Yep, that’s right, we have crickets Cricuts! No, not those chirpy little insects! These are CNC machines for crafters. The Maker Shed carries the original Cricut Machine, the portable Cricut Create, and the larger Cricut Expression. All of these machines allow you to cut paper, or other materials, without a computer. Check out the full line of Cricut machines in the Maker Shed.
Check out the FREE shipping offer from the Maker Shed.
(orders of $100 or more, Contiguous US only, not to be combined with any other offers)
10 thoughts on “New in the Maker Shed: Cricuts, lots of Cricuts!”
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These things aren’t exactly Maker Bill of Rights-friendly.
With these, it’s not so much that you *can* cut *without* a computer as you *cannot* cut *with* a computer – and you have to purchase their proprietary modules in order to design your project.
Please tell me they have changed the design to include a usb port…
Their website appears to supply free software to upload other designs to a cartridge, possibly to the machine itself. How good it is in practice I don’t know – some of these things tend to be iffy.
After some of the buzz about the Cricut a few years ago, there never seemed to be much success hacking it (I stopped looking, though). I don’t really see anything that indicates the company now supports cutting directly from the computer – at least not cutting patterns that aren’t on cartridges.
After looking at the Cricut, I ended up getting a Craft Robo. The software that comes with it allows you to cut whatever shapes you want. It doesn’t require hacking (maybe that’s a negative for some people), but it was cheaper and immediately useful.
I have owned the Cricut Expression for a few years. It’s awesome, and you can cut anything from a vector drawing program (Inkscape, Illustrator, Corel) with a 3rd party program called Sure Cuts A Lot. Just plug in a USB cable and get cutting. Well worth the money…and they just announced a Mac version!
http://www.craftedge.com/index.html
I use it all the time with Adobe Illustrator. It’s a great machine, extremely strong cutting pressure, and very well made.
And no one has been able to reverse engineer the protocol?