This does not require a funny quip. These Cornell students used a MakerBot to make the casing for their wrist watch.

But this isn’t an ordinary watch.

TicTocTrac is a wristwatch that doesn’t just keep time, but measures your perception of it, allowing you to track changes over the course of days or even months.

You’ll have to read their fantastic documentation to understand how exactly the watch captures your perception of time, rather than the progression of time. But I can tell you that they used our friend Jeremy Blum‘s MakerBot to print the case for their project.

Love it!

 

 

As we did last month, we are about to live stream our MakerBot User Group New York (MUGNY) meeting! Please join us here on the blog, or come over to UStream.com. Enjoy!

 

Live Video streaming by Ustream

Man, talk about teacher appreciation. Here is a teacher I think we can all appreciate.

In late March, I got looped into a series of emails involving our Support guys and our Education team. As I read through the long thread, I learned that a man named David Brelsford down in Baltimore was making every effort to get his hands on some MakerBots. Not for himself, but for his students. As Dave put it, his is a group of “amazing kids,” but their school sits “in a pretty rough area, a lot of gang activity, drugs and crime.”

When The Replicator launched in January, Dave asked us directly what we planned to do with all the Thing-O-Matics in the BotFarm. A lot of these were being cycled back into R&D, but we still had a handful in limbo. Dave made us this deal: if MakerBot donated the machines to his school, he would give them all the TLC necessary to get them up and running, use them to teach his students about robotics and the thrill of making stuff, and report back to us on everyone’s progress. He and I made a virtual handshake, and not too long later he was up here in Brooklyn to pick up his three new Thing-O-Matics.

These three TOMs are now down at NAF Prep, where they sit in Dave’s Bot Lot. This is where he hopes to build some momentum toward a pre-engineering class at the middle school.

After a few weeks of having the TOMs down in Baltimore, I had a chance to catch up with Dave and check the group’s progress. He told me there is a “definite ‘really interested-almost psychotically’ group of 8” kids regularly stopping by the Bot Lot after school. Even the “principal is hooked on it as well. She came by the other day, and really saw how the kids would interact with the machines. We are now working on a way to make this a part of an actual class.”

So far, Dave and the students have done some “tuning as far as resolution, and optimal temps,” but are mostly trying to refine their workflow. As a teacher, he said it was crucial for the group to talk extensively about safety. He used the opportunity to get the kids practicing conversions from Celsius to Fahrenheit.

As for design, the group is testing a variety of programs. Tinkercad, Google SketchUp, and 3Dtin. Dave says he might be leaning toward 3Dtin and that SketchUp may have too steep of a learning curve to get the kids started with a MakerBot.

I’m looking forward to checking in with Dave and hearing how he’s using the Thing-O-Matics in his curriculum. He has shown so much drive and passion just in tracking down the machines themselves that I know he is going to be a great voice for MakerBotting teachers. One quick note I’ll share from him is that the presence of the program has already had a positive effect on at least one student’s behavior at school. Dave and Kyosha have spent a lot of time printing parts for a quadcopter. Can’t wait to see this!

If you’re a teacher and you use a MakerBot, I would love to share your stories and best practices. You can always email me.

 

A store-bought postage scale might set you back anywhere between $10-$20.  This amazing design from Maakit creates a working letter/postage scale you can build yourself and use with a minimal amount of calibration.  If you’re not sure if you need one of these – you might want to check with that special knitter in your life.  Besides using our postage scale for determining correct postage, my wife uses a postage scale all the time to weigh yarn when she’s designing knitting patterns – so she can give people a sense of how much yarn is needed for a particular design.

It may actually surprise you how many special mothers in your life might appreciate this exact gift.  You’ll have fun building it for her and she’ll love using it. ¹  (You really should call her more, you know?)

1. Maybe you could even personalize it with an embossed message? [↩]

Okay, I’m not the only one getting truly excellent first prints out of The Replicator. Check this video from Teehan+Lax Labs in Toronto. This bust looked great right after they took the support material off, but beautiful after some quick finishing.

Design firms, you’re on notice. This is how it’s done.

 

Also, what are these gears for, guys?! So glad you’re off and running.

Printing gears off the @makerbot for our next project – bit.ly/KpJ9yN

— Teehan+Lax Labs (@tllabs) May 10, 2012

 

You gotta love this. Have you heard about the Pebble Watch? Eric Migicovsky’s company Pebble has raised a record-breaking $10 million+ on Kickstarter¹ — with a week left in its campaign — to produce its Bluetooth supported smart watch.

They thought they’d raise enough money to make 1,000 of these beautiful and highly sought after watches. Well, now it looks like they’ll have to produce 85,000. That’s a tall order, except that they say they’ll use The Replicator to help the production process.

The team has smashed the Kickstarter record for funding, and collected its initial goal of $100,000 in a matter of two hours, and had surpassed $200,000 within four hours.

The Pebble crew is a ten person startup, which Migicovsky says is working around the clock on perfecting the software. Regardless of the team’s heavy workload, Migicovsky assures that backers will receive a Pebble in the order in which they were purchased. In the future, says Migicovsky, the production phase will bolstered upon the purchase of a MakerBot replicator.

More proof that a MakerBot is an essential tool for the entrepreneur.

via Digital Trends

 

1. !!!!!!! [↩]

Need everyone’s input on this. Someone just posted a comment on a BusinessWeek feature on MakerBot and our CEO Bre Pettis.

I Like Bre…Great Charisma and energy. I wish him well. I think his printers will be successful but ultimately real manufactured goods will still be made with industrial 3D printers. I believe that his equipment is perfect as an educational piece, hobbyists or even classrooms.

Is this true? This sounds like the commenter is taking for granted that manufacturing will never change, as if it’s always been the same. We make MakerBots so that people can make the things they want and need, not just one copy of something that was made a million times. The way things are done now satisfies the broadest base of customers.

What does it mean to say something is a “real manufactured good”? Does that mean that something you make for yourself can’t be just as good as something that was made for you? We totally disagree.

By the way, the article in BusinessWeek today is great. And in case you’re wondering, you can now scan yourself in a number of ways that don’t involve cornstarch! But the cornstarch method is still fun. 4Chan founder Moot and new media guru/Internet philosopher Clay Shirky were into it! Watch the video of their scans below.

 

Sorry folks. We’ve been getting some great pictures of MakerBot habitats in our inbox, but I have now acquired a backlog. Fixing that! But please do keep sending.

Here’s Ben’s TOM home. Looks like a busy workspace! What is that board attached to, Ben? It looks like it’s wrapped up in bubble wrap, making it doubly interesting.

 

 

Yesterday’s New York Times had an interesting piece about a group of people in Amsterdam who help people fix things instead of throw them out; like an old iron that doesn’t steam or a skirt with a hole in it.

Founder of the Repair Cafe, Martine Postma:

“In Europe, we throw out so many things,” said Martine Postma, a former journalist who came up with the concept after the birth of her second child led her to think more about the environment. “It’s a shame, because the things we throw away are usually not that broken. There are more and more people in the world, and we can’t keep handling things the way we do.”

Exactly! This is how Makers see the world. Sure, something breaks, but that doesn’t mean it’s ready for the trash can. Look at all the things that have been saved with the mindset that Ms. Postma talks about:

 

Thingiverse user Renosis saved a family member’s beloved wrist watch by making a replacement for the lost battery cover. He wrote, “I don’t expect anyone has the same watch and if they do, I wouldn’t expect that they lost the back to it. This is more of a proof of concept. I wanted to post it because I was so amazed that it worked and hopefully, it will inspire someone else to use this temporary fix one day if their watch breaks.”

 

rbckman made a replacement lock mechanism for his buddy’s dishwasher. The manufacturer of the dishwasher wasn’t shipping that part anymore, so they either had to fix it with a custom part or throw out the dishwasher. The choice is clear!

 

 

 

lazlo‘s blender broke, and the solution was to simply make a new gear. Why throw out an almost perfectly good blender? Good as new.

 

 

 

The other day, Brendan Dawes saved a mop from going to the garbage by just making a couple new clips.

 

 

 

 

 

Annelise talked about her own fix to the drain plug in her kitchen sink. If you don’t have a handle to remove that plug, it’s gotta go. That handle broke, so she just made a new one, and avoided a trip to Home Depot.

 

Even better: these are all available for free for anyone! Sometimes people wonder, “why should I make more stuff out of plastic?” But a lot of times it’s more about the waste you’re not creating by keeping old things in good condition!

What have you revitalized with a MakerBot?