Perhaps you’re a gardener and have seen these evil little butterflies (Cabbage Moth / Cabbage Butterfly Plutella xylostella, Pieris rapae) that lay eggs on cabbage, then the caterpillars devour your vegetables. Why is it this is the only butterfly that I don’t like and does bad things? It is referred to as both a moth and butterfly so I will assume it is more annoying moth than a delicate innocent beautiful butterfly. It turns out these little delicate insects are highly territorial and wont go into a garden area where another is. I wonder what a butterfly fight looks like…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabbage_butterfly
http://www.yates.co.nz/problem-solver/problems/cabbage-moth-cabbage-butterfly/

Old remedies were to spray tons of nasty chemicals all over everything, spread egg shells in your garden, or place white paper butterfly decoys - but now we have 3D printing.

So I designed a 3D cabbage butterfly in AutoCAD end used STLOUT or 3DPRINT command to generate a STL file for use by 3D printers. I could also have easily designed the 3D Butterfly and generated an STL 3D Print export using the free 123D solid modeling software. I then printed it on my MakerBot Replicator and then affixed it with fishing line to some 1/8” copper wire.

The detailed steps to create a decoy to keep other real cabbage butterflies away has been posted as an Instructable on instructables.com http://www.instructables.com/id/3D-Printing-a-Cabbage-Moth-Butterfly-Decoy-to-Sa/

The 2D DWG and 3D STL source files are posted on Thingiverse at http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:26719

I hope the decoys keep these little hungry cabbage eaters out of the garden this year.

Cheers,
Shaan

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