MakerBot Industries

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Ok, when NBC called me up to go to see Transformers 3 and review it, I was skeptical, but it was going to be free popcorn and I knew that even if the story was as sketchy as Tron2, I’d still love the visuals.

In the interview I was asked if MakerBot decided to jump tracks from making affordable 3D printers and instead switch to building autonomous transforming robots, how long would that take? In the video, I basically settle on 5 years, but to be honest, we’re living in that future already with such awesome Thingiverse hits as the Cupcake transformer and the Blockbot cube transformer.

I was surprised to find myself enjoying the movie. You have to look past the fact that it is a movie targeted at boys full of gratuitous explosions and the idea of robot war as the defining plot element, but Buzz Aldrin stars in it as Buzz Aldrin which redeems the movie. Also, the 3D effects were good with lots of action on many planes of view in the focal plane. It went on for almost 3 hours, but I got caught up in it and ended up enjoying it as long as I didn’t think to much about the plot.

On June 6th a team from MakerBot scanned the head Stephen Colbert and put the 3D model online, but we didn’t stop there. Hackers, bloggers, artists, musicians, comedians and anyone one else we think is notable stopped by our Brooklyn workshop to get immortalized.

Well, the week of the event is upon us! Come see the results, and hear a brief art talk by current artist-in-residence Jonathan Monaghan who performed scanning, digital clean-up, and printing for all of those lovely notable heads.

Thursday June 30th, 2011   7PM-10PM

314 Dean St

Brooklyn, NY 11217

Thingiverse citizen madscifi has designed what is sure to be a classic printable toy – a dump truck.  This one piece print features captive wheels inspired by a toy tanker truck by jag and sports a moveable truck bed.  While a one-piece printable, rolling dump truck with a movable bed is pretty sweet – what really wows me is the photograph of the interim design stages. Madscifi has been kind enough to share his OpenSCAD design files so that everyone else can benefit from his work too!

Okay, who’s up for designing a one-print, captive-wheels, working-hinges transformer?