MakerBot Industries

@bre asked:

What are the subversive things you could imagine printing on a MakerBot? #subversivemanufacturing

My vote?

Books

Photo courtesy of LincolnStein.

One of the joys of working with an open platform like the Cupcake is the ability to experiment with ideas that would be difficult or impossible to tinker with on a closed platform.  The other day I wanted to take a break, so I tried to print some patterned lampshades.

Creating a translucent patterned lampshade as a traditional 3D model doesn’t work very well. The small variations in wall widths are hard for slicing engines to handle. Your wall width will have to be a multiple of your extrusion width.  You’re also limited by the resolution of your X/Y positioning system. I decided to try a different approach.

Instead of embedding the design in a model, I wrote a script that takes a bitmap as input and generates gcodes to draw a straight cylinder or cone. The trick is to vary the wall thickness by extruding more plastic at the “darker” parts of the design. I did this by lowering the feedrate during these parts of the print; more plastic is extruded during the motion that draws that particular segment, and you end up with a thicker wall.

The advantage of this technique is that you can get very fine gradations of wall thickness– much finer than the positioning resolution of your X/Y stages, in fact. If you look at the “globe” patterned lampshade closely, you can actually see some subtle hyperbola-shaped gradations that are an artifact of the X/Y resolution of our machine.

This approach has applications beyond lampshades. You could use it to apply textures to model walls by reading ordinary 2d model textures as heightmaps, or someday even achieve “sub-voxel” print resolution by varying the wall thickness as the print head moves.

If you want to experiment with creating your own lampshade, you can download the script here, or explore the source on GitHub. Have fun!

Green into red? Madness!!!

I’m a big fan of bar codes. ¹  I really like the idea that you can have something physical instantly transformed into something digital. ² In a way, a bar code is the opposite side of a MakerBot coin.  I realize that print resolutions, thing shapes, and QR code size requirements would preclude this, but it would be so cool to have each object printed from Thingiverse to have a little QR code built into its side.  If you wanted to give a copy to your friend – just flash the QR code on the bottom at their phone/webcam/MakerBot and they can have one too.³

An interesting factoid about QR codes is that the size of the QR code box is related to the amount of information being encode into it.  The longer the URL, the larger the QR code needs to be.  By using a URL shortening service⁴ on a Thingiverse URL⁵ along with a QR code generator you can essentially compress the data required to reach a Thing on Thingiverse into a smaller QR code.

Using a 3D scanner to duplicate an object will basically guarantee the digital version of that object will be rougher than the original.  However, using a built-in QR code, you could have duplication without generational degradation.  It would be like stamping everything on Thingiverse with the DNA necessary to build a duplicate.

Semi-random thoughts:

1. Can all of the DNA in a human be expressed as a long string of text?
2. If so, it would be very interesting to me to try to encode that long string of text as a QR code.  I wonder how large it would have to be?
3. One way out is to link to the Human Genome Project, run their link through a URL shortener, and then create a QR code from that.  Now you can print people!

The Human Genome Project

1. Photo courtesy of Mario Caruso [↩]
2. Zach’s recent Tweet got me thinking about this post. [↩]
3. Then again, at that point it might be easier to use image recognition software to match the printed thing with the Thingiverse catalog. [↩]
4. I like YOURLS, but that’s because I like open source stuff, rolling my own versions of things, and the idea of having my own URL shortening service. [↩]
5. Or link to someone else’s STL. [↩]

Ars Electronica is an epic arts celebration and MakerBot and Thingiverse won an honorable mention in the Digital Communities category. This is kinda a big deal that together we have been seriously recognized by an artistic organization as a community. This shines a spotlight on all of you MakerBot Operators and Citizens of Thingiverse!

Lots of Thingiverse Citizens are here and last night I ran into Wizard23 who said that he remembered back in the day when only a few things would get uploaded every month to Thingiverse. It seems like these days it’s a few things every day! The library of downloadable digital designs is an important resource as we move into the future. Celebrate the citizens who refuse to share digital designs and free them from the suffering of loneliness and isolation on their hard drives!

MakerBot will be printing things out all weekend in the teleinternet. (also on twitter as teleinternet) If you’re in Linz, stop by the 3rd floor of the big tobacco factory building and say hi!