MakerBot Industries

The 3rd Ward MakerBot Make-A-Thon was awesome! Special thanks to MakerBot User Group New York for showing off their designs and introducing 3rd Ward members to MakerBot. Kyle McDonald used the interior of Michael Felix’s geodesic dome for his 3D Photo Booth. If Kyle scanned you, be sure to find yourself on Thingiverse here. Stay tuned for our next MakerBot User Group meeting and a continued collaboration between MakerBot and 3rd Ward.

For those of you who haven’t been reading our calendar, (bottom right of this page!) we will be doing a demo at Blipfest NYC tonight through Saturday.  If you don’t know about Blip, it’s the premier festival for chiptunes and 8-bit music, with great artists like nullsleep and former MakerBot artist Bubblyfish.  (She was responsible for a lot of the work on musical Cupcakes from last summer, including her own composition, the haunting Lullaby for a Makerbot.)

We’ll be showing off some Thing-O-Matics, printing some objects, and answering questions as best we can considering that the glitched-out computer jams might get a bit loud.  So head on down to Eyebeam, 540 W. 21st St, tonight through Saturday!  Hope to see you there!

I have to admit that a lot of my excitement about this object stems from the fact that guitar wall mounts are too large for ukuleles, and my tiny uke looks really ridiculous when I hang it from one of them.  (They might also be filled with too many guitars…)

So, the ukulele has to suffer the indignity of being shuffled from coffee table to desk to shelf when not in use — until now, thanks to rebuilder.  I’m very excited to print one of these out…maybe several if it fits mandolins!

Ukulele wall mount by rebuilder

Having sat on an Ukulele, I decided the best way to avoid pesky repairwork would be to hang the instruments up where I can't crush them. This does the job. I've included two versions of the object as STL. One has a thicker base in case your ukulele head ends up needing to go through a wall if you try to mount it on the thinner one. The thin version looks better, and for my instruments at least, I think would work even if I had mounted them on a wall instead of the top of a shelf as I did. Included is also the Blender file for these, which should be better suited for editing than the STLs.

This thing brought to you by

Now...lets just see...where am I? Brooklyn!

MakerBot Artist-In-Residence Kyle McDonald is already an expert in mapping objects with point clouds given his extensive work on structured light and 3D scanning with a Kinect via Processing. But he is also exploring another kind of mapping — grabbing topological¹ data and 3D printing it with a MakerBot Thing-O-Matic.

He’s not the first to attempt this — Lake and Mountain Topography and Mt Everest are other notable examples from the Thingiverse kingdom — but his hack makes the topography easier to read.

He uses the g-code command M1 machine halt² to pause the print to give you time to switch filaments. The results are a two-color topography where the critical elevation gain above the bottom color of filament is easier to read. Works great for sea-level topography where the transition maps to an easy to understand reference elevation. ((Though I’d love to see some sea trenches!)

This hack only works on a “tethered” MakerBot printing RepG at the moment, but is worth the hassle:

• The topographical data is freely available here.
• Generate the STL with Kyle’s custom app here.
• Then search through the gcode for just before the M101 command for the first G1 command including the z-height where you’d like the transition, and drop an “M1″ on its own line.
• I’d suggest sandwiching a “20mm up, 20mm” down waiting position script around the M1 command to keep from oozing while you fiddle with the filament, but you should code to taste.
• If there is an active M101 command you will be extruding while you switch filament! You need to find a sweet spot between an M103 and an M101.

Kyle was standing somewhere just above the thumb when he took this picture!

NYC Elevation Map by kylemcdonald

A topographical map of NYC based on the 1/3 arc second NED data from the USGS. Generated with a custom app available at github.com/kylemcdonald/Makerbot/tree/master/NedToStl

This thing brought to you by

1. From topology to topography [↩]
2. that might be vanishing as an option soon [↩]

Slicing with style

Gian Pablo’s excellent tutorial on how to manually edit Skeinforge profiles on Mac OS X got me thinking that manually editing Skeinforge profiles isn’t exactly intuitive for just about any operating system. ¹  For instance, Windows Vista will store Skeinforge settings in one of two locations.  These profiles are located either in a sub-folder where you have ReplicatorG installed or a sub-folder of your user profile.

1. Location of Skeinforge Settings in ReplicatorG
   • replicatorg-0024\skein_engines\skeinforge-35\skeinforge_application\prefs
2. Location of Skeinforge Settings under User Profile
   • C:\Users\USERNAME\.replicatorg\sf_35_profiles

The settings folder within the ReplicatorG sub-folder should contain a series of sub-folders with the stock profiles:

• SF35-cupcake-ABP
• SF35-cupcake-HBP
• SF35-Thingomatic-ABP
• SF35-Thingomatic-ABP-Stepstruder
• SF35-Thingomatic-ABP-Stepstruder-1.75
• SF35-Thingomatic-HBP
• SF35-Thingomatic-HBP-Stepstruder
• SF35-Thingomatic-HBP-Stepstruder-1.75
• SF35-Thingomatic-non-heated

It seems that when you create a new Skeinforge profile within ReplicatorG the new settings profile will be stored under your User Profile.  The profiles themselves are basically a collection of text documents laid out in the exact order you would see them in when viewing Skeinforge.  Changing the settings manually is merely a matter of opening one of those text documents in a text editor and changing the relevant values.

1. Photo courtesy of pj_vanf [↩]