MakerBot Industries

There has been a conversation going over the past year about what open source hardware (OSHW) means and the definition is at draft version .4. Check it out!

The temperature is dropping, and so are the leaves. That can only mean one thing – Halloween is ominously looming. To get you in the spirit of the season, we want you to design Halloween things – anything ghoulish, spooky, creepy, and cool. Be creative! Blow us away with your innovations.

A few parameters

1. Must be .stl file uploaded to Thingiverse and tagged with “Halloween”
2. Must be a new design as of 8 October, 2010
3. Deadline is Monday, October 18th at 11:11 p.m.
4. Must be innovative, spooky, and and printable with a MakerBot
5. Bonus points for requiring the Makerbot 3D Scanner v1.0 Kit, Unicorn, or Automated Build Platform

The best designs will be judged by our expert panel of holiday spirit guides, and creators of the best designs will receive a one pound roll of ABS!

Looking for inspiration? Check out some of these spooky designs already up on Thingiverse:

Whoodoo Box by Whystler

Spider ring by builttospec

Halloween smilie bob by deherzog

Ghost Bookmark by Mark A

Eyeball Monster by Zomboe

Screen FAIL

As I was getting ready to leave a meeting yesterday one of the guys pulled out his iPhone and placed on his iBook. ¹ His screen had been shattered and the only thing keeping it in place was the screen protector. ^2 3  This wasn’t just any crack, it was seriously seriously messed up.  I asked him why he hadn’t gotten it replaced yet.

Are you kidding?  That’s like 50 bucks!  And, I can still use my phone and make calls as long as I keep the screen protector in place. ⁴

If you take your iPhone to Apple, it’s going to set you back about $200, some no-name shops can do it for $50 – but you can get a DIY kit off the internet for $13.  Maybe $50 is too much money to repair your iPhone screen – but I imagine $13 isn’t.  Then again, that’s the difference between being handy and handing the job to someone else.

Yeah, when you do-it-yourself you might make it worse⁵ , you might ruin whatever it is you were working, and it may even turn out that you don’t save either time or money in the end.  But, you do get the satisfaction of fixing it yourself and you’ll probably learn something in the process.⁶

1. I will refrain from the obligatory iLife jokes [↩]
2. AKA the screen FAIL. [↩]
3. Photo courtesy of Clifford Kozak [↩]
4. Again, screen FAIL [↩]
5. But probably not by much! [↩]
6. Or get the satisfaction of knowing it’s permanently totally irrevocably screwed up forever. [↩]

Scale up!

Srsguy brings us a quick design hack for Google Sketchup along with his Aerodynamic ramp – EC Fan Mount.¹

**NOTE** Because google sketchup isn’t good with very tiny dimensions, I had to scale this thing up by 1000x in order for it to save properly. Sad, I know HOTFIX: When you’re editing it in ReplicatorG, use the Scale tool and enter the value : .001

Google Sketchup is really really bad when you get to millimeter scale objects. ²³ At that scale it starts to delete random faces and won’t let you draw faces with an area less than 1 mm square.  So, just start working with meters instead, drop the scale in ReplicatorG and rock on!⁴⁵

Sketchup isn’t open source, but it is free.  While it would be great for newer features to also be free in order to help democratize production, it is still super easy to use.  With some of the great plugins for Sketchup and his handy dandy hack, we should be able to make anything!

Thanks Srsguy!!!

Scale down...

1. Photos courtesy of Ninnoz [↩]
2. They’re like all, “We’re google, we like big numbers.  We don’t have tiiiiiiime for small numbers!” [↩]
3. Which is funny, since they’re always refactoring their search algorithms for small response times… [↩]
4. For my fellow nerds out there, you are decimating the scale three times…  UPDATE:  Patrick VERY correctly notes that I got this totally totally wrong.  I mixed up reducing BY 1/10 with reducing to 1/10.  The math is strong with this one. [↩]
5. Do you remember that bit in Doctor Who The Sound of Drums when The Master had his little spherical minions attack the populace?  He said “Decimate them!” or some such and then followed it with “Remove one-tenth of the population!”  I was so proud to be a Doctor Who fan that day… [↩]

Marc de Vinck’s MakerBot build series is awesome and he takes awesome pictures like this picture of his cat in his MakerBot. The MakerBot he’s building is now on sale as the Cupcake Starter Kit for $649.

Make: Online : CupCake CNC build, part 9: Installing the X & Y stages.

Origami as training for building robots

I am not a typical techie.  My “hard science” degree is in Philosophy. ¹  I don’t work anywhere close to tech.  Outside of my MakerBot 3D printer, I had barely soldered anything, never worked with LED’s, and certainly never built a robot. ²  I actually credit my success in building my MakerBot to origami. ³

For most practicing origami⁴ it involves a square sheet of paper and some diagrams or directions.  Most of the time actually folding involves squinting at one picture, at your piece of paper, and then back at the next picture in the sequence.  There are no tricks, no hidden gotchas – just two pictures in a sequence and your sheet of paper.  Your task at any given interval is to take a piece of paper that looks like step X and make it look like step X+1.

Long before I purchased my Cupcake CNC⁵ I had been following MakerBot’s progress.  When they first launched the Cupcake 3D printer I poured over the wiki – looking at how it was put together, wondering how all the bits fit, and marveling that they had actually managed to put together a robot kit for the everyday tinkerer.  I approached the assembly of my ‘bot just as I have always approached a new origami model – taking it one step at a time, reading the notes, and making the thing in my hand look like step X+1.

Yeah, you might be a little apprehensive about buying a robot kit – I know I was.  It took me months to get up the courage to actually do it. ⁶⁷  Thankfully, besides the kit all I really needed was a computer handy to keep my directions close at hand and the self-confidence to build an awesome robot.

Believe me, if I can do it, so can you. 

1. I’m totally totally serious. [↩]
2. Photo courtesy of PhilipWest [↩]
3. If you want to read more on intersections between math, origami, and MakerBots, take a gander at this old post of mine [↩]
4. The traditional Japanese art of paper folding.  The link above gives a little history on origami as well as some commentary on recent movements. [↩]
5. Purchased 11/23/2009 [↩]
6. Was I going to burn a fingertip?  Scorch an eyebrow?  Break a small part? [↩]
7. In order:  Yes, no, yes – but it was fixable. [↩]