I’m still buzzing from Maker Faire, which Annelise captured beautifully in the last episode of Season 2 of MakerBot TV. I met thousands and thousands of people at the MakerBot tent, including people who were discovering us for the first time and people who had all three generations of bots at home.

And then there were people in the middle, like Jason Huggins, or hugs on Thingiverse. Jason was part of the Grid Beam booth just down the path from our tent, and stopped by during set up on Friday to say hello. When I asked him whether he was a MakerBotter, he said no, but that he was a part of the community and had a good Thingiverse success story. Incidentally, Jason is the founder of Sauce Labs, a cloud version of the website performance testing services Selenium that he also started. But he is an enthusiastic open source hardware guy, too.

Last fall, Jason started his project Bitbeam, which he explains this way on his blog:

Bitbeam = Lego + Grid Beam = Awesome

To clarify: Grid Beam is a construction system created by Phil and Richard Jergensen, and Bitbeam is a miniaturization of that concept to just the right scale that it’s compatible with Lego, and especially Lego Technic.

Jason added Bitbeam to Thingiverse last September as a file for laser cutting, and before the day was out, there were two derivatives including a version you can make on a MakerBot. He was really excited to tell me about that, and I was excited to hear it. One person put an open source hardware idea into the community, and someone else, a total stranger, took it from one way of making things into another in just a few hours.

And here’s how Maker Faire chapter of this story makes it more awesome. When Jason told me at our tent on Friday that he had still never seen his Bitbeams made on a MakerBot, I said I could easily run the file through ReplicatorG for him. I did that in a spare moment that same evening, which took me all of two minutes, and finally caught up with Jason on Sunday to show him the final product. This was the look on his face.

A Happy Hugs

And this was his tweet to me:

@pelkertron Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! /cc @MakerBot @bitbeam

— Jason Huggins (@hugs) May 21, 2012

It’s nice when a grown up can be genuinely surprised and delighted by something. Jason told me that he has no real interest in laser cutting the Bitbeam pieces in balsa wood — although, I have to say I really think they’re nice looking — and would rather just tell the world to get a MakerBot and make all the pieces themselves. He twisted and bent the ABS parts in his hand and said the durability was better than the wood. Just to be sure of the quality of the design, we linked one up to one of his Bitbeam constructions on display. Perfect fit!

MakerBotted Bitbeam attached to laser cut Bitbeam

I was thrilled to meet Jason and to give him a little confirmation that his idea of making his designs on a MakerBot was a great one. This was really easy because we were at Maker Faire together, but this is exactly the kind of thing that happens in hackerspaces all the time. If you own a MakerBot, I hope you give yourself the thrill of making something for someone, and letting them tell you their ideas that could take over the world.

This stuff never gets old.

Any brick?!

This last weekend I had the good fortune to be able to help out with the MakerBot booth at the 2012 Maker Faire Bay Area in San Mateo. ¹  So many people had so many interesting questions that I’d like to just can’t help sharing a few of them here on the blog.

One of my favorite series of questions came from two boys who were at the booth with their father.  After watching half a squirrel being printed out, they asked what material the MakerBot was using to make objects.  I explained that it was the same ABS that went into Legos.  All of a sudden the pairs of eyes that were watching the Replicator were now on me with laser focus.  They had to know if the robot could make Legos.  I told them that people had, indeed, shared designs for Lego compatible bricks on Thingiverse and they were no longer constrained to only have those bricks they could find in stores – they could have any brick they could design.  Now, that got their attention.

Their father, ever the savvy and wary consumer, wanted to know just how expensive it would be to make those bricks.  I responded with my own question – how many plastic building pieces could they buy for $50?  The father and both kids agreed that it wasn’t much – $50.00 might buy you a medium sized Lego set.  I reminded them that those boxes were also mostly empty – you buy a lot of air when you buy a box of Legos. ²  Hefting a spool of ABS plastic in their direction I told them that $50.00 would buy enough plastic to make more than two pounds of bricks – bricks of any size and shape they could imagine.  That definitely got the dad’s attention.

Untitled by jag

This thing brought to you by

1. Near San Francisco [↩]
2. Don’t get me wrong.  I love Legos and own a LOT of them. [↩]

Well, it’s Monday morning after Maker Faire Bay Area and I’m already wishing the festivities could go on a bit longer. There’s just so much to learn and see, and so many makers to meet in such a short amount of time. We brought a ton of Awesome to this year’s faire including a MakerBot BotFarm, as well as a Robot Petting Zoo, a Photo Booth and Awesome Toss’Em (a MakerBot carnival game). In this special Maker Faire edition of MakerBot TV, R.Maker takes you on a tour of the faire and then we chat with a few of the many MakerBot Operators we ran into over the weekend. Thank you so much to everyone who joined in the fun! Keep it awesome!