MakerBot Industries

What would you ask Santa's elves to make for you?

Or…  A gnome of your own?

Just over a year ago the idea of a DIY 3D printed toy with moving parts seemed a little far off. ¹  Then Kparanya uploaded their Toy Car with Captive Wheels.  Since then we’ve seen all kinds of multi-part toys uploaded to Thingiverse including lots of puzzles, a transformer, and Beco building blocks.

Although I use my Cupcake CNC to print a lot of tools and things to assist with repairs, what I really love using it for is printing toys – especially those I’ve designed.  At the moment I’m really enamored with the idea of designing an open source disc shooter.  But, this is just something which interests me. ²

If you had a MakerBot at your disposal, what kind of toy would you want to design?  I suppose another way to ask this question is, “If you had one of Santa’s elves³ at your disposal to create any toy imaginable, what would you ask for?”

If there’s enough interest, perhaps I could do a series on the process of brainstorming, designing, creating a proof of concept, prototyping, and creating a polished design for a toy.  (Although, I suspect this process is reasonably similar for any kind of inventing)  Leave a comment and let me know what you’d like to see!

1. Photo courtesy of jpellgen [↩]
2. Although, it seems like at least one or two others would want to print them out if the designs were available. [↩]
3. Or, perhaps a fussy gnome? [↩]

Things are heating up in the robot world. Botacon approaches. We’re happy to announce the speakers at this first ever Botacon! Get your tickets now!

Heather Knight – Robotic Touch: Capacitive Sensing to Understand Human Body Language
Rob Gilson – State of the Replicators
Chris Connors – MakerBot and emerging technologies in the classroom
Dustyn Roberts – 3D without the Glasses: Making Assemblies of Parts
Laura Greig – Helping Paintbots Become More Than Printers
Kio Stark – 9 Ways to Make Your Robot Come to Life
Ben Combee – Put a Web Server on Your Bot
Erik de Bruijn – Open source innovation: On empowerment, architecture and ecosystems
Mr.Kim and John Sarik – Makerbot Printable Transistors and OLEDs
George Hart – Cool Geometric Forms
Zach Smith – Compilers of Industrial Revolution 2
Ilan Moyer – Gestural Design: Product Design in an Age of Personal Fabrication
Iem and Andy Heng and Zhang – Autonomous and Non-Autonomous Flexible Robot
Amy Hurst – Nickel for Scale – automatically customizing 3D objects to fit YOU!
Adam Mayer – Tiny Robots Everywhere
MakerBlock – How to be a robot dad
Raphael Abrams – The Nine Step Program to Make a Robot Puppet that Will Haunt Your Dreams

This is shaping up to be THE conference about DIY robotics and the bright future for automated everything. Be there!

After all, this is a family blog

The  infamous Pink Panther Woman model by Pedro Januário was uploaded to Thingiverse more than a year ago.  As far as I can tell, no one knows why this was named “The Pink Panther Woman.”  A bigger question is – did it really take more than a year for someone to upload a naked male figure?

A few days ago Nicholas C. Lewis uploaded a Basic Male Form to Thingiverse as a printer test while he was learning how to use MakeHuman.org’s open source tools for making 3D human models.  One day later Erik de Bruijn uploaded his derivative Basic Male Form in the spirit of equality.  Above you can see Erik’s Basic Male Form along side the Pink Panther Woman, both printed on his Ultimaker 3D printer.