <author>your name here</name>
6. change <value>each thing</value>.
7. save your file.
8. restart Makelangelo.
9. select your language from the preferences if it is not already set.
10. finished your translation? Share it in the forums at http://marginallyclever.com so everyone can enjoy.

How to use a translation

You will be asked to select a language the first time you start the program. Any time after that you can see the selection dialog by surfing through the menu: Makelangelo – Preferences – Language will bring back the language selection dialog. After you change the language you will have to restart the program for it to complete update all buttons and menus.

New hotness

Check the date on this blog post. If it’s very new, you may find that the feature is only available to those who download the github project. Once we have a few languages in the system we’ll start rolling it out to everyone.

If you have any bugs or feature requests, please post them to http://marginallyclever.com/forum.
Note: when you create an account on our store you automatically create a forum account. Save yourself some time and do both at once.

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Store News, 2014-11-03

Today we have news about Black Friday week long deals, upcoming classes, and public appearances across the continent. I don’t have a clever picture, so here’s a photo of my manager giving me a hard time.

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