MakerBot Industries

Hey folks!  It’s Friday so the three of us on the customer service crew have some awesome stuff for you.  This week on Robot Hospital: tips on bot decoration with Marketing Director Keith Ozar and a quick tip on the fastest way to get your files to the SD card for printing with yours truly.  Also, another Thingiverse roundup with Isaac, featuring the Bunny-Footed Egg Holder, a printable hand-cranked pump, a cool arty shape thing, and more!

Chick In Egg by nicholasclewis

It’s natural to hate homework – especially homework over a holiday weekend.  Nevertheless, I am still assigning you homework, due by the end of Saturday.  Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to upload a variation on a panoramic egg just in time for Easter morning.

Just think of the squeals of delight across the globe as children everywhere receive a little egg that you designed! ¹  What will you put in an egg?

1. On a slightly-self-absorbed note – I have a particular fondness for the above Thing.  It’s a nicholasclewis’ derivative of my panoramic parametric egg which was, in turn, a derivative of his parametric egg. [↩]

Syvwlch’s work on a printable clock has been one of the most exciting ongoing projects on Thingiverse.  He’s just upload what might be a final version of his work.  This version includes the escapement, pendulum, gears for the seconds, minutes, and hours, and a set of nested concentric gears to provide the corresponding second, minute, and hour movement.  And, let’s not forget he’s made this entire clock parametric in OpenSCAD – in case you need to print up a grandfather clock or a teeny-tiny watch.

As quickly as he’s been developing this project, it hasn’t been without it’s obstacles.  Syvwlch explained some of the benefits to designing such a complex mechanism in OpenSCAD:

There are none of the usual frustrations.  If you made a mistake a few steps back, it’s not a big deal.  I had the math on how to size the thing to fit inside a MakerBot completely wrong.  It took me two minutes to fix it.

As if designing a printable clock weren’t enough, Syvwlch has also set up his OpenSCAD file so that it will kick out STL’s for easy printing on just about any 3D printer AND so that it can show you an animated diagram of how the parts fit together and operate.  I can’t wait to start printing up these parts.

Clockwork Library & Printable Clock Script by syvwlch

Winner of the Pattywac Makerbot United Challenge for collaborative design: makerbot.com/blog/2011/05/16/pattywac-makerbot-united-challenge-winner/ Thank you team! :-) Video of the first ticking powered escapement mechanism:prototribe.net/vidplay/testjig2.html ___________WARNING_________ Several bugs have been fixed since this release, and the current tip-of-the-spear for development is a simplified 2-gear clock with only minutes and seconds. Current development version to be found on git hub here:github.com/syvwlch/Printable-Clock-Project Current version of the 8-Gear Clock (revision D):thingiverse.com/thing:8284 Current bleeding edge development version of the test jig:thingiverse.com/thing:8275 Current repository for the latest version of the clockwork library:thingiverse.com/thing:8155 Thanks to RustedRobot for his continued assistance debugging the clock! ___________WARNING_________ This is both a derivative of the printable clock PoC, and of my escapement library: thingiverse.com/thing:7822 . The involute gear profiles are from the MCAD library. (EDIT: The clock got a mention by Cory Doctorow on boing boing!boingboing.net/2011/04/23/model-files-for-a-wo.html ) I cleaned up the code so it would render faster, moved all the gear work into the library, and created a laidOutToPrint() module to facilitate creating the STLs of the individual parts. I included an optional print volume visualizer, so you can check every part doesn't exceed the printer's capabilities. The assembled() module is still fully animate-able, and I've added colors to help see if everything meshes properly. The clock itself now has clip-on hands, front & back frames, and most importantly, I switched to a different set of gear ratios (3.2, 3, 2.5 & 2.5) which allows for bigger shafts by keeping the ratios small. Assuming an 80x80x80mm printing volume, you now have a bit more than 12mm (almost half an inch!) available for the overall diameter of the shaft, the two sleeves that slide over it and the necessary clearances. I think this configuration is close to final, except for the escapement, which will need fine-tuning... but without re-printing the rest of the clock.

This thing brought to you by

Gnome Clone

Veteran MakerBot operator Tony Buser has been uploading some pretty cool 3D objects to Thingiverse lately.  The interesting thing about them is that he made them by using My3DScanner.com, a new (free!) online service for converting 2D digital photographs into 3D point clouds.  From there you can use Meshlab to convert the point cloud into an STL.

First in Meshlab I load the point cloud, delete the points I don’t want, then goto Filters -> Point Set -> Compute normals for point sets, then Filters -> Point Set -> Surface Reconstruction: Poisson (set octree depth to about 9 or 10), then export to STL.

Then import the STL into Blender, chop off parts I don’t want, maybe fill some holes, re-align it so it sits on the platform right, add a cube and do a boolean difference to give it a flat bottom, sometimes I also use Blender to flip some normals that are backwards.

Then I load it into Pleasant 3D and resize it and/or center or reorient it some more.

Using My3DScanner Tony uploaded 30 pictures from his camera phone to create the above gnome clone.  Awesome!

Who is going to be the first person to create a 3D image of Mount Rushmore using this system?

Too big? Too little?

Have you ever tried to import an STL into ReplicatorG and found that the object was miniscule? ¹  This usually happens when the object was saved as an STL in inches, rather that millimeters² .³

It takes 25.4mm to equal 1 inch.  All you have to do is scale the object up by a factor of 25.4 and you’re ready to go!

1. Photo courtesy of Holtsman [↩]
2. Which is what ReplicatorG assumes [↩]
3. What do you mean you’re not metric?!  Get out of my house! [↩]