MakerBot Industries

Drumroll please…

Mr. Maker by ErikJDurwoodII is now the official MakerBot mascot. We judged this challenge based on creativity and 3D printability. It’s a very cute mascot, it’s simple enough to be easy to print and has a playful, creative character that embodies the MakerBot spirit. Congrats to ErikJDurwoodII, we’ll be sending him a MakerBot Thing-O-Matic kit and we can’t wait to see what he does with it! Check it Mr. Maker on GrabCAD and Thingiverse. If you have a MakerBot there are printing plates that will make it easy for you to churn this design out!

With so many awesome entries, this was a hard contest to judge. We’ve got 10 runners up and we’re going to be printing out their designs over the next month and sending them out to them as runners up gifts.

Mikey

Replicant JR Also on Thingiverse and on plates.

MakerBot Transformer Also on Thingiverse.

Botbot Also on Thingiverse.

makerbot-084824-65-7

Mambo

Mark II Also on Thingiverse.

mrobot

Mascot 5 Also on Thingiverse.

Make-a-bot Also on Thingiverse.

There were almost 100 entries into this contest and there was so much creativity in all the entries. Check them out too!

MakerBot’s own Bre Pettis is the latest profile for Time.com’s Game Changer series. The crew from Time visited the MakerBot Workshop and the BotCave for a behind-the-scenes look at what we do here every day. The video also shows off some awesome objects we’ve printed recently including pliers, zaggo’s whistle, sconine’s  starfish, and the just-finished zoetrope project that artist Takeshi Murata is showing at London’s Frieze Art Fair.

Check out some of the other Game Changer profiles – Bre is in good company!

Klein Bottle by kelsorj

I recently posted about a Klein Bottle shared on Thingiverse by RotoScan. ¹  This got me thinking – are there any OpenSCAD versions?  After poking around Thingiverse a bit, I haven’t found any.

The challenge for you is as follows:

• Design a Klein Bottle using OpenSCAD.
• Upload an STL and OpenSCAD design file to Thingiverse.
• Tag your design with “openscad,klein bottle,openscad klein bottle”²

Do you want to join the ranks of the OpenSCAD design challenge winners?  Do you want to bask in the glory that is everlasting internet fame?!  Internet points, the sum of 9,000, shall be awarded to:

• The first to upload an OpenSCAD Klein Bottle
• The person who uploads an OpenSCAD Klein Bottle with the fewest lines of code
• The person who uploads an OpenSCAD Klein Bottle with the fewest number of facets
• The person who uploads an OpenSCAD Klein Bottle that most resembles either Kelsorj’s Klein Bottle or RotoScan’s Klein Bottle

As always, the use of OpenSCAD libraries is allowed and encouraged.  If you’ve got a rules question, just post it here! ³⁴⁵

1. For the unfamiliar, a Klein Bottle is an object that essentially has just one continuous surface. [↩]
2. That will actually create three tags.  Mostly so that it will be easy for people to find your work in the future! [↩]
3. No purchase necessary! [↩]
4. Void where prohibited! [↩]
5. Offers not outside of the continental United States or two-dimensional space [↩]

Everybody knows clock projects are pretty sweet — I mean, why would you have a boring clock with hands when you could instead have an amazing gear piece like this! Not only is it mostly 3d-printed, but it also has working gears!

It is a simple but very cool project — just print the parts, assemble, and snap it on to your salvaged/purpose bought wall clock.  Well done, PrintTo3d!  I foresee telling time with one of these very soon.

Gear O'Clock by PrintTo3D

NEW VIDEO! youtube.com/watch?v=gCGmpHHC0Ag It's a 3D printed clock! WOOT! It consists of 12 number plates, 2 gears, and 1 mount. All units are inches. In the zip folder are two versions of the main drive gear and clock base (10" gear). The gear I sectioned into four pieces (print two of each) and a version of the drive gear that does not need supports. This should main clock base should fit on most hobby printers. I made everything so that it requires no support and fits within a 4x4" box.

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Laurie Anderson joins the growing roster of artists creating original work on a MakerBot, with her latest exhibit, “Forty-Nine Days in the Bardo.” The multimedia exhibition is running now through November 19^th at the Fabric Workshop & Museum in Philadelphia.

The team at MakerBot performed a 3D scan on a clay model of Laurie Anderson’s dog Lola, creating a virtual 3D object.  From this object, we printed out over 20 plastic models of the scan. The pack of plastic dogs is currently on display in the museum’s lobby, alongside a Thing-O-Matic.

It’s awesome to have a robot that makes plastic thing for you at your beck and call. However, these wee beasties can get a bit unruly sometimes.

We here at MakerBot have created a feedback form so that all kinds of 3D Printer Developers can get good idea about what works best, worst, and ugliest of using 3D Printers. We all want to solve the most annoying problems first, and this helps us identify them, and fix them quickly.

There is a quick 1 page feedback form, or you can fill out, and extra 2 pages for people that want to give more in-depth feedback. You can also fill out the feedback form for any other Open Source 3D printers if you want. We will collect and send those results to their respective creators, to help cooperatively make all kinds of 3d printing more awesome.

(Random Plant Photo is CC by asgw. Thanks for sharing the photo asgw!)

This week on MakerBot TV I’ll get you acquainted with some brand new colors and my brand new printing partner!!! We’ll also share the scoop on experimental dual extrusion and deliver some helpful tips for using the new Stepstruder® MK7, ReplicatorG 0026 and the firmware update v3.0.

Thanks to Ben Rockhold and Ethan Hartman for your help this week. As well as Alan Bjorklund, Goto80 and Latché Swing for the music.

Here’s what most of us need on a Monday morning: a sweet little widget to help us mount our classic Vinyl LPs to the wall for display.  I suspect this might also be appropriate for LaserDiscs; for example, if someone had a really sweet LaserDisc of “Short Circuit,” it might look really good on their wall held up by one of these.  Hypothetically.

I mean, most of us are probably going to just put up super-hip electronica records, but you could mount a LaserDisc.  Which is really a testament to the quality of the design by crudlabs.  Well done!

Vinyl LP Display Module by crudlabs

This is a simple little guy for displaying records or other hard, flat things on your wall. Has two holes about 0.04" for small nails for mounting. Built with a Makerbot Cupcake.

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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! [↩]