They’re multiplying!

Backstory: after their debut at the Maker Faire Bay Area 2012, the creatures of the MakerBot Robot Petting Zoo were put onto Thingiverse. First Wheely, then Bumper Bot, Button Bot, and Bubble Bot.

And then we noticed that a couple of these bots were quietly re-made by two brave Thingiverse citizens. Woot!

Here’s Xephius’ version of Wheely, with a hilarious description below.

This is a descendant of early high performance sport UAV’s that settled in BC’s Fraser Valley. They can easily be identified by the bright yellow and red markings and tell tail Stainless Steel Rodgers hardware in Imperial not Metric. (Canadian Tire doesn’t carry any M3 hardware!) Because of the relatively low number of wild UAV’s in BC (420 in last count), they are protected by the Province. Recent observations show they are attracted to Poutine, Hockey pucks, and Timbits, seen here courting a Sieg X2 CNC mill…

Just hours ago, a new cousin to this Wheely derivative popped up, too! Here’s cornwarrior’s version of Bumper Bot.

Awesome work by these two superstar Thingiverse members Xephius (aka John Cooney) and cornwarrior (aka Josh Kugler)!

Two down, two to go. Who will complete the happy family?

I always thought “handy” meant building the perfect tree house for your kids, and I always thought I’d grow up to be Bob Vila (but…taller?).  Now I’m realizing there’s a new kind of handyman. A MakerBot, for example, is a new power tool  in that belt. I’d like to be the kind of dad who builds treehouses, but also the kind who makes the things that go in the treehouse, or who makes the perfect toothbrush holder per my kids’ demands.

MakerBotting is something dads and kids do together. And that is awesome.

With Father’s Day around the corner, it’s a good time to refresh some of our favorite MakerBot Community dads. Here’s a MakerBot TV episode Annelise made about Steve Conine, a dad who uses a MakerBot to make toys. You could say he makes toys for his kids, but it’s more correct to say he makes toys with his kids. Steve’s files have been downloaded thousands of times all together, including the Starfish, which he and his kids perfected together.

Thingiverse citizen paulharter has posted instructions for converting your build on his Minecraft server  into an .stl file.

Log in to Minecraft and go to 46.38.166.50

Build with sand inside the building

Add a signpost with your email

Press PRINT and you will be sent a .stl file of your model

Paul’s using OpenSCAD for the conversion, and he provides this one caution in the comments so far: creating a model with blocks that only touch diagonally point-to-point confuse the system, so be sure to have a connection with an edge. If you want a rundown on using OpenSCAD, click the link above. Our Education Team has put together all sorts of good information on various modeling software.

Gears Gears Gears.

The search “gears” returns 407 things on Thingiverse, and “gear” shoots back 641. Clearly there is something that gets us excited about parts that translate torque from one thing to the next. The best example of our shared obsession is, of course, Heart Gears.

MAKE Magazine’s Sean Michael Ragan has gifted the world with a fantastic “family tree” (on his personal site) of the heart gears sensation on Thingiverse. Here’s a still image of the chart, but you should visit the link to get a clickable version. The post also includes the source code for generating the tree.

This is awesome awesome awesome. Our recent project at the Met, which will now be spreading into towns and cities, highlights how important it is to talk about the origins of physical things. Things and ideas have roots and families and beginnings. It’s so important to keep this in mind when uploading things in a community like Thingiverse. As a reminder, if you forget how to assign “ancestry” to your Thing, this blog post explains it.

From Lem at Robots Dreams:

There isn’t a lot of information available yet, but here’s what is rumored so far:

The new robot dog, named the Omnibot i-SODOG, is expected to have realistic dog-like movement utilizing 15 custom designed servo motors. It will feature voice recognition and respond to hand signals using motion detection sensors. In addition to a dedicated remote control that looks similar to the i-SOBOT humanoid control unit, i-SODOG can be controlled using a smartphone. We’re guessing that the interface will be Bluetooth.

My first thought was, “look at that face!” And then I thought, how cool would it be if the company that will release this robot, Takara Tomy, had a Thingiverse page where you could go and download different faces designed to work with their product?