MakerBot Industries

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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Update: Bre here, Skimbal is an awesome designer who has just really impressed everyone in the MakerBot community. I’m excited to announce that we just hired him to make awesome projects and document them here at MakerBot Industries full time. He’ll be moving to Brooklyn to design, make, and document awesome MakerBottable things. To say we’re excited at MakerBot to bring him on board is an serious understatement. Be prepared for more Skimbal awesomeness coming soon to a MakerBot near you!

Turtle Shell Racer – High Power Edition by Skimbal

We got a glimpse of Skimbal’s Turtle Shell Racers in a recent photo from the Detroit MakerFaire, but a picture is even better.  If you ever had a doubt about the raw potential and power inherent in the humble MakerBot Cupcake CNC, please allow such misconceptions to be thusly dispelled.  Besides the incredible amount of work that went into designing and printing these, Skimbal obviously put a lot of work into the documentation as well.  He’s included all the STL’s files you’d need to print one, a list of materials, a PDF of how to assemble them, and, of course, a few videos of them in action!  Well done, sir!  Well done!

Go download the files for the Turtle Shell Racers at Thingiverse. Bonus! Download the awesome instructional booklet!

Check out this great Google SketchUp tutorial for MakerBot Operators from Tested.com! No doubt many of you have caught their show. I particularly love their MakerBot Mystery Build Fridays, for obvious reasons. Well, in addition to exploring the Thingiverse and printing with their brand new Thing-O-Matic, they are also helping all of us contribute more great designs.

Here’s a teaser from their post:

Most weeks, our famed MakerBot printouts are culled from a handy website called Thingiverse. It’s here that members of the CNC community can submit pre-made models for anyone to print — and if some of our past videos are any indication, there are some very good ones available too. But while it’s easy to print someone else’s creation, there’s something to be said for designing one yourself. There’s a sense of accomplishment that you just don’t get by mashing “print” on a pre-made design. (Read more.)

There are quite a few Google Sketchup tutorials out there, but not that many good ones focused on 3D printing with a MakerBot. Thanks to Tested.com for sharing the good stuff!

Yes.

This doesn’t need much explanation, and I think we all know where this is going. Thaed has started the process by taking advantage of the Google 3D Warehouse. (as a side note, check out the Google Sketchup Warehouse – some very cool and possibly challenging items to print!)

So, what happens when you combine one aggravated avian¹, Batist‘s slingshot, and a challenge to the Thingiverse community to upload a few other fowl balls? Perhaps just enough material for some kind of video…

Aggravated Avian. by Thaed

Taken from Google Sketchup Warehouse, I see this more as a tribute than anything else.

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Slingshot by Batist

I tried to print this one, but I scaled it to big... and it was warping a lot. Perhaps printing a mini version? UPDATE: Today I printed a smaller one, and it works like a charm! When I was a child I made slingshots out of wood... Living in a city nowadays (Ghent, Belgium) I can relive my youth by printing them. I hope one day my children will use tools like this to explore their creativity :-).

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1. From 3D Warehouse [↩]

Ok, we’ve covered something like this before.  However, Thingiverse user nmartin has re-created a classic here.  You don’t have to play too many records before you see one of these — the cheap, ubiquitous adapters that you’ll still find in 45rpm (7″ for the hipsters) records to this day.  But now, with your MakerBot, you can print one out for every single 7″ record you have!

This is either immensely exciting to you, or you’ve already stopped reading.

phonograph adapter for 45's by nmartin

The little thingy you put in the center of your old 45's to play on a phonograph

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MakerBot is still looking to add to its team.  Are you made of the right stuff to be a Productor?  To work in the glamorous Botcave in fabulous Boerum Hill, Brooklyn?  If so, you’ll be in the trenches putting together the kits that go out to become MakerBots, and that makes it a very important position.

The position requires lots of attention to detail, but MakerBot is a blast to work for if you’re up for the challenge.

Here is the scoop on the open positions:

Duties & Responsibilities:
- Manual assembly of small products and kits
- Maintaining accurate inventory counts in our computer system
- Restocking supplies from warehouse

Requirements:
- Detail oriented. You pride yourself on getting it right every time.
- Self-motivator with a strong work ethic, and able to work in a fast paced environment
- Rock solid computer skills (e.g. Windows, Office, Internet)
- Able to lift 35 lbs

Bonus Qualifications:
- Experience using different types of shipping software (e.g. DHL, Endicia)
- Past experience or interest in robotics and 3D Printing
- Experience in shipping products for a large company
- Experience picking, packing and shipping customer orders

This position is full time 40 hours per week at $12 per hour.

We offer a fun working environment, a steady paycheck and the opportunity to be a part of the next manufacturing revolution.

If you’re interested, please email us your resume along with a brief explanation of why you want to work with us and how your qualifications & experience will add value to our company. hiring (at) makerbot.com

MakerBot Industries is back from MakerFaire Detroit 2011 — where Matt and Keith shared cool Space Month things from Thingiverse, met many incredible people, and found their fellow exhibitors Awesome. Check out our slideshow for highlights from the weekend.

Detroit is a special place, and the each year we make it to the Faire here it feels more and more essential that we do so. See you all at World MakerFaire NYC 2011 in September!