MakerBot Industries

MakerBot Operator Scott Miller sent us these pictures of his students doing work with a MakerBot at Mech Design class at Olin college.  They have high end 3D printers installed at their school, but he brought his MakerBot in to show how 3D printers work and run some prints.

There is no substitute for being able to put a machine on the table, upload a file, and build a part in real time. Being able to build working prototypes quickly is a critical part of the Olin College Mechanical Design class.  We use 3D printing and Sheet Metal to leverage their complementing strengths.  To design effective parts, it is critical to understand the fabrication process.  We used the Thing-O-Matic in class to visually demonstrate the entire 3D printing process from the design in Solidworks -> STL -> SkeinForge -> GCode -> 3D print.  Understanding the print methodology and internal structure of the parts allows the students to be more effective right off the bat for their 3D printed designs.

Scott sent me a slide from his presentation courtesy of Professor Barrett that shows some basic guidelines for 3D printing. Great tips!

We really want — really need — a 3D printable cute robot mascot.¹ So when we heard that GrabCAD wanted to collaborate with us, we took this opportunity to create a challenge on their site and put up a brand new MakerBot Thing-O-Matic kit as stakes for the engineer who blows our minds and warm our hearts.

The concept of the robot is wide open so feel free to enter creatures of all shapes and styles. Inspired by the lunchbox on wheels that rolled around on the Death Star in Star Wars? Great! You’re a fan of humanoid robots like the B9 from Lost in Space? Super! All shapes of robots’ designs are expected to participate. The winning entry will become the lead MakerBot Robot Mascot. It is very likely that most, if not all entries will be filmed for MakerBot.TV videos. The finalists will have their robots 3D printed on a MakerBot at MakerBot HQ and sent to them.

You may submit as many robots as you like, just don’t wait around! This competition ends on September 28th.

The inspiration for this challenge is Tony Buser’s “BOB” robot. We saw this and all we could think of was “MORE!”, especially considering the popularity of robot models in the Thingiverse, on GrabCAD’s Library, and elsewhere in the Internet kingdom.

Bob is built from a toolset of robot parts that include joints for arms and ears. This toolset gives you a nice set of components that you can use to make your robot design have pose-able parts. The toolset also includes the MakerBot M logo design to make it easy to badge the robot with it. Using the toolset is not required, but we wanted to make the functioning side as easy as possible for people to express their robo-creativity, so some of the components are offered up front for optional use in this challenge.

We’re doing this with GrabCAD, a great community and platform for engineers to collaborate and get hired to make things. Head on over to GrabCAD to read the rules and requirements, and get started with our challenge. We hope that you will post your projects on Thingiverse as well as GrabCAD so that both communities can benefit from your creativity!

1. Yeah, we said “cute.” [↩]

Another video from the GE Air Show project, this time featuring helicopters. The client (GE) has discovered what most of us already know: that watching a Makerbot print is hypnotic! The creative direction has been to emphasize the design and print process, so you’ll be seeing more timelapse takes of the print.

This is likely to be the penultimate video of the project: they are taking submissions for the grand finale right now on the Facebook page.

We’ve liked 3dTin for awhile now; it was a clever, useful app since it debuted.  But, unlike many clever, useful projects, this one has actually had its development continue, and it’s seen some major improvements.  In fact, there are a couple of big ones you should know about: first, they added cylinders!  And now, they’ve added the entire library of primitive templates that you see above.

3dTin is probably the most accessible way to get into 3d modeling, so it’s really great to see it becoming a more powerful and full-featured tool.  Most of the designs are still a bit, well, low-rez, but it’s clear that it’s much more than a one-hit-wonder.  If you like what you’re seeing with 3dTin (and Cadmium, a 3d modeling library for Python) you can support them by purchasing the premium app on the Chrome store, or just logging on and making cool models!

Some of the best Thingiverse objects are the oddest — for example, TrevorLaw’s designs which help you assemble Möbius strip with pieces of cut dowels.

A Möbius strip is of course something that looks like a loop but really has only one side…it also has a bunch of other properties of course, but to us non-math-genius dullards, it just looks like a physical paradox.  Which of course makes it very cool to print.

Even cooler, TrevorLaw has gone ahead and made a parametric version, so you can set the number of sticks and their diameters (and more!)   So you can create your own custom impossibilities — well done!

Dowel Mobius Strip by TrevorLaw

Simulation of a Mobius strip with dowels glued into slots. As there are no overhangs, you can probably eliminate the printed part entirely from the final object by gluing the dowels to each other as they sit in the slots. If it doesn't seem enough like a strip to you, I would suggest making the backbone a bit thinner. The first version was too flimsy for my liking and I may have overcompensated.

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Parametric Dowel Mobius Strip by TrevorLaw

This is a parametric model for a Mobius Strip built with dowels glued into slots on a printed part. You can set the number of sticks, their lengths, and diameters. The constraint which determines the overall size is that the projections of the dowels towards the center of the circle do not interfere. Cutting the dowels to length is the most labor-intensive part, so if you can find a bag of short dowels at the store you can plug in their length and build this fairly quickly (toothpicks?).

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