Challenge: Zero to Prototype in 72 Hours

The @CraftsMANhammer tweeting hammer prototype

I have a new personal challenge: 

I'm going to do four 72-hour prototype building sprints on four different projects in the next four weeks and write about the results here.

Where this idea came from:

While at a party on a recent Saturday night, I received an email from a potential client, an ad agency. They are about to pitch for the business of a major tool manufacturer, am I available to make a hammer that is motion sensitive and sends out tweets? Oh, and can I deliver it by Wednesday?

My response was 1) yes, I'm available, 2) wait, do you mean THIS Wednesday, three days from now?

By the time my estimates were approved and I was given the green light to start work (Sunday afternoon), I had almost exactly 72 hours to deliver a prototype.

7661 miles in 5 days

As I mentioned earlier, I recently purchased a FlashForge Creator 3D Printer.

I believe this is the most under-reported story in the 3D printing world - a Chinese company picked up an abandoned open source design, made changes, simplifications, and improvements, and their printer has been amongst the best selling 3D Printers on Amazon for months - it's currently ranked #2 (behind the $299 printrbot Simple DIY kit) and is holding a five star review average - out of 81 reviews!

This story's not all sunshine and rainbows - The FlashForge company doesn't appear to respect the original design's Creative Commons Attribution / Share-Alike licensing.  I don't see anything other than a vague "based on open source" mention in their documentation, and there are reports that they consider their design files "confidential." So they're not attributing or sharing alike. This is pretty silly considering that their printer really is a Replicator - the changes they made are pretty easy to spot on a side-by-side comparison, and some branding aside, my printer does look startlingly similar to the original Replicator Dual.

Maybe a year ago this would have bothered me, but a lot has happened since then - MakerBot abandoned this design, chose to go closed source, and join Shapeways.  Now FlashForge is the only company manufacturing this design, so if you want it, they're the only people making it.

Here are my impressions after using the FlashForge for a few days:

So far the experience has been really promising - 5 days after ordering the printer, it was at my house. Compared to most other competing 3D printers, this is amazing - a three+ week lead time is completely normal in this sector of the market.