MakerBot Industries

It’s a few weeks too early for Beaujolais, but there’s a new ReplicatorG available to tide you over until then.

This is primarily a bugfix release.  There were some situations in which stopping a build could put the communications between the bot and the host out of sync.  If you were sometimes experiencing “temperature inversion” in the control panel, where the extruder temperature and the platform temperature were reversed, this should solve your problem.  It should also fix cases where the extruder would get out of sync and stop extruding after an aborted build.  If you’ve been seeing a delay when you hit the pause or stop buttons (for example, the bot finishing the segment it’s on before stopping or pausing), that should be corrected too.

There are a couple of other small goodies in there too: exiting the app will no longer halt an SD card build.  There’s a first pass at a thingomatic profile for skeinforge 31, and the menus have been cleaned up a bit (thanks, charlespax and justjoheinz!).

As always, grab it from the download page.  Give it a whirl!

(One last note– there have been a lot of people contributing to ReplicatorG lately; so many that I haven’t had time to integrate most of the patches yet!  0022 is going to be the big merge, so if you’ve been hacking away on something, thanks in advance, and it should be in the main tree soon!)

Logo Filler by JohnA

Last week JohnA uploaded a brand new way to pimp out your MakerBot!    With is Logo Fillers you can swap out the logo to match your mood.  Decorative, simple, and expressive – what’s not to like? ¹

One of the interesting things about JohnA’s contribution is the number of comments from people planning the same improvement.  One of the wonderful things about open source projects is if you don’t get to something quick enough, someone else might just take care of it for you!  And, if no one has taken care of your issue yet, either you’re alone with that idea/problem or it’s time for you to start designing a solution.

1. How long before someone designs a way for a MakerBot to detect it’s “health”  or “mood” and display it in the logo? [↩]

Apologies for the delay in the Halloween charm challenge announcement.  I was in Washington, D.C. this past weekend showing hundreds of children how to fold paper airplanes for the USA Science and Engineering Festival and did not have a free moment!

Thanks to everyone who submitted Halloween inspired designs. There are now dozens of spooky 3D printer projects up on Thingiverse. There were many creative entries, and choosing a winner was not easy.

We have two winners!

Onneksi Olkoon PaSuTX:lle ja sen Bat Mobile. That means “Congratulations to PaSuTX and his Bat Mobile,” in Finnish. The Thingiverse user is from Finland, and I happen to know a little big of the language and I always love any excuse to use it. PaSuTX submitted several awesome designs, which is interesting considering they don’t celebrate Halloween in Finland. But we appreciate the Halloween spirit! Actually, in Finland Easter is sort of like Halloween because little kids dress up like witches and do a form of trick-or-treating. So there’s some bonus trivia for you about Finland. We hope to see this Bat Mobile printed in glow-in-the-dark ABS very soon.

The other winner is nicholasclewis, creator of the parametric spider web. We love that it’s fully configurable, and it prints very nicely.

Congratulations to the both of you. Please send along your shipping addresses for your free glow-in-the-dark ABS! Happy Halloween and keep posting your Halloween projects to Thingiverse.

One of MakerBot’s interns, Jack Poon, about printing large scale projects.¹

Crowdsourcing has endless possibilities especially in the hands of creators, inventors and the curious public. So far in the past, Makerbot has invited members of the 3D printing community to create printed pulleys for Makerbot kits. On top of that, Effalo, a thingiverse member, has invited members of the 3D printing community to print out parts for a geodesic dome. He has even offered 2$ for parts sent in to build a geodesic dome. Other projects included a Halloween design challenge, a humane mousetrap design challenge as well as the Deep Water Horizon Challenge.

One of the cool things about crowdsourcing is that it invites people from all over the place to commit to a common goal. These goals can range from practical applications to works of art. People of different backgrounds and experiences can all offer different insights into the problems we face today. So far the combined efforts of everyone has resulted in remarkable feats and diverse ideas. I foresee even greater opportunity for utilizing 3D printers and crowdsourcing. One opportunity is the construction of large scale, complex projects. Imagine if all the people who had access to 3d printers were to print out buildings of an entire city. In no time at all, we could create a scale sized city and invite people to see the city, maybe even rearrange the city. One day, should we ever plan on building a lunar base on the moon, the base could be replicated on Earth first and people would be free to walk through the base and maybe even suggest some ideas of their own. How cool would that be! These are just some of the possibilities of crowdsourcing combined with rapid prototyping. If you know some people around your area with 3D printers, why not start a project like the ones listed above. Get them together to brainstorm and solve problems in the community. In fact, invite members of the community to see some of the prototyped parts created and even leave suggestions and ideas!

Lets print the world!

1. Photo courtesy of NASA [↩]