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Archive for July 21st, 2010

Meet the MakerBot Operators Video 001: Meet Nick, Winter, and “Lola”

Posted by on Wednesday, July 21, 2010 in MakerBot Operators, Video

For the first video in the Meet the MakerBot Operators series, I talked with the brilliant Brooklyn teacher and NYC Resistor member Liz Arum about the students working with “Lola,” the MakerBot her school purchased for class and student use at Saint Ann’s School in Brooklyn. I recorded this video earier this year when Nick (then a senior) and Winter (then a freshmen) were still in school.
This is an experiment and I’m planning on making more of these kinds of videos. I’d love to get your feedback. Tell me what you think about the video in the comments!

(Music: composed for and performed on a MakerBot by Bubblyfish, used with her permission.)

When talking to friends about MakerBots, I often get the question “What are most people looking to print with it?” With the list of potential uses long enough to boggle the mind, those asking me this question are looking for a sense of the culture of printing: what are people in the community of operators doing with their MakerBot?One exciting factor about working in a new frontier is that there is no cut and dry answer to this question. If you are designing and/or printing objects for the MakerBot, you are contributing to this discussion-in-progress. And the rapidly expanding community of people leaping into personal desktop fabrication are laboring everyday to broaden the list of possible answers.

Take a look at the thousands of objects up at Thingiverse.com, with all of the new custom “truders,” printheads, and other modifications: how do I answer the question “what is the MakerBot for?” without skipping over a number of purposes that are the very reason operator x or y assembled her MakerBot in the first place?

In the series Meet the MakerBot Operators, I am attempting to give a suitable, practical answer to this question by taking it directly to the community, by visiting this new breed of “MakerBot Operators” to meet their bots and do mini-interviews right there in their printing nooks. Most will be printed interviews posted here (with photos), but with every once in a while I plan to work on more videos: “Meet the MakerBot Operators” (profile) and “MakerBot Operators Tips” (collaboratively co-created with the subject).

And along with any activities I do (limited, at least at first, to the northeastern United States), consider this an open call for the community to jump into this discussion by introducing yourselves. Post your own “Meet the MakerBot Operators” and “MakerBot Operators Tips” blog entries, photographs, and videos and drop me a note about it at griffin at makerbot dot com.

– Matt Griffin

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Laser Scan to Print

Posted by on Wednesday, July 21, 2010 in Scanner

Many of you have been asking for a laser scanner that can turn your CupCake CNC into a 3D copier. Thingiverse user tc_fea (aka my dad) is hard at work making that a reality. Using Visual Basic, ANSYS and a lot of math, tc_fea has gone from scan to print. Leave a comment if you’d like to see the source code and we’ll be sure to post it online.

Required Equipment

  • Chessboard
  • Laser-line level
  • Web camera
  • Windows PC with Visual Basic

Step 1 – Scan the Object

Actual Scan Object (drill)

First, tc_fea puts the scan object in front of a known, calibrated background – in this case an antique chessboard. He manually moves the laser line level incrementally across the image, taking a picture after each move.

Step 2 – Compute the Point Cloud

Point cloud

Tc_fea feeds the multiple scan images into his Visual Basic software for processing. The software does the following:

  1. Subtracts each scan image from a baseline image (with no laser line). This produces a very high contrast scan line.
  2. Subtracts the RGB component colors separately from the scan line, pixel-by-pixel (using Bresenham’s Algorithm). This allows a color scan.
  3. Applies a threshold filter to isolate the scan line from the background.
  4. Assemble the scan lines into a point cloud by performing a number of image transformation routines based on OpenCV methods
  5. Renders an image of the 3D point cloud in color

Step 3 – Mesh and Create an STL file in ANSYS

ANSYS photo

Next, tc_fea meshes his point cloud in ANSYS, a analysis package used, among other things, to analyze fighter jets and certify nuclear reactors. Overkill? Absolutely. Expensive? You bet. Fortunately, tc_fea is using an affordable demo version called ANSYS ED, which has many of the features in the full version, but limits the number of nodes and elements. Tc_fea’s program kicks out a pretty good point cloud, so you could probably accomplish the same thing in MeshLab or Blender (both free).

Step 4 – Print!

p100719_scanned_drill (2)

Finally, tc_fea prints the scanned part using his CupCake CNC running ReplicatorG! Homemade scan to print for less than $100!

For more things designed by tc_fea, go to http://www.thingiverse.com/tc_fea/things

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