MakerBot Industries

Get scanned by MakerBot Artist-in-Residence Kyle McDonald at the 3rd Ward MakerBot Make-A-Thon

MakerBot User Group New York – it’s time to meetup!

The 3rd Ward MakerBot Make-A-Thon is your chance to meet other MakerBot users, print awesome 3D objects and even a 3D portrait of yourself.

MakerBot Artist-in-Residence Kyle McDonald will be presenting his work turning the Xbox Kinect into a 3D Scanner. He will scan you in his 3D Photo Booth, then print you using the MakerBot.

Learn more about Kyle McDonald’s Xbox Kinect hack in this 3rd Ward blog post.

Bring your MakerBots and your favorite objects for a MakerBot user show and tell.

Giveaways! There will be giveaways, including LEDs!

MakerBot User Group New York

I don’t know about you, but no small part of why I bought a 3D printer was so that I could make toys.  There are no end of very practical applications for 3D printing, but making toys is probably my favorite.  With Thingiverse abound with mashups and derivatives, each new Thing uploaded has the potential to be hacked into something else entirely.  If I’m not mistaken, Renosis’ collapsible flower is the first collapsible toy uploaded to Thingiverse.  How long before we have a collapsible cat, dog, or dragon?

Flower - Push Puppet by Renosis

This is a Collapsible Flower or push puppet. You push the button on the bottom and the flower goes limp. Designed in OpenSCAD, Source Files included. *** UPDATE *** I have made a change to the Button... which is located in Flower-Red.stl and also on the Flower-Tray.stl. I have also uploaded a new version of the OpenScad file with the changes. Basically, it makes the button shorter, which allows for more movement in the pot, which will make the flower go even limper! It makes it look much nicer. New video posted below! Here is a Video of the flower in action:youtube.com/watch?v=PjEeOx-yp4o Updated Video Showing the old and new versions of the flower:youtu.be/K2dZtu1U94U

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When I found this Thingiverse item, I couldn’t stop myself from shouting, “Hey, I saw that on Create Digital Music over the weekend!”   It’s a small world — and a rad one, especially when creative folks are using Thingiverse to share files for their projects.

A little background may be in order for readers of this blog who are more attuned to the 3d space instead of audio.  Pure Data is a branch of the influential graphical programming language paradigm known as max, authored primarily by Miller Puckette.  Many artists and musicians use it to experiment, perform, or proof ideas.  This project is in support of an effort to encourage patch-sharing going on out in Los Angeles (and other Southern California locations.)

Cheers to theron for sharing this, and I hope this bodes well for future music community crossover!  Maybe we’ll be printing by sending bangs to a “MakerBot” object one day soon.

Pure Data (Pd) USB Stick Enclosure by theron

Designed for pd-LAunch, the kick-off of a Los Angeles based patching circle (for patching languages like Pure Data and Max/MSP). We had a series of videos of Miller Puckette lectures we wanted to be able to distribute on USB stick. I designed this enclosure as a special edition version of the stick. The stick is shaped like a message box in Pd, and can be modified with any message text. "bang" is a special Pd message that makes things go. "pd-la" is the name of our patching circle. I designed these on ViaCAD, but exported DXF files of each part. The Corel Draw file has all the parts together, and is what I actually used on the laser cutter.pd-la.info/2011/04/pd-la-usb-stick/

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Though we do have some famous buildings already, but this is certainly a nice addition to the bunch.  This is without a doubt the most famous bit of 20th-century architecture available on Thingiverse — cheers Disrespective!

It does imply a bit of a challenge though…doesn’t make you want a printable Guggenheim Museum or Fallingwater house?  Or perhaps Sagrada Familia (heck, we can even print a completed one!)

It’s great to see additions to Thingiverse’s architectural library.  Keep ‘em coming!

Sydney Opera House by Disrespective

Another Architecture test model to show people/students what the Thing-o-Matic is capable of. It's a long print at full size, just over 3 hours, but is a nice example of achievable overhangs, curved and flat faces. And a nice example of Jorn Utzon architecture too. The model is a little dirty and probably has a bunch of holes in it and extra triangles but prints pretty well. If anyone in the Wellington VUW League of Makers wants to see it in person then let me know. You know who you are...

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Sharp CE-150 Printer Pen Adapter by TeamTeamUSA

Okay, so sure TeamTeamUSA had me from the Kraftwerk references, but even beyond the retro-chic extreme-fever geek-score for resurrecting a pen-plotter module for an early pocket calculator, this project is a tremendous example for how you can use a MakerBot to create accessories and tools for EOL equipment and appliances.

The gutters along the road of printer development are littered with entire populations of cast-off injection molded printer carcasses. However, in many cases, printers are abandoned, supply-closet-stacked, or curb-sided not because they are well and truly dead but rather because they have been outmoded for their originally assigned role — or have just that one tiny thing wrong that the owner doesn’t fix¹.

With a little effort, printers found elsewhere than the bottom of a lake can be repaired, mined for parts, or put to incredibly interesting new uses. However, the deployment of printer technology from any mode or era has been rife with proprietary fittings, pens, ink-cartridges and the like.

TeamTeamUSA reminds us that these challenges are minor obstacles for a MakerBot Operator armed with digital calipers and a will to give lonely, neglected technology new life and purpose.

Sharp CE-150 Printer Pen Adapter by TeamTeamUSA

"I'm the operator with my pocket calculator" - Kraftwerkyoutube.com/watch?v=zZt64_XOflk Re-live the bygone years of RPN, 16 Kb total RAM, cassette tape storage, and plotted printing! A friend is a vintage computer junkie and one of his recent purchases was a printer/plotter for his Sharp PC-1500A pocket computer. Although the printer works, the pens, being almost 30 years old, do not nor are they still available. This is an attempt to help him re-live the geeky years of his youth! All calculator and printer images from pocket.free.fr/

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1. Similarly, a high percentage of the 2-slice toasters thrown into the trash are fixable by wiping the crumbs out of the temperature sensor. [↩]