One of the main joys of being a MakerBot employee is working with our customers; they’re some of the most creative and interesting people in the world. This means that some of the luckiest people on our staff are our Support Team members, who get to email back and forth and actually chat with customers on the phone every day.

We sat down with a few of them this week to hear a little more about how they spend their time at work. What do the people who help people make things all day like to make themselves? What are some of the fun stories from the MakerBot community that they remember?

If you have a story about your experience with the MakerBot Support Team, share it with us in the comments. And if you’d like to ask them a question for the next video, tweet it to @MakerBotSupport.

Make on, MakerBotters, and tell us how we can help.

In further celebration of Geek Pride Day, we are pleased to announce that the masterpieces collection from the MakerBot Design Team known as the Robot Petting Zoo will now be available on Thingiverse!

You heard us talk about these and you saw it all over Engadget and CNET and a bunch of other spots. We are incredibly proud of these little guys, and not just because they won Editor’s Choice from Maker Faire. They represent what a MakerBot is capable of and the power of combining open-source hardware technologies.

Now it’s time for the more important phase in the project: when we put the files in your hands and tell you to run free with them. (Don’t run too free. In our experience, you’ll need a fence to keep these robots in one place). In keeping with the open-source, collaborative spirit of everything we do here, the designs are now yours to use as you please. And the beauty is you can take these and be inspired to come up with other pet robots, and help us turn this petting zoo into a robot circus.

The first set of files to go up are for Wheely, the “robotic chicken” designed by Michael Curry. Here is how Michael describes his pet robot.

Wheely is a domesticated subspecies of the common Flightless Aircraft.  Found in the disused aerodromes of the southwestern deserts, Wheelies descend from earlier generations of autonomous UAV’s.  They live in rigorously organized communities called ‘squadrons’ and spend most of their lives socializing.  Largely ambivalent to other mechanical organisms, Wheely retains his ancestors ability to detect electric fields.

Wheely is up on Thingiverse right now (!!), and the rest of the bots — Bumper, Bubble, and Button — will be up in the next couple of days. Go make these, make them different, make them yours!

Untitled by MakerBot

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The other day the guys at the Florida-based marketing agency Pixil, represented on Thingiverse by videopixil and ecken, posted their review of a Discovery Daypack bag from Tenba (video below). Now we see through twitter that they’ve added a clip to a Tenba bag for attaching a monopod. Nice!

This also gets a Where You MakerBot, since I saw in their twitter feed that they’ve moved their Replicator into a nice new home. I like that it’s getting some of that good Florida sunshine.

We had a fun visit last night from actor/musician/artist/tech evangelist/cowboy hat evangelist Jared Leto, one of Fast Company’s 100 Most Creative People in Business.

People know Jared from movies (Requiem for a Dream, Prefontaine, Panic Room) and TV (My So-Called Life), and then more recently from his shift into music. His band 30 Seconds to Mars won an MTV Video Music Award for the song Kings & Queens.

But as Fast Company points out, Jared’s newest journey into the world of startups is turning heads. We got a chance to see why yesterday. He explained clearly what it is his company The Hive does for bands and the kind of innovations that excite and interest him. The Hive is a company Jared started to help his band connect with the real fans through social media. A more recent venture Vyrt lets fans login and watch a livestream of a concert, which is huge for anyone that doesn’t live in a city with a lot of show venues, and perfect for bands to reach their truly passionate fans around the world. This is a guy who completely understands community.

We explained to Jared that a MakerBot is a robot that makes whatever you want, and he had some really exciting ideas about the future of MakerBot and Thingiverse and it was nice to exchange ideas with him and his team. He’s somebody who connects people — and a genius at social media, by the way — so he totally understood the power to share ideas and things within a huge community.

And of course the creative aspect wasn’t lost on him either. We got a chance to show Jared and his team the R. Maker Adventures animation series and he was impressed.

We were genuinely excited to have an artist and entrepreneur like Jared in the house. We can’t wait to find out what he’ll do with MakerBot, and if you have any suggestions for Jared, email our tips line or shoot him a tweet @jaredleto.

We make an open-source robot so that people can make better things and a better worlds. That’s why we work really hard to keep costs down on high quality machines and plastic. We just want people to have this stuff and start imagining and doing.

What if kids could imagine the workshop of their dreams? What if little girl could look at a LEGO set and think of herself as a person who runs a technology company?

Ladyada, the master maker and hardware hacker at adafruit, and LEGO artist Bruce Lowell have created a fun, inspirational LEGO set to get boys and girls excited about engineering. Look at this set!

We are really excited about this LEGO set, and we need you guys to go VOTE for it at LEGO Cuusoo! In order for this to become a real set, it needs 10,000 votes. Help give kids the chance to imagine what it’s like to run a hardware and electronics company and learn about open source. This is what empowerment looks like at an early age, and MakerBot is in full support.

Just think what a kid might decide to learn about when she sees this laser cutter.

Or when he encounters this clean workspace with soldering station.

It’s a special day, MakerBot world. May 25 is the anniversary of the release of A New Hope (Star Wars Episode IV), the day chosen as Towel Day to remember Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy author Douglas Adams, and the day on which the Glorious Revolution occurred in Terry Pratchett’s Discworld.

That’s a whole lotta geek, so without further ado we wish you,

Happy Geek Pride Day!

Top Five Things To Make On Geek Pride Day.

Towel Hook by chapulina, so that you may always know where your towel is.

…any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is, is clearly a man to be reckoned with. — Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, page 21 (in my copy)

 

 

The always popular Han Solo in Carbonite by gianteye. This has been downloaded over 1,100 times, but needs some refreshing. MakerCubed did a good job three weeks ago, and with a good color choice, I should add. Who’s going to try this today?

Will Langford’s Glasses and/or Waltorg’s Ultra Configurable Geek Glasses, and/or Hipster Geek Glasses by Beehive. It’s really interesting that glasses are associated with geekyness, and now we have the chance to make whatever kind of glasses we want. That’s like geek power, no?

Geek key chain by InnovationByLayers. BLING.

We all gotta eat, and a geek’s gotta sketch, amirite? The last thing on today’s list is MakerBlock’s gorgeous Pencil Case for 10 Pencils (that’s “exactly 10 pencils”, just so we’re clear). It looks awesome in PLA, and it’ll look fantastic crammed into the front pocket of your short sleeve button down.