MakerBot Industries

Thingitag Jr. by whosawhatsis

Please consider this a public service announcement on the issue of tags.  There are now more than 10,000 things shared on Thingiverse, which means it’s getting more difficult to find what you might be looking for among all the other things out there.  Fortunately, Thingiverse citizens have the ability, nay – duty!, to add tags to the things they see.

So, if you’re adding something to the universe of things, please be sure to add a few tags so that a week from now they’ll be easy to find even when your designs are no longer on the front page of the Newest Things.

And, if you’re cruising around Thingiverse and find something that would benefit from an additional tag or three, please help out everyone and add those tags!  One of the best parts about tagging someone else’s Thing is that when you do, Thingiverse instantly displays the number of things that share that tag, showing you all the other awesome related things you might otherwise miss out on!

Thingitag Jr. by whosawhatsis

I was showing off some of my designs at a recent Makerbot user group meeting, and I wished I had tags for them with QR codes and some other relevant data. This bookmarklet will generate such tags. This is a smaller version, with the QR code on one side and the human-readable information on the other. Note: I initially set the license to CC-BY for the example picture because the CC licenses look a little nicer on the tags, but I've changed the license to PD, so feel free to use it however you want. Update: Some errors were reported with the DOM walking, so I rewrote those portions to use Regex instead. This should improve compatibility.

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Parametric Tardis by Gossamer

If there’s something that’s even better than a regular TARDIS, it’s a parametric OpenSCAD TARDIS. ¹  In the true spirit of Thingiverse, the designer Gossamer, shared their designs and source code.  Doing so allowed other users to join in, offer suggestions, and Gossamer immediately updated the TARDIS code to incorporate these improvements.

Here are two OpenSCAD pro-tips:

• Best Programming Practices.  OpenSCAD for Windows tends to freak out when you don’t add a leading “0″ to a decimal.  By adding writing “0.5″ rather than “.5″ you can ensure compatibility across platforms.  Thanks Bluemetal!
• Too Many Elements.  Sometimes OpenSCAD will complain that there are too many elements.  You’ll see this happen a lot more when you’ve got some “for loops” or lots of nested functions. By adding “render()” before a group of code, you force OpenSCAD to render and cache that group of code.  Each successive render will be a lot quicker. Thanks Tbuser!

What other OpenSCAD tips do you have to share?

Parametric Tardis by Gossamer

None of the Tardises on here were quite what I was looking for, so i decided to make one myself. I tried to make it as parametric as possible, but you'll still find some things, such as the depth of the face impression, that are static. I'm working on an accompanying insert that will light up the light on top from the inside, I'll add that as a derivative as it develops. Let me know if you find any parameters that aren't scaling/re-sizing properly. EDIT: Per suggestions from Bluemetal and Tbuser I've added leading 0s to my decimal values and added render() to the face module, so it will now compile(F5) properly.

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1. And, goodness knows, I feel compelled to blog anything Doctor Who related. [↩]

MakerBots are the new rock stars! Rolling Stone paid a visit to our Brooklyn workshop for this profile that just ran on their Gear Up Tech blog. Check out the new video we created for those Rolling Stone readers who are new to the idea of MakerBotting. Bre created this How-To video covering the basics for any 3D-printer novice.

It’s not unusual for us to receive requests for DXF files for our MakerBot machines and Scott Hunter did just that – asking for the files that would enable his group of students the ability to replace the wooden components of his school’s Thing-O-Matic with various colors of acrylic. What caught my attention was that his students were 12 year old girls, from Scotland, with a penchant for designing the future of Formula 1 cars. Yep.

The students, involved in the F1 in Schools Technology Challenge, are using CAD/CAM(Computer Aided Manufacture) software to communicate their vision. The participants are encouraged to consider everything from physics, aerodynamics, design, and manufacture, to branding, graphics, sponsorship and more. It’s a comprehensive competition with wind and smoke tunnels, culminating with a race down a 20 meter track with the cars going as fast as 60 kmh (over 37 mph!).

The competition permits the use of 3D printers for the front and rear aerofoils of their miniature gas powered balsa wood F1 cars (manufactured on a CNC machine), and Scott’s team chose the Thing-O-Matic to help them get to the finish line. As you can see from the photo above, it’s looking great! With an international field of contestants (34 countries) aged 9-19 (for a total of 12 million(!) students), and fierce competition, the Challenge is more worth following…if you can keep up.

Hey MakerPeople! This friday, we are going to have a hyper-fun mega-event at Manhattan’s über-hip AC Gears store!  There will be refreshments as well as a DJ — that’s right, a professional Disc Jockey, who will be playing all the latest dance hits on an up-to-the-minute solid-state Hi-Fi!

AC Gears is on E. 8th St in Manhattan, and it’s a small place, so an RSVP is required on the official Facebook invite page.  See you there!

Well folks — it’s gotten to be that time of the year.  I hope you’ve stored away enough nuts to make it through the winter.

If you haven’t, perhaps you can print out an army of these squirrels by MBCook to help you gather enough to get you through.  I suspect ABS (or PLA) squirrels don’t eat very much…but then maybe they’re not quite as quick as real squirrels either.

Whatever the case, it’s clear that you need a whole lot of plastic squirrles for a crisp fall day like this.

Squirrel by MBCook

This is a 3D model of a squirrel that I found on Aim@Shape [1]. It was uploaded by MPII and is actually under the MPII Institute License, which you can view by clicking on the download link on the things page at Aim@shape. I flattened the base and cleaned up some artifacts on the tail that I'm guessing were the result of scanning. This is the most work I've ever done on a model (I used Netfabb and Blender to clean it), so I learned a lot, and he came out very cute. My print came before I caught an error in the model, which caused the bandana looking line. It slices correctly now. [1] shapes.aimatshape.net/view.php?id=105

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The cameras are now deployed at each crabitat!

Big ups to Dropcam for being the first sponsor of Project Shellter!

Here are screen captures of recent activity in each crabitat:

             Tori Shelling (on right) taking a late night stroll at ShellterEast

             The Karshellians (Khloe and Kim, left and right) enjoying a midnight snack at ShellterWest

Here’s the real news: now you can see a live crabitat video feed while you’re surfing the interwebs; just drag-and-drop the following images to your bookmarks toolbar or right click each and add to your favorites.

This will install a bookmarklet that will allow you to watch the crabs from anywhere on the interwebs (except a blank page)!

Once installed, click on the words in the toolbar to launch a live video feed in a popup window.

Depending upon your browser and version, you may have to allow popups for certain sites to see the feed.

These are alpha versions of the bookmarklets. If you have any problems using them please post your experience in the comments.

Also, if you’re a web developer that wants to help with the continued development of these bookmarklets, drop a note in the comments.

Hermit crabs are, for the most part, nocturnal creatures. Most crabitat activity occurs during nighttime PDT and EDT. YMMV.

This guest post is part of Project Shellter.