MakerBot Industries

We’re all set up and printing today in readiness for CES opening tomorrow. The booth looks really good and the MakerBots are all purring happily printing stuff out.

Come by and see us if you’re in Las Vegas!

Follow this map to find us! We’re going to be in booth 30766 in the South Hall Upper Level! Nearby is the Maxim booth and the Epilog Laser Cutter booth! Yarr!

Desktop Equipment Tilt / Angle Foot by aaronkondziela

This Desktop Equipment Tilt / Angle Foot by aaronkondziela is one of my new favorite things on Thingiverse.  Here’s his explanation:

I needed something to tilt my desktop music synths up at an angle, so that I didn’t have to lean over them to see all the controls. Normally, I’d throw a chunk of wood under them, but I didn’t have any suitable pieces. This foot is the result.

Believe it or not, we now live in a world where it’s easier to design some custom footie-bits for your personal robot crank out than it is for you to go look for a chunk of wood on which to prop your equipment.

I mean, this is the kind of no-brainer Star Trek characters face.  “You want me to what?  Look for a piece of wood?  Are you kidding me?  Ugh – that seems like such a hassle.  Why don’t I just whip something up?  I mean, the machine is right there…”

Open Farm Tech Product Line

Marcin Jakubowski produced this short video entitled Global Village Construction Set in 2 Minutes which explains the Global Village Construction Set. The Global Village Construction Set is a set of open source tools which form a “life-size Lego set” building system with interchangeable parts, motors, and power for producing tools, power tools, construction and farm equipment at roughly 1/8th the cost of commercial equipment.

Thanks for the tip Adam Cecchetti!

Nophead's plate of Huxley RepRap parts

A little while ago I asked what would you do with double the printing capacity of a 3D printer.

Here’s a better question, what would you do with more than a 100 times the printing capacity?  Nophead, author of the excellent HydraRaptor blog, recently announced he printed 101 full sets of RepRap Mendel plastic parts over the course of the last year.  He’s essentially also answered an interesting practical question – how fast can a RepRap 3D printer replicate plastic parts under human supervision? ¹ While he used his CNC mill with a printer head, HydraRaptor, this hardly diminishes the accomplishment.  Printing that many sets of parts takes a lot of dedication and time.

Now that we’ve thought about what is possible with two 3D printers, Nophead’s achievement raises so many new and wonderful questions:

• What would you do with 102 printers? ²
• What would you do with 1 printer and 101 friends who also had printers? ³
• What would happen to 101 brilliant start-ups if they were each given a printer, a computer, and a pile of plastic?
• What would happen to 101 brilliant and disadvantaged students if they were each given a printer, a computer, and a large pile of plastic?
• What would happen to 101 poor villages across the globe that suddenly had access to a printer, a computer, and a large pile of plastic?⁴

1. He states that these 101 sets were printed over about 4800 hours, so perhaps 47.5 hours per set? [↩]
2. The original one plus the 101 children. [↩]
3. Don’t have 101 friends?  Pssh.  I’ve seen your Facebook profile. [↩]
4. I think the transformation could be on par with something like the Universal Sheller from the Full Belly Project [↩]

On the recent “Who are the MakerBot Operators” survey, we asked, in your opinion, what is the best band of all time? So far, a mere 26% said Daft Punk! Shocking!!! I feel confident that this low percentage is because folks haven’t watched 5555. Click through for the data dump and for some musical inspiration outside of the Daft Punk genre.

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