MakerBot Industries

The winners have been announced on the Make: Blog!

Big news! We’re SO EXCITED to announce the winners in the MAKE/MakerBot CupCake CNC 3D printer kit giveaway! Participants were asked to design 3D objects and upload them to Thingiverse, where they were judged by Bre Pettis, Gareth Branwyn, and Becky Stern based on complexity, ingenuity, and “MakerBottability,” or how likely they are to print successfully on a MakerBot CupCake CNC. Entrants could also quality for a runner up prize pack by submitting an idea for something to print. Here are the results!

Grand Prize winner of a Deluxe CupCake CNC kit: jmillerid for his CupCake Transformer

What’s cooler than transformers? A Cupcake CNC transformer with a Bre head? This is a fully articulated assembly that transforms from a Cupcake CNC to a Bre-bot. I started with a snap-together design (see the attached concept sketches) but migrated to a bolt-together kit for various reasons. The final design allows for fine adjustment of the joint tension so the transformer can stand in any position but still be movable, positionable, transformable! See the animated transformation here: jmillerid.com/wordpress/2010/05/cupcake-cnc-transformer/ Modeled in NX6, rendered and animated in Modo, .stl files cleaned up in Blender, exploded view created with Rhino and Illustrator, sketches with Sharpie.

It should be noted that the use of Bre’s head in this model had no bearing on its winning status; it’s simply the most complex, ingenious, and MakerBottable entry! Contributing Make: Online writer John Baichtal liked it so much, he made a post about it a while back, calling it “1000X awesome.” We agree. Congrats, Joel, you’ve earned yourself a free MakerBot 3D printer kit!

Each of five runners up receive a “Poor Person’s 3D Fabbing” prize pack including:

• 1 Arduino Duemilanove board (courtesy of MakerBot)
• 1 copy of MAKE Volume 21, the Desktop Manufacturing issue
• 1 Maker’s Notebook (courtesy of Maker Shed)
• 1 package of Shapelock Design Plastic (courtesy of Maker Shed)

Stereoscopic Viewer

Can you imagine using a a 3D printer to make a 3D viewer to turn 2D images into 3D? Thats 11D!

This is a stereoscope used for viewing stereo pairs (two images that together make a 3D image) arranged parallel style (not cross-eye). Thanks to its central pivot, it can be used with a wide variety of image sizes. It’s ideal for viewing pairs made of two 5×7″ photo prints, or images approximately that size on a monitor. It’s also fun to just plain look through the viewer, because it increases your depth perception by effectively moving your eyes farther apart.

Kongorilla’s stereoscopic viewer comes with ridiculously great instructions and sample images to use with it. Here’s our favorite:

Ultra Compact Pinhole

There were at least 4 pinhole camera entries for the contest and this one by LeoM looks really good!

Sarrus Z axis

The Sarrus linkage by fdavies is really an impressive piece of machinery that uses lots of small MakerBottable parts to make a large and wonderful contraption!

2 Channel Rhythm Contraption

<Solidworksmagi submitted 50 designs to the giveaway making him the most prolific contributor to the contest. He is truly a Solidworks Magi! We like his 2 channel, 2 gear programmable percussion & rhythm machine.

LED Candles

“Eyepokerouter” wrote in with his winning idea:

I am working on making LED candles for a friend’s upcoming 30th birthday. These candles need to go on a cake, so it would be great to be able to print out the candle shape, leaving two channels for the LED leads and wires to run through. This would look much better than the straws filled with glue that I am currently planning on using.

Hopefully you can make those candles with your new Shapelock and Arduino!

Congrats to the winners and thanks to everybody who participated! There were so many great entries to the giveaway that we also want to share with you the honorable mentions. Check them out after the jump!

Read the rest of this entry »