Credit: KMJ, via WikiMedia Commons

Are any of you participating in this? The New York Times is hosting an everyday innovation challenge that several of you may be interested in.

They write:

For a special issue on June 3, we invite you to share an innovation that you have made in your daily life. Maybe you’ve figured out a way to make waking up more pleasant by jury-rigging your alarm clock. Or maybe you’ve invented a foolproof method for shining your shoes, or for finding time to exercise. It could be a gadget you’ve fashioned, or something less tangible. We want to hear what you’ve come up with.

Yes, but more importantly, we want to hear what you’ve come up with.

The judges for this are Paola Antonelli, Curator for the Department of Architecture and Design at MoMA; James Dyson, of never-lose-suction-vacuum fame; Ben Kaufman of Quirky; and Martha Stewart, who is Martha Stewart.

You all have submitted thousands of things to Thingiverse that would knock readers’ socks off. In fact, Thingiverse is a veritable catalog of relevant submissions for this challenge. Perhaps you have favorite things from Thingiverse that you think ought to be recognized! If you leave a comment here, I’ll get in touch with that Thingiverse user and urge them to participate.

Earnest's cozy home, in Lou's workspace

Meet Earnest, the fully customized TOM #6419 belonging to LouFlemal. This is one pimped-out Bot:

• A couple Shower Bar Supports by Carmiac (Thing #7770) let Lou quickly switch among 8 spools of filament.
• Quick Change Build Platform by tomlombardi (Thing #14747)
• A pair of Thing-O-Matic Arms (Thing #21776, LouFlemal’s own scaled down version of MakerBot Arms)
• MakerBot Text Logo by Tinkerer (Thing #10849), lest Earnest’s Bot Cave lineage be forgotten behind that Gen 4 interface

Lou’s Thing-O-Matic lives in a 16″ wide bookshelf, which limits visibility from the side. But there’s a fix for that, too: a mirrored plexi panel on the back, attached, of course, with Jag’s Window Clip (Thing #14727).

Looks like an awesome work space.

A few colleagues and I had a truly great time up in Westport, Connecticut last weekend, where we were part of that state’s first ever Maker Faire event. This Mini Maker Faire was held on the giant lawn outside the Westport Public Library. The only downside there was that a bunch of the guests and makers at Saturday’s event probably didn’t get a chance to go inside that gorgeous facility.

Anyway, I just wanted to thank everyone for stopping by to see us. I learned a lot from all the visitors to our table. For example, Dr. Raimund Herzog stopped by to discuss some challenges he was facing with his Thing-O-Matic extruder. He didn’t realize it, but he was giving me an education in the history of extruders.

Ray also shared a really helpful tip that I think bears re-mentioning on the blog: when assembling your TOM, it’s always a good idea to have a magnetic wand on hand, such as the one he received along with his Weller soldering station.

If you’re about to embark on an assembly adventure, get one of these. I assembled a Replicator the other day and found myself wishing I had one on hand. The guys and girls in the Bot Cave use them a lot, in case you’re wondering about the tools of the trade.

Here’s a shot of Ray showing us how useful this tool was in putting together his Filament Spindle Box, and another shot below it from our Support pages showing another angle.

Thanks, Ray!

Sometimes I shy away from writing about instances of MakerBot being honored for this or that. There are a lot of those things, and I figure readers of this blog probably understand that our products are cool. On Friday we participated in something that I do want you to know about, though, since you are, by virtue of the act of just reading this blog, part of it.

MakerBot CEO Bre Pettis accepted a Disruptive Innovation Award from the Tribeca Film Festival, specifically for “creating an entire ecosystem for desktop 3D printing.” What is an ecosystem without all the flora and fauna? The people who own our 3D printers, or interact with the world of personal fabrication in other ways – by spending weekends in hackerspaces or uploading design ideas to Thingiverse or commenting on others’ ideas and creations – are the people who breathe life into this ecosystem. So our hat’s off to you.

MakerBot CEO Bre Pettis accepting the Maslow Silver Hammer at the Tribeca Disruptive Innovation Awards April 30, 2012

Now let me tell you about Justin Bieber. Read the rest of this entry »

Worthless Dice by blarbles

Now, don’t get me wrong – I love me my OpenSCAD.  While it’s an amazing and powerful tool for 3D modeling, the text editor is not as full featured as one would want.  Thankfully, Thingiverse citizen justblair has put together a short tutorial on how to use the text editor of your choice with OpenSCAD for the best of both worlds – a full featured text editor and an awesome 3D modeling program.

Justblair recommends my personal pick for a text editor, the free, open source, and very feature rich Notepad++.  (I prefer the PortableApps.com version). ¹  The process basically involves changing a few settings so that OpenSCAD will immediately re-compile the current objects from a file being edited, whenever that file is saved.

The process is really easy and very worthwhile.  Being able to find/replace and perform regex searches make designing in OpenSCAD so much easier.

Untitled by Justblair

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