MakerBot Industries

Thing-o-matic modified backplane to accomodate rear-mounted electronics by usiegj00

I realize full well that there are very practical reasons for wanting external electronics on a 3D printer.  That’s one of the cool things about the MakerBot Cupcake CNC.  It’s a snap to just jump right in, disconnect some wires, swap out circuit boards, and generally just hack and tinker away.

With an automated build platform, MK5 extruder¹ , MK6 plus heater upgrade kit, safety cutoff switch, Twotimes Z-rider, and Twotimes Mendel inspired XY lowrider carriage you can upgrade your Cupcake to near-Thing-O-Matic abilities.

Seeing usiegjoo’s modification of their Thing-O-Matic gave me a good chuckle.  Ever since seeing Charles Pax’s Muffin CNC, I wanted to perform a similar hack to put the electronics inside my Cupcake.  So, despite knowing all of the practical benefits to external electronics, I couldn’t help but think of this an almost…  downgrade for the Thing-O-Matic. ²  Since the release of the Thing-O-Matic the trend has been very much the reverse – with people working to upgrade their Cupcakes to near-Thing-O-Matic levels of functionality.

Thing-o-matic modified backplane to accomodate rear-mounted electronics by usiegj00

The ATX power cable and supply cables needed a notch in the lower back of the case along. This is added to this backplane as well as side-channels for easier cable routing. This is based off of thingiverse.com/thing:4973

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1. Apparently the truly adventurous can try their hand at the completely unofficial and unsupported wiki entries on the StepStruder MK6 with Gen 4 electronics. [↩]
2. That said, it’s not a downgrade.  It’s really more of an alternate configuration. [↩]

The folks over at Slate put together a great feature video about 3D printing featuring MakerBots! Check it out!

Salt and Pepper Hats by DesignGlut

Jen Graves over at The Stranger just wrote about how much she wanted her very own MakerBot.  My favorite line from the article?

The machine itself looks like one of those hook carnival games that you can never win, except with this one you always win.

Check out the full article and find out what Jen would do with her own MakerBot here!

Salt and Pepper Hats by DesignGlut

Back in July Switched.com challenged us to design and make a set of salt and pepper shakers, all in one day! We took care of the design end, and the shakers were made by awesome 3-D printing technology from MakerBot. We've always wanted to design a set of salt and pepper shakers to match Egg Pants, one of our most successful products. This finally gave us the chance to do it. We bring you Salt and Pepper Hats! We're so happy with how they turned out that we will be taking them one step further and turning them into a product for our line, which should be available by winter 2009. In the meantime, we're offering up the files for our prototypes - download away and make your very own! Want Egg Pants to go with them? Get a pair here: designglut.bigcartel.com/product/egg-pants

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What’s the old saying? A picture’s worth a thousand words? Sure, but a picture’s only as good as the frame surrounding it. This gorgeous frame designed by red24b is the perfect way to present a picture of your pet, significant other, or your MakerBot.

The frame prints in two parts allowing for two pictures, so why not print in two colors (or more!) and flip the frame depending on your mood? If you’d rather use it for your notes, it also includes a convenient pen / pencil holder. Beautiful work red24b!

Front-back frame by red24b

This object is composed of two parts, once joint it can be used as a front-back frame or a holder for your notes!red-lab24.org/

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Bezier Heart Bracelet in OpenScad by MakeALot

In this project, MakerBot Operator MakeALot makes excellent use of  WilliamAAdams’ Bezier Heart in OpenSCAD. He redesigned one of his bracelets to include inlay settings to match the hearts model — so you can print the bracelet and hearts in two separate colors, and then fix them afterwards. There are many projects up on Thingiverse that are assemblies of multiple parts, but printing decorative inlays in multiple colors is an under-utilized easy hack for upping the wow factor for your designs.

In my opinion, the above color choices work really well.¹ Most important to pull this off — MakeALot notes that both the hearts and the heart settings are flat-backed. The extra math and geometry he put into the problem goes a long way to make the inlay process quick and clean.

Bezier Heart Bracelet in OpenScad by MakeALot

Hearts placed around a plain bracelet

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Bezier Heart in OpenScad by WilliamAAdams

The question is, what good are Bezier curves? This thing is constructed from Bezier curves. It is actually inspired from some Processing code. It demonstrates how easy it is to translate from some graphics system that has Bezier support, to using the new Bezier functions within OpenScad. The Processing code came from here: local-guru.net/blog/2010/09/19/pulsating-heart-made-from-bezier-curves-in-processing There are many heart things on Thingiverse as evidenced by this: thingiverse.com/tag:Heart So, add one more to the list. Of course, this one is fully parametric, even in a math sense, so you can easily change the size, shape, height, whatever. And, on top of that, it's a simple example of how you can use the Bezier function to construct something simple.

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1. Perhaps Green ABS set in Yellow ABS would be less appealing? I do not like green hearts and bands…. [↩]

Clockwork Library & Printable Clock Script by syvwlch

Thingiverse citizen Pattywac recently organized a team design challenge called “MakerBot United.”  The winning team receives $60.00 from Pattywac plus $100.00 in MakerBot store credit provided by MakerBot Industries!  Without further ado, the results are now in!

First, I’d like to apologize for the delay.  I have been extremely busy lately and kept putting off the judging and announcement…. until now!

There were some great group entries to the design challenge, but the one that seemed to click (tick?) with the community, had the largest working group, and was one of the more complex entries (yet still well designed) was the “Clockwork Library and Printable Clock Script” by syvwlch.  syvwlch collaborated with rustedrobot, barrychuck, and MakerBlock to iterate and improve on the design, making it a great entry for the challenge.  The $66 from me (~$6 from various Flattr donations) will be distributed to the team members via Paypal and the rest will be coordinated through MBI.  Congrats to everyone for the great entries.  I really enjoy seeing the creativity in designs that I hope is at least partially sparked by the design challenges.

Since MakerBlock assists in part of the design challenge process but still wanted to partake, we agreed ahead of time¹ that if he was on the winning team his portion of the winnings would be split amongst the remaining team members.  This means that the $166 total prize pool will be split between syvwlch, rustedrobot, and barrychuck.

It has been really amazing to watch the evolution of the printable clock.  These kinds of cooperative exercises are what open source is about.  Rustedrobot and barrychuck were able to print and test multiple components of the printable clock even as they helped contributed to the improvements of the design.  The amount of dedication from these guys in printing multiple test rigs and revisions is pretty incredible.  And, let’s not forget that Syvwlch has been designing all this time without the benefit of ever getting to use a 3D printer himself – having to completely rely upon his teammates for feedback on the designs!

Congratulations to Syvwlch, rustedrobot, and barrychuck!

1. MakerBlock: In case it matters to anyone, I don’t take part in any of the criteria selection, judging, or decision making process. [↩]

Here’s another oft-overlooked early Thingiverse item: a comb!  You know what I like about this print?  It’s useful.  It’s a useful item that you can download from the internet and make on your own 3d printer, instead of buying an injection-molded one imported from overseas.  Also, I tend to lose combs, so it’s cool to be able to get a new one quickly.

Also, this is a nice, functiona design — hurrah repraprook!  What other toiletries are there already lurking on Thingiverse?  repraprook has a few…and there’s the tube squeezer by starno of course.  Can you find other essentials?  Tooth brushes?  Toilet bowl cleaners?  Vegetable peelers?  Measuring cups?

If you get your design up now, there’s a chance that yours will be the one that future generations 3d print when they need a coaster or coathook…are you up to the challenge?

Coffee Dosing Spoon by repraprook

So, you want to make a cup of coffee. Now - you can either shove the coffee into the coffee machine with your bare hands, or you can print out this coffee dosing spoon. After several attempts for differents container forms I stuck with the cone form, because it was the only one I could get closed at the bottom. As an additional feature I put a hole into the handle, so after you are finished you can hang it on a hook or a nail.

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Hair Comb by repraprook

This is the first item I created myself for my new RepRap machine, using CoCreate. As you can see it's a simple comb.

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Sometimes you need to manually edit or delete a Skeinforge profile. The built-in profiles are stored with ReplicatorG in its installation directory, but the user-created profiles are in a hidden file within the user’s home directory. On Mac OS X, if you want to edit these profiles directly, say to edit the start.gcode file, it can be awkward to find and open the right directory. Fortunately, there is a simple way to access it, with no hacking or trickery required! Here’s how it’s done:

First, make a new Finder window. It should open in your user directory. Then, go to the Go menu in the Finder, and choose the Go To Folder… option.

Then, enter the name of the folder where ReplicatorG stores all the user stuff, which is usually “.replicatorg”:

And voilà, the folder opens up!

Your Skeinforge profiles will be in the folder labelled sf_xx_profiles, where xx is the version number. The start.gcode and end.gcode files are in the folder “alterations” within each of the profiles, and can be edited with TextEdit, or any other text editor. The “profiles” folder within each profile contains the settings for each individual module within Skeinforge. You can edit them directly if you are brave, or more practically, just copy the profiles to back them up or move them to another machine.¹

1. This trick works great when using ReplicatorG 24 and earlier. Stay tuned — or take a peek at the beta early — to take advantage of the new “Locate” button in the Skeinforge window when you “Generate G-Code”: automates this for you. [↩]

Dino by foxdewayne

If you want something that it doesn’t yet exist, there’s only one sure-fire way to get it.  That’s to become a Maker.  Thingiverse citizen said:

Well I’ve been hoping that someone would make one of these. Seeing that no one did, I decided to get off my butt and make one myself. I hope others will have some fun with it as well.

I agree that Thingiverse was a poorer place just three hours ago before it had a printable dinosaur skeleton.  Thanks to Foxdewayne my daughter will never have to live in a printable-dinosaur-skeleton-less world.

Dino by foxdewayne

5-16-2011 I have updated the files so that the parts are 3mm thick. This makes a more stable Dino. Please Enjoy. Well I've been hopeing that someone would make one of these. Seeing that no one did, I decided to get off my butt and make one myself. I hope others will have some fun with it as well. I used this dino as my insperation, and then traced the plans in Sketchup. epiloglaser.com/sc_dino.htm I don't Know who the creater is, but I would like to say thanks for the plans.

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Great article today in the NYTimes. Check it out! (Click past the fold to read the whole thing.)

Also, there’s a great chance to meet a number of the artist and MakerBot Operators featured in the article at the MakerBot Make-A-Thon @ 3rd Ward this Saturday from 2-pm.

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