MakerBot Industries

The stalwarts over at the indomitable Slashdot have picked up a story from Motherboard.tv about our good friends upstairs.  NYC Resistor was, indeed, the swamp from which we dragged ourselves…ok bad metaphor…the nurturing womb from which we crawled…uh…that’s no better is it. 

Anyway, our founders met there and did a lot to help it increase in awesomeness before devoting themselves to MakerBot.Check out the article, the no doubt enlightened discussion over at /. and enjoy the 11-minute video featuring Bre and Adam.

As incredible as RustedRobot’s print of Syvwlch’s printable parametric clock is, a single still photograph just doesn’t do it justice. Two weeks ago there was no such thing as a 3D printed clock. Today you get to watch one in action. Sure, it’s powered by a drill and running a little fast… but this is progress! In the history of the world, there has probably never been a clock that has gone from concept to actuality and run through so many iterations so quickly. Syvwlch has been crunching through versions and derivatives of derivatives of this clock just about as quickly as OpenSCAD can render.

Cube Farm Playset by tc_fea

I have been enjoying MakerBot Operator tc_fea‘s models up on Thingiverse for a long while. We have featured Tony Cervantes’ pine tree and miniature castle projects here on the MakerBot blog — and his truss bridge kit, outhouse, flower, and his and hers toilets are among my favorite models up on Thingiverse. Tony brings humor and impressive modeling chops to the recreation of everyday elements of modern domestic life (well, in a wide range of centuries).

And now with his Cube Farm Playset he introduces a challenge — can you model the environment where you model and share it with everyone on Thingiverse?

Tony specifically requests that you create more cube farm stations to add to his kit (tag your model in Thingiverse with “cube farm“), but I’d bet he wouldn’t mind if you recreated (to his scale) the home office, backyard hutch, or the secret underground laboratory where you work so that your workstation can be printed out and arranged into Dilbertian cubicle labyrinths by the future middle manager of the world.

I think his challenge is a very good one — and might well be the solid CAD analog to the many self-portraits an apprentice visual artist makes on his or her way to mastering the tools and eyes to create later original work. Stop what you are doing right now and look around you — can you model where you are working and share it with us?

Cube Farm Playset by tc_fea

This is a cube farm playset project to honor all of us who toil on in the corporate rat maze and keep America going. If you decide to create something for this project, please add the tag: cube_farm so that we can find it and add it to our cube farm playset. I provided some dimensioned pictures for those who do not use Google Sketchup. I sorta plan to eventually add things like: computer monitor, keyboard, chair, wall clips etc. Or maybe I will add a laser cannon to zap noisy co-workers.

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As cool as the last of CreativeTools‘ featured projects was, they’ve really upped their game with his one.  It’s a high-res laser scan of  a bit of high tech from the bronze age — a shield.  No, not a lolshield or gameshield, a literal shield.  It might look basic to us today, but to a bronze-age Scandinavian soldier, this was state of the art.

In all seriousness, we all know that digital fabrication and 3d printing are the future — but they’re also key to providing access to the past.  Want a Venus di Milo (Ἀφροδίτη τῆς Μήλου to those in the know) or maybe a Laocoön and His Sons?  Well, print your own…one day.  After all, these treasures should be freely available to all — they’re certainly not copyrighted.

I hope to see more antiquities on Thingiverse — until then, hats off to CreativeTools for getting the ball rolling.

CreativeTools.se - Handyscan 3D - Laser scanned - Bronze Shield by CreativeTools

This is a 3D-scanned bronze shield that we borrowed from Länsmuseer Halland. This is a very unique item that we have been blessed to handle and 3D-scan. In order to scan this shield we used Handyscan 3D-scanner VIUscan. To process the shield and decimate the model we used Geomagic Studio. Feel free to download the files! The .zip file includes the full-res STL file with over one million facets. There are also .IGES, .OBJ, 3ds Max file and Geomagic files available in the zip-file "Extra formats".

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Thingiverse citizen rustedrobot has printed, assembled, and in the true cooperative spirit of open source design provided feedback to the designer to help improve the designs for everyone.

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.

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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! [↩]