Career Counseling a Cricut

This past summer a fine young Cricut machine made it’s way to my doorstep. Apparently rejected for younger things it had been sold cheap and lied to about it’s true potential.

If you asked the misguided souls who had let it go so easily all this thing could do was follow a few limited instructions built in to a cartridge using all the dazzling technology the 80s had to offer. Granted these cartridges are sold at an incredible premium, maybe because these little cartridges are relics of sorts. Perhaps they had to invest in restoring the manufacturing equipment. I mean, the CD at OfficeDepot with 5000 images would be $10, so clearly cartridge with 80 for 100 images must contain some amazing hidden secrets.

Fortunately, some could see the true potential here. It’s maker had given this little gizmo a USB port and inside it spoke the same language as hundreds of other machines. All it would take to help it along is to break through some language munging that had been built in to repress the little guy. Fortunately, once ownership was transferred, they lost all claims to its destiny.

Others have long since learned how to allow the Cricut to cut any shape that you can come up with. One company that had the audacity to make it easy and make a profit was hearlessly sued and forced to pretend that their software really couldn’t talk to the Cricut even though it could talk to other nearly identical devices. ProvoCraft should be ashamed of themselves for their actions. They clearly are not.

I’m pretty sure I’ve shared my amazement at things that take what I’ve created on the computer and turn it into a physical object (see the Christams projects post). Yes, a printer technically does this too, but after a while just putting ink on an 8x11 piece of paper is not as cool as it used to be.

So with a little help from the libcutter project and the folks at built-to-spec.com I was able to save one of these amazing little devices from the drudgery of cutting the rationed library it’s maker saw fit to release, and have been able to make some really cool things. Stay tuned for those details.