MakerBot Industries

How To Develop A Prototype - Business Insider

An interview with Bre Pettis and the origin story for MakerBot Industries featured in a Business Insider article titled “How to Develop a Prototype.”

A few snips from the article that caught my eye:

“We are living in a fantastic renaissance of innovation right now,” says Bre Pettis, co-founder of MakerBot Industries and the NYC Resistor, a hacker collective. Groups like NYC Resistor bring together like-minded hobbyists to collaborate and build ideas with laser cutters, rapid prototyping machines, and electronic-building software. The group has even given rise to products, including Pettis’ very own MakerBot, a 3D printer available for under $1,000 (3D printers, typically costing several thousands of dollars, create objects by stacking plastic or metal layers on top of one another).

A little more than a year into business, Pettis has shipped more than 3,000 of his MakerBots to what-to-be inventors throughout the country. He says the device can make almost anything up to 4”x4”x6′. The device converts 3D CAD files into tangible, plastic models of any shape or size. It may take a little while to build the machine and master the software, but costs a lot less than what a development firm might charge you. “You can feel really comfortable coming up with ideas, printing it, making mistakes, and re-printing it,” Pettis says.

A number of products, and even companies, have spawned from the likes of MakerBots and hacker collectives as well. Pettis says the founders of the social network Diaspora met putting together a MakerBot in computer science class at NYU. Tinkerers can even share their homemade designs on a site called Thingiverse.com, which features everything from toy cars to salt- and pepper-shakers to robotic arms. With more ease of use and collaboration, DIY modeling today acts almost as a natural prelude to prototyping.

We love it when a plan comes together.

As huge fans of technologies converging, I am happy to say this latest addition to Thingiverse is like a big hug from one awesome, future pushing device to another. Kinect, meet your new best friend, a 3D printable tripod bracket! It’s love.

Tim Bartlett Grabbing Visuals for SXSW Dorkbot/Ignite 2011 at NYCR

MakerBot friend Tim Bartlett¹ came over to Craft Night at NYC Resistor last week to shoot real time visuals for a little performance this coming Friday in Austin, Texas.

He is the real-time video artist for the band Ghost Ghost, who will be the house band for the Dorkbot/Ignite event in Austin Music Hall, opening night of a wee festival called SXSW Interactive….

Thanks to  Matt Mets for his late, late night assistance hacking on old pen plotters to get more visuals! And to NYCR for welcoming Tim in and sharing oscilloscopes and laser-cutters. And to Keith Ozar for helping us setup and experiment.

Check out this video post card that features some of the visuals he captured on MakerBots.

1. Thanks for lending us your Canon 7D for so many MakerBot videos! [↩]

TSP crossing

The question behind the “Traveling Salesman Problem” is basically, what’s the most efficient path through a large number of points? ¹  There are probably many important applications of this difficult mathematical problem, but the most interesting for me is line art.  If you’ve been following the progress of the MakerBot Unicorn or Egg-Bot projects, you’ve already seen some incredible examples of “TSP” line art.

Mona Lisa by mifga

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Nikolai Tesla by mifga

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Thomas Edison by mifga

Here is a Unicorn printable version of the Thomas Edison TSP Art line work by dnewman!

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The current process for converting a picture to TSP line art is pretty involved.  From the excellent TSP line art tutorial over at Evil Mad Scientist labs, the process involves converting the image to greyscale, converting it into a stippled image, putting the points through a TSP solver such as the Concorde TSP solver package to create the TSP line art from the stippled image and end up with an SVG file.  At that point you could probably use Schmarty’s Inkscape GCode extension. ²³

I would love to see this process become simplified.  I suspect the best method for doing so might lie in the creation of a GIMP⁴ plugin.  GIMP already has the mechanisms for many of the above steps.  A GIMP plugin could probably automate the “grayscale -> stippled image -> point puddle” process.⁵⁶  Once that was done, the resulting “point puddle” would still need to be fed through the TSP solver.  However, I suspect this might be able to be done by having GIMP call the Concorde TSP solver.  This would take it from “point puddle -> TSP solver -> SVG file” which could then be turned into GCode using the above Inkscape extension.

Besides my belief that there just isn’t enough TSP line art in the world, there are a bunch of reasons I’d love to see this plugin pop into existence.   The top three reasons being the Unicorn, the Egg-Bot, the CNC Etch-a-Sketch.    After that, I’d have to say – TSP line art renderings of photographs and old master works of art.  I would love to see a web cam hooked up to a Unicorn for instant TSP line art photobooth style sticky note generation!

1. Photo courtesy of robotson [↩]
2. Basically, image -> gray image -> point puddle -> TSP solver -> printable SVG path [↩]
3. I say point puddle since it’s not a 3D point cloud.  Just a 2D … puddle of points. [↩]
4. My favorite open source image manipulation/editing software [↩]
5. See note above last for explanation of “point puddle.” [↩]
6. “Point puddle” you heard it here first! [↩]

A little while ago we featured a printable pinhole lens for Canon EF mount.  Now, it’s joined by this Nikon-mount version by thingiverse designer xjcrawler01.  There’s also a rear cap for Nikon Lenses, but that’s about it.

Now, since lens and body caps for vintage cameras are annoyingly expensive, wouldn’t it be great if we could print out any type we need?  Canon FD?  Olympus OM?  Mamiya RZ?  Pinhole lens for Micro 4/3?  Isn’t that a better idea than buying expensive, out-of-production plastic parts?

This is the long-term goal of course, but for now, this: how come there aren’t any generic lens caps up there?  No 52mm, no 46mm no 77mm…nothing…which brings me to a challenge that I’m just going to throw out there: the community needs an openscad parametric lenscap generator.  It can have a clever gripping method or just be press-fit; I don’t care.  We just need one.

There is the gauntlet; it’s been thrown down.

Nikon Pinhole Lens by xjcrawler01

Pinhole lens for Nikon with replaceable tinfoil for different apertures!!!Print in Black otherwise you will have a bad color cast!!! *** UPDATE *** 03.09.11 *** V1 *** 1. Tested lose fit 2. Printed in blue bad color cast 3. Hard to separate cap from base 4. washed out image due to light leeks - Moved the mount point up 1mm.(fix lose fit) - Made Lock-rings 1mm longer (fix lose fit) - Made the radius of the base cover the entire mount surface(light leeks) - Increased the radius of the cap (light leeks) - Added holes in the cap for ballpoint pen to separate cap and base - Files Updated 03.09.11 21:40 GMT -7

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