MakerBot Industries

We don’t see a lot of animal designs on Thingiverse but now we have some cool frog designs by owenscenic. He made the frog for his daughter and now we can all have our own sets of little frogs.

If you have a 3D model for an animal, upload it to Thingiverse so everyone can make it!

Unfold & Tim Knapen – L’Artisan Electronique from Kunst in Limburg on Vimeo.

Awesome. The amazing Unfold has come up with a contraption that lets folks sculpt virtual pottery! Very cool!

For L’Artisan Electronique, Unfold created -aside from the ceramic printer- a virtual pottery wheel in collaboration with Tim Knapen. This pottery wheel gives visitors a chance to ‘turn’ their own forms. Every time a visitor presses “Save” on the arcade buttons, the creation is saved to disk and displayed on the wall. At regular intervals, a selection of these designs is printed in clay using a modified REPRAP machine and exhibited in the space.

The virtual pottery interface uses openFrameworks with openCV to track visitors’ hand positions in the air. There are two parts to the scan, one being the green laser projecting lines onto the hand and camera recording the deformations to the line created by the hand. The curvature recorded is used as a cylinder deformer.

Beautiful! Via Creative Applications Also check out Unfold’s blog!

Calling all Thingiverse Citizens, MakerBot Operators, and Engineers around the world!

Fact: The Deepwater Horizon Unified Command (DHUC) is inviting alternative technology responses to stop the spill either at the spill or the source level.

Fact: The current oil spill in the Mexican Gulf is threatening or killing thousands of wildlife everyday.

Fact: Many Thingiverse citizens think of creative solutions to problems on a daily basis.

Junior Tan contacted me this last week. He had put together an idea for plugging up the oil flowing into the Gulf and he had submitted it to BP and didn’t get a response. He emailed me willing to give $100 the person who could design something that might get a response with the hope that an idea from the Engineers of the world might just be the right thing to solve the problem. I told him that MakerBot would put in $100 as well and so the total is now $200 for someone who can get a response and, not even joking here, save the world.

This is a two week all-hands-on-deck-ideas-fest call to action! Let us instead focus our minds on saving the world.

We are offering a bounty of US$200 to the following:

1. The first person who actually gets a response from DHUC specifying interest and/or requesting more information, or
2. Even if there is no response from DHUC, we will hold a judging exercise on June 20th when the two weeks are up based on the following criteria:
-       simplicity of solution (is it easy to build, deploy and maintain?)
-       viability of solution (can the solution be feasible considering the high fluidic pressures, depth of the water column and the extreme low temperatures at depth?)

Call for volunteer judges:

While some of us here are comfortable working with ABS, PLA and M3 socket bolts, we may not be totally familiar with fluid dynamics or Young’s modulus. We would like to open a call for volunteer judges. Catch is, as a judge, you cannot qualify for the bounty even if you win. Please contact MakerBot should you wish to help verify the first response from BP or figure out who to paypal the money to if BP doesn’t respond.

Call for bounty pledges:

The bounty here is a mix of volunteer pledges from Thingiverse citizens as well as Makerbot Industries. So even if you don’t solve the problem of fixing the oil leak, you can throw down and pledge to throw more moolah in the pot to make things more interesting, drop a note in the comments and when it’s all over, we’ll send you the winner’s paypal address and those pledges can be paypalled. Yes, you can still join the Call To Action, and qualify for the same bounty! We can’t be sure everyone who pledges will pony up, but the $200 is real money!

You can start at the DeepWater Horizon response page and you can submit your designs to BP here. Remember to upload them to Thingiverse too! (Tag: deepwaterhorizon). If you want to contribute to the bounty, just drop a note in the comments and we’ll shoot you an email shortly after June 20th.

Update: According to the comments, the bounty is up to $1100!

$100 Junior Tan
$100 MakerBot
$100 Gl33p
$200 Ponoko
$100 Jerri Chou
$200 ifixit
$100 David Ten Have
$100 Frank of Monochrom. (Pledged via twitter)
$100 Matt O’Rourke Pledged via Twitter

Wow, just wow! Christian Arnø has made a MakerBot with a MakerBot and has achieved MakerBot self replication!!! SO MUCH WIN!

The reprap is not the only 3d printer that can replicate itself, now the Makerbot can too.

This Makerbot is made out of approximately 150 individual pieces that is printed on , (yes you guessed it) a Makerbot.

My Makerbot worked hard everyday for about a month straight to finish this project, and i am immensly happy about the end result

(The pictures doesn’t do it justice one bit, but it really is a thing of beauty)

Make sure to check out the MakerBot made by a MakerBot page on Thingiverse to look at all the pictures! WOW!

MakerBot is in the New Scientist. I love this magazine!

Over the next few minutes, this “MakerBot” will do something I can only dream of doing: it will create a spare part of itself as an insurance against future mishaps. Staring at the Heath Robinson-style kit before me, it is hard to believe that it – and a few hundred other devices – are paving the way to an era of desktop machines that can make just about anything, including copies of themselves.

via Rise of the replicators – tech – 02 June 2010 – New Scientist.

At MakerBot Industries, we want to get the MakerBot into the hands of young people in schools, colleges, and universities. We’re starting by creating the MakerBot Educators Group for folks who are students, teachers, professors, and folks who just think that actually doing things and making things should be an integral part education.

We figure that students can put theory into practice and get practical manufacturing experience with a MakerBot. We want students to be able to make their imagination real by exploring the world of 3D design and fabrication while exploring manufacturing in a tangible, personal way.

We imagine a utopia where students get hands on access to 3D printing in a room full of happily buzzing MakerBots and share their designs on Thingiverse where there are already 1000′s of models that are ready to download and print!

A lot of you are already either teachers, professors, students or are involved in education in some way. So this group is for you all to share your ideas and resources! Join in the conversation!

Inspired by this cover of the book Godel, Escher, Bach, tshannon has created MIT Shadow Sculpture using three orthogonal shadows in the shapes of the letters: M.I.T. Now choose your favorite three letters to do the same! Wanna represent your college, school, or university? Upload your school pride in the form of clever things to Thingiverse!

Creative Commons is raising money through June 30 to fund its recently launched Catalyst Grants program.

Catalyst Commons want to make it possible for individuals and organizations to leverage the power of Creative Commons. Their goal is raise $100,000 from CC supporters to fund the grants for some of their projects. We think this is awesome. For more information, visit the page here.

We’ll have the teeny tiniest booth at this trade show. #2812. Come visit us at the Javits Center for the Atlantic Design and Manufacturing show from June 8 – June 10.

We’ll have MakerBots MakerBotting! It’s free to go to this event if you register. We’ve never been to this event but we hear it the place to check out machinery!

Looking at a time lapse really gives you an idea of what’s involved in putting together a MakerBot.

This is certainly not an over-engineered machine. Rather, it is designed to be just enough — finding a careful balance between cost and functionality — and that is what makes this such an elegant solution. The design of the MakerBot is very clever, primarily using laser-cut plywood that bolts together.

I can make one in around 4 hours, but Joel Miller’s 11 hours is pretty typical of how long it takes to put one together the first time. Thanks Joel!