MakerBot Industries

Thing-A-Day.com!

The website Thing-A-Day.com challenges people to create a new thing each day in February.  Sign-ups start on January 21, 2011 and end on midnight of February 1, 2011.

And the timing really couldn’t be better.  Now that Thingiverse has incorporated Flattr buttons, people can even reward you with “digital tips” to help keep you motivated throughout the month.  So, dust off some old designs, get inspired to create new things, sculpt something amazing on 3Dtin.com, and share it with everyone!

Retroacan_004 by sergio.carrasco.a on 3DTin.com

3Dtin.com is an online 3D design program.  Imagine someone stirring up Sketchup, Legos, and playdoh in a big pot and then sticking it up on a web page for all to use.  The web interface is very intuitive and the mix of colors plus solid building block modeling system makes for a fun way to quickly mock up a design.  Although, the objects that you can create are highly “voxelated” (Read: blocky) an unbounded building system like this is really only limited by your imagination.

Solder Holder by pehr

Last, but not least, Thingiverse citizen pehr put together a Solder Holder by designing in 3Dtin and then exporting directly to an STL!

One of the more frequent questions people would ask us at CES was “what’s the difference between a Thing-O-Matic and a Cupcake?” We’d tell them about the improved Z stage travel, microstepping, mechanical endstops, etc. but sometimes it’s easier to show than tell:

Thing-O-Matic on top, Cupcake below.

Plastruder base top plate - with ooze!

Yesterday I tried to print in pink plastic (a bath hook for my daughter) only to discover I was unable to back the black ABS out of my MK5 plastruder.  I could extrude, but I just couldn’t back it out with the motor or pull it out after loosening the Delrin plug.

By way of background, and in the interests of experimentation, I had recently tried a few things with my Thing-O-Matic that are kinda contra-indicated by the assembly and usage instructions.  In no particular order, and at different times I had:

• Kept the plastruder warmed up and let it sit for a while
• Let a filament run all the way into the plastruder and shoved another filament in after it

After trying the above and a few different filaments recently, I noticed a  whitish smear along the inside of my plastruder.  The smear was between the toothed pulley and where the filament entered the heater barrel.  I didn’t think anything of it since I had still been able to extrude and print.

Obviously, being unable to remove filament from my plastruder is not really an option.  In order to fix this problem I disassembled my plastruder.  I quickly discovered that the white smear wasn’t just along the path of the filament.  Apparently I had managed to ooze some plastic up out of the heater barrel, around the top of the heater barrel, around the circular hole in the acrylic base to the plastruder, and around the entrance to the heater barrel all along the inside of the plastruder.  This had the effect of “gluing” the acrylic plates of the plastruder together.  Fortunately, there wasn’t a lot of plastic and it came apart rather easily.

The only explanation I have for this is that I must have kept my plastruder hot for too long without running the extruder motor.  This would allow the heat from the extruder to travel up the barrel and essentially liquify the plastic.  Then, once I started up the extruder motor, it must have squished the plastic out of the heater barrel and up into the plastruder.  I also suspect that jamming one filament in after another exacerbated this problem by squishing the filament entering the the barrel with the new filament. ¹

With the plastruder disassembled I found white smear could be scraped off.  It had a gooey residue-like consistency – like old toothpaste.  It was easy enough to scrape it off with a putty knife.  Since I already had the plastruder disassembled, I flossed the extruder toothed pulley.  I also was able to remove the filament with everything apart.  I discovered that the black ABS filament was also covered with the white plastic residue.  The extra width created by the residue on the filament probably contributed to my inability remove the filament in the first place.  I also noticed a few notches ground into the filament from when I was trying to back it out.

Once done, I reassembled the plastruder, reinstalled it, fired up the Thing-O-Matic, heated the plastruder, and did a test extrusion.  All in working order!

1. Perhaps it even squished the first filament up against the sides of the plastruder causing the smear in the first place. [↩]

Thingiverse just launched integration with Flattr – a flat-rate flattering system that lets you give (and receive!) cash money for things that you like on the web.

How it Works

First, you’ll need to sign up with Flattr, if you haven’t already. Once you’ve signed up, you need to add some money to your account, then you can start Flattring your favorite things, designers, and even Thingiverse itself!

But you said “receive”!

Indeed I did! Receiving flattrs on Thingiverse is as easy as 1-2-3:

1. Copy your Flattr User ID from your Flattr settings page.
2. Go to your Thingiverse Profile and click “Edit my Profile”.
3. Paste your Flattr User ID in to the Flattr section and save.

Once you’ve registered your Flattr ID, Thingiverse will automatically put Flattr buttons on your profile and on every thing you upload! Awesome!

Flattr works on a give-to-receive philosophy – you can’t receive flattrs unless you’re also giving out flattrs – so get out there and start Flattring! Check their website for more info about how Flattr works.

Clip by J_Hodgie

This simple clip by J_Hodgie is awesome in its elegance.  Three printed parts relying upon the elasticity of the plastic in which it is printed.  Strong enough to grip a small test print, small enough to be useful in a lot of situations, I could see this being a thing that gets printed and used a lot.

And the remix possibilities?  Forget about it!

• How about a clip + ball and socket chain links with hole through by StefanHH?¹
• How about a clip + becco block connectors?
• How about a Leonardo Robot with clip hands?
• What about a larger clip area for a potato chip bag clip?
• What about more springs for a stronger clip?
• What about a card/badge holder with a built in clip?

1. Incidentally, another favorite thing from today [↩]

Bre appeared on CNN’s “The Big I” this morning!

WHATEVER YOU DO, DO NOT CLICK THIS LINK.

The only reason for this post is to kick the crawling nightmare that is the ModHex brainchild of moleofproduction off the front page.  The only way I could put it into the website was to include a quick hack which made it autoplay the sound that will accompany the apocalypse.

Belfry Fabber Mk1 rev6 by Revar

When MakerBot’s Cupcakes were in short supply last year, Revar did what any self-respecting maker would do.  He built his own from scratch.

He must have been saving up the announcement of his designs for a while, because his Belfry Fabber Mk1 rev6 is Thingiverse Thing # 1952.  Based on the comments for Things #1951 and 1953, that means he started to upload his ideas back in March of last year.  The designs were clearly worth the wait.  His ‘bot features:

• An expanded build area (165x175x170mm)
• A custom heated build platform
• Internal electronics, custom LCD and keypad mounted to the front (with an itty-bitty slot for the SD card)
• Thing-O-Matic style cantilevered Z stage and endstop support for automatic homing and centering

More?!  You need MORE information about Revar’s amazing robot???  Then more you shall have! Behold his video walk through!

Thing-O-Matic SCIENCE! with Ed Nisley

Ed Nisley’s blog “The Smell of Molten Projects In The Morning” is all kinds of sciency awesome.  Ed’s blog is essentially his online super-well annotated laboratory notebook.  While I jump and clap excitedly as a bunny appears in my Thing-O-Matic,¹ Ed is writing stuff like this:

I wanted to figure out just what was going on inside the Extruder Head, which means some instrumentation was in order, which meant I had to figure out how to attach a set of thermocouples to the Core. This picture shows one approach: epoxy a set of small brass tubes to various parts of the MK5 Extruder Head.

Keep up the awesome work Ed!

1. Or writing terrible Doctor Who fan fic. [↩]