CADcraft | Devpost

Inspiration

In 2018, when I volunteered at "Code Club", the 9-12 year olds were given the chance to be creative when the library received its first 3D printer. However, conventional 3D CAD modelling software such as Tinkercad fails to reach the very young demographic, as such software solutions are too difficult to use and need constant supervision to point them on the right track.

What it does

CADcraft eliminates the need for traditional CAD modelling software by using everyone's favourite virtual block building game; Minecraft!

CADcraft takes in any 3D model built on it's virtual 3D printer build plane, slices, dices, and converts the blocks into reality!

How we built it

32 individually and remotely controlled ComputerCraft Robots are sent to detect what blocks are available within the build plane - Layer by layer, the blocks are scanned until a full 3D model of up to the full 32x32x32 build plane is generated.

These robots are usually controlled by Lua, but with "TypeScript to Lua", we avoided the pain of coding in Lua to using a language more familiar to us, streamlining our process.

Table 31. Have fun.

Challenges we ran into

As the ComputerCraft API is not properly typed in a TypeScript environment, figuring out what APIs are available to the end user and how they work was a challenge.