MakerBot Industries

I’ve been working on an exciting project lately: the GE Air Show. The idea is to get people to submit models, sketches, concepts or ideas for weird and wonderful flying machines, print them on a Makerbot, and then have them star in a video set in a miniature air show of the imagination. At the end of the month we’re hoping to have the airport crowded with all kinds of aircraft – so please submit your ideas.

We’re looking for submissions regardless of 3D design skills: you can submit sketches, mockups or just your brilliant idea to hello.social@ge.com, and you can check out other comments and submissions at facebook.com/ge. The models that are being built will be listed on the GE page at Thingiverse, thingiverse.com/GE, so keep checking back for updates.

I’ve been working together with Andrew Rutter on building the Makerbots, and getting 3D models ready for printing. It’s been very interesting so far: both Thing-O-Matics were up and running within a day – in fact, one of them was put together in only three and half hours! The new cartridge-based extruder is much simpler to assemble, and the Thing-O-Matic can certainly produce great results with a lot less tuning than was required for previous models.

This project is interesting because it highlights how quickly you can go from a concept to a physical object through 3D printing. By offering to model sketches or ideas that people have sent in, it makes it possible for people unfamiliar with 3D design to see their ideas made real. A lot of requests are for models of existing aircraft, but we’d really like for people to submit ideas for original and fanciful designs.

There has been quite a bit of excitement over at the Botcave since Thingiverse user Skimbal – creator of one of the site’s most popular models of all time, the Gothic Cathedral Play Set — launched his Turtle Shell Racers project (High and Low Power Edition). His project is both a love note to Mario Kart and Super Mario Bros in general, and probably the coolest MakerBot project we have seen to date: freely downloadable parts and building instructions for modding an RC car into a “Turtle Shell Racer.” Not sold in stores, but free to print on your MakerBot. It’s like playing Mario Kart in real life!

We launched the story on Friday afternoon, and since then sites such as Engadget are picking up not only the story of the release, but the late breaking news that MakerBot hired Skimbal to create and release projects like these full time.

Check out his teardown video to get more details how to extract what you need from the cheap RC car that will be the heart of your MakerBot Turtle Shell Racer!

Recently MakerBotted rings were part of wonderful changes in relationship status!

Astera says,

I talked Marius into remotely printing two rings for me just in time to propose to Joernchen on July 15th. Well… he said yes! \o/ And he’s wearing the ring all day, though he actually never liked rings at all. ABS is just awesome for engagement rings!

Robert Carlsen also made the leap and on his flickr page, he says

Kara doesn’t wear much jewelry and we don’t support the diamond trade. I wanted to still give her a personal, meaningful symbol of the engagement.

I had heard of other folks printing rings (even an engagement ring) on Thingiverse – I’m not pretending to be incredibly original with this. However, I did design Kara’s ring with CAD software (open source of course – QCad / OpenSCAD) and printed it on my MakerBot Cupcake #2943. I wasn’t sure of her ring size, so I printed several sizes of the band in black ABS plastic. The “stone” was printed separately in orange ABS and glued into the setting. I also printed a threaded box available on Thingiverse, scaled to just fit the ring.

For the actual proposal, Kara had never seen the Pacific Ocean, but had grown up spending summers in Ocean City, NJ. We’ve also spent a lot of time at the shore together. After dating for a decade, standing ankle deep in the ocean with Haystack Rock in the background, it felt right to propose at that moment – she accepted and I presented her the box with the ring – which she loves….and here we are

There is nothing better than when a MakerBot gets to print love!

Spherical Projector by nrp

Thingiverse citizen nrp, duplicator-of-keys, gesture-freestyle-printer, and Kinect-copier-of-people has uploaded another incredible design.  This time he has created a spherical projector using OpenSCAD designed printed parts, a frosted globe, a pico projector, and some hardware.  Nrp, like many others, has been inspired by Neal Stephenson’s cyberpunk classic “Snow Crash” as his inspiration for this project. ^1 2  Nrp’s amazing write-up and description suggests there’s more than a little math involved in converting flat digital photos of the earth into a pico-projected-globe.  I’m looking forward to reading the rest of series of upcoming blog posts detailing his work.

Spherical Projector by nrp

A writeup with links and images is on my blog: eclecti.cc/computergraphics/snow-globe-part-one-cheap-diy-spherical-projection Since reading Snow Crash, I’ve been drawn to the idea of having my own personal Earth. Because I’m stuck in reality and the virtual version of it is always 5 years away, I’m building a physical artifact that approximates the idea: an interactive spherical display. This is of course something that exists and can likely be found at your local science center. The ones they use are typically 30-100″ in diameter and cost enough that they don’t have prices publicly listed. Snow Globe is my 8″ diameter version that costs around $200 to build if you didn’t buy a Microvision SHOWWX for $600 when they launched like I did. The basic design here is to shoot a picoprojector through a 180° fisheye lens into a frosted glass globe. The projector is a SHOWWX since I already have one, but it likely works better than any of the non-laser alternatives since you avoid having to deal with keeping the surface of the sphere focused. Microvision also publishes some useful specs, and if you ask nicely, they’ll email you a .STL model of their projector. The lens is an Opteka fisheye designed to be attached to handheld camcorders. It is by far the cheapest 180° lens I could find with a large enough opening to project through. The globe, as in my last dome based project is for use on lighting fixtures. This time I bought one from the local hardware store for $6 instead of taking the one in my bathroom. I’ve had a lot of fun recently copying keys and people, but my objective in building a 3D printer was to make it easier to do projects like this one. Designing a model in OpenSCAD, printing it, tweaking it, and repeating as necessary is much simpler than any other fabrication technique I’m capable of. In this case, I printed a mount that attaches the lens to the correct spot in front of the projector at a 14.5° angle to center the projected image. I also printed brackets to attach the globe to the lens/projector mount. The whole thing is sitting on a GorillaPod until I get around to building something more permanent. Actually calibrating a projector with slight pincushion through a $25 lens into a bathroom fixture attached together with some guesswork and a 3D printer is well beyond my linear algebra skill, so I simplified the calibration procedure down to four terms. We need to find the radius in pixels of the circle being projected and the x and y position of the center of that circle for starters. The more difficult part, which tested my extremely rusty memory of trigonometry is figuring out how to map the hemisphere coming out of the fisheye lens to the spherical display surface. For that, we have a single number for the distance from the center of the sphere to the lens, in terms of a ratio of the projected radius. The math is all available in the code, but the calibration script I wrote is pretty simple to use. It uses pygame to project longitude lines and latitude color sections as in the image above. You use the arrow keys to line up the longitude lines correctly to arrive at the x and y position, plus and minus keys to adjust the radius size until it fits the full visible area of the sphere, and 9 and 0 to adjust the lens offset until the latitudes look properly aligned. What you end up with is close enough to correct to look good, though as you can see in the images, the projector doesn’t quite fit the lens or fill the sphere. The script saves the calibration information in a pickle file for use elsewhere. Going back to the initial goal, I wrote a script to turn equirectangular projected maps of the Earth into roughly azimuthal equidistant projected images calibrated for a Snow Globe like the one above. There are plenty of maps of the former projection available freely, like Natural Earth and Blue Marble. Written in python, the script is quite slow, but it serves as a proof of concept. The script, along with the calibration script and the models for the 3D printed mounts are all available on github. I’ve finally fully accepted git and no longer see a point in attaching the files to these posts themselves. I put a Part One in the title to warn you that this blog is going to be all Snow Globe all the time for the foreseeable future. Up next is writing a faster interface to interactively display to it in real time, and if I think of a good way to do it, touch input is coming after that. Download from github: git://github.com/nrpatel/SnowGlobe.git

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1. Interestingly, one of the creators of Google Earth also cites this book for his inspiration. [↩]
2. Also interesting, Neal Stephenson’s work “The Diamond Age” is cited by many 3D printing enthusiasts as their inspiration.  Just look at Vik’s website! [↩]

Here is another one for all the gearheads.  Ok — this is not quite as esoteric as the model rotary engine that we featured awhile ago, but this is a lovely print. I myself look forward to nervously moving it through its cycle while watching Top Gear reruns.

Obviously this is some lovely modeling by sirmakesalot (great handle, btw)  and it’s really raised the bar for tiny motor assemblies.  It does, however, make me wonder if somebody could stack up say four or eight  of these in a printed engine block, and connect them by a printed crank…no, it’s too much.  I won’t even mention printing a camshaft.

Anybody’s gears turning?

single cylinder engine by sirmakesalot

This is my first contribution of my own design to Thingiverse! I designed it in Rhino and printed it on my TOM. I left a lot of space in the piston cavity and it could probably be tweaked but it works great! Makes a good demo for children or if your bored give it a whirl! Big thanks to my friends at Makerbot support, Matt made this possible!

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