As far as consumer-grade 3D printers are concerned, MakerBot’s replicator is a powerful unit with a print volume of 456 cubic inches and a 100 micron layer resolution. It can fabricate some pretty high-resolution trinkets, sculptures, or utensils, assuming you can tolerate the awful washing machine full of rocks sound its emit while printing. What if we were to tell you that, with a little bit of DIY ingenuity, those noisy stepper motors may be hacked to produce musical compositions akin to John Williams’ “Imperial March” from “Star Wars” such as the one provided by YouTube user, Zero Innovations, just below?
According to 3DPrint.com’s Heidi Milkert, a growing movement of people exist who are jerry-rigging their 3D printers to produce musical ensembles. She explains that the process involves “hacking a simple MIDI file, and then outputting a Gcode, the language 3D printers read, will produce the same frequencies and duration of each note within the music.” Sounds simple? That’s because the exhaustive step by step labor was consolidated into a downloadable tutorial, courtesy of the website Outguessing The Machine, who computed the combination of distance and feed-rate along the axis to cause the stepper motor to spin at the precise frequency corresponding to a musical note. Meaning, the complex mathematics converting musical notes to coordinates in an x, y, and z matrix have already been calculated for you.
The site’s author adds, that “with a little vector magic, the same can be done for (x, y, z, federate) to produce chords as the machine follows a 3D line.” Outguessing The Machine also provides links to download thes programs needed to convert the MIDI-to-GCode.
Another notable 3D printer tunes include the Super Mario Bros’ theme
As well as the Legend of Zelda theme.
Via 3Dprint.com
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