MakerBot Industries

Look at the pictures above and then make your choice.  Do you want the Red LED strip or the Blue LED strip?  If you choose the Blue LED strip, the story ends, and you wake up in your bed and believe…wait.  Wait…scratch that.  I’m going to blow your mind in a completely different way.

You don’t have to choose!  The pictures above are of brand new product — a color-changing RGB LED strip! Just use the MaxM RGB led controller or wire up an Arduino to control the cycling, strobing, or pulsing colors any way you want.

Just make sure you keep a firm grip on reality when confronted with all these possibilities.

Francis Scott Key Bust by nathan

As ambitious as Clothbot’s attempts to resurrect a virtual protoceratops have been, it is really amazing to see something that went from photos, uploaded to my3dscanner.com, cleaned in Blender, and printed on a MakerBot.

Thingiverse citizen nathan scanned the statue of Francis Scott Key in Georgetown, Washington D.C. and printed out his own little replica.  The STL result is amazingly faithful when compared to the real thing.¹  I honestly wish I had the foresight to remember to take the number and variety of pictures required to scan things around me.

More and more we’re consuming information about our world through our handheld devices and smart phones.  I could really see a service like my3dscanner.com being the way of the future for mobile scanning.

Francis Scott Key Bust by nathan

used my3dscanner.com to convert a ply to a mesh, cleaned it up in blender. Original sculpture is located in Georgetown, Washington DC.

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1. I would have loved to have included this photo – but it’s All Rights Reserved.  Curses! [↩]

Ada Lovelace

I’d like to think of last week’s design challenges as a great success.  The first was an OpenSCAD challenge to recreate an inverse Turner’s Cube and the second was another OpenSCAD challenge to create a 20-sided die that had the number “20″ imprinted into each side.

Given that today is Ada Lovelace day the lightning challenge is to share something inspired by the first computer programmer, Ada Lovelace.¹  If you need help finding inspiration, just check out the marathon of posts at Adafruit Industries as they profile women in technology, science, and math throughout the day in celebration.  Here’s how you can participate in this challenge:

1. Create a printable design inspired by Ada Lovelace or awesome woman in technology, science, mathematics
2. Upload your STL to Thingiverse and tag it with “adalovelace“

Super awesome best happy good luck friendship points shall be awarded to (1) the first person to upload their Ada Lovelace inspired design and (2) the most creative design.

1. Thanks for reminding me Schmarty! [↩]

It has come to my attention that our original blog post didn’t show off the non-silver colors very well; while silver has sold out, the light and dark brown, tan, and even this electrifying yellow (3 mm anyway) have not fared as well.  So if you’re not blinded by the solar brilliance in the photo above, click through to see some gorgeous spool photos.

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