MakerBot Industries

Here’s another awesome Thingiverse camera item: this time, it’s an adapter to use the iPhone camera to take photos from your microscope.  This looks like an excellent way to get those images of plates into your lab reports.  This should be handy whether you’re checking your wine barrels for a brettanomyces outbreak or figuring out how to fight vicious, rapidly mutating bacteria!  Or just doing nice, safe science projects.  It’s up to you.

Good work Boogie!  Keep the awesome sciencey designs coming!

iPhone to Microscope mount by Boogie

This thing basically holds your iphone in position with the microscope eyepiece. It allows you to turn your iphone into a digital camera/view screen for a binocular type microscope. Great for group viewings or capturing microscopic images with your iphone and microscope. Great tool for classrooms. The mount was designed specifically for the Edmund Scientific binocular type microscope. It slips right over the eye pieces. If you don't have an iPhone, you can print just the base mount and use rubber bands to hold your phone/camera on.

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There’s a nice little piece over on the Tinkercad blog about a successful program at the Marymount School here in New York.  Jaymes Dec has been using Tinkercad and MakerBots to teach the students about design and fabrication, and the results are pretty rad.

If you like pictures of young people smiling next to MakerBots or charming, whimsical designs made by children, it’s definitely worth a read.

P.S. If you’re interested in printing these designs, the Tinkercad sharing site does let you download an .stl — just click on the “Print 3d” button and then click “Download stl” in the popup.

We had a couple of unexpected but welcome visitors in the Botfarm workshop yesterday: Bilal and Colin of Pocket Factory.  Pocket Factory has been driving around the country with several 3d Printers (including several Thing-O-Matics) for some time now, presenting 3d printing technology in various settings and places.  They debriefed us on the project and we helped them get one of their Thing-O-Matics back in service — a Thing-O-Matic that had been literally around the world, including visits to Hong Kong and Baja California.

Take some time to read their dispatches over on Makezine — during their travels, they’ve had some interesting experiences and elicited a wide variety of strong reactions from many people.  There’s a particularly pertinent story about a run-in with an old-tech artisan who had a very negative take on their project and rapid prototyping in general.

This is one of the best glimpses we have of what will be happening as the general public learns about small-scale digital manufacturing — it’s definitely worth a read.  Stay tuned for a wrap-up video as their project winds to a close!

That’s right: the intrepid world-travelers from Barcelona’s blablabLAB are still playing world traveler, this time in São Paulo, Brazil.  They performed their “Be Your Own Souvenir” installation once more, this time seven days straight for an audience of 7,000 students!

Perhaps even better, they’ve recently posted a scan of Jon “maddog” Hall, legendary Linux programmer and community organizer, to Thingiverse! (Not enough beard detail if you ask me.)

Keep up the good work, guys!  And for everybody else: are you involved in a project that’s as awesome as what they’re doing?  Drop us a line at support@makerbot.com and we’ll help share your story.

Jon maddog Hall by blablabLAB

thanks to... dammitcoetzee for his penguin Jon for his software and permission ;)

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Ahh, mid-February.  The week we all turn our thoughts to love.  And here we have the perfect Valentine’s Day gift — an adorable Cthulhu figurine!  What better way to celebrate an ersatz holiday popularized by Chaucer than with a Lovecraftian gift?

This design even comes with a lullaby you can sing with your beloved:

Rock-a-bye Cthulhu, In R’lyeh deep.
Dead you may be, or only in sleep.
When you awake, the madness will fall

Romantic, right?  cymon‘s significant other sure is a lucky one.  The only thing you’ll have to worry about it setting the bar too high for next year!

Cthulhu mini - Lovecraft Collection by cymon

Rock-a-bye Cthulhu, In R'lyeh deep. Dead you may be, or only in sleep. When you awake, the madness will fall, Then the Old Ones will teach man new ways to shout and kill and revel, and all the earth would flame with a holocaust of ecstasy and freedom. This is the first of a new set of pieces designed to be a desktop figures or re-sized to be a suitable replacement for simple pawns in your favorite board games. Print off a whole set to add a touch of madness to any game. I don't have a 3D printer so I'll need your support and feedback if you have one.

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Autodesk 123d is one of many freely-available apps that new MakerBot users might consider learning.  And unlike some other programs we love, it looks like Autodesk wants it to be easy to print your models on a MakerBot.  In fact, they want it so much that they’ve just posted the above video on their youtube channel.

It’s a bit long (over 9 minutes) but put it on your list for when you’re woodshedding your 3d-modeling chops.  While it’s specifically aimed at the Thing-O-Matic, most of what they’re saying should transfer to the Replicator.  Just model for a larger build area!

123d is a bit different from other modeling programs, and might be a bit counter-intuitive if you’re used to one of the others.  However, their youtube channel has a number of tutorials and there are some neat things about the project (like an iPad app and a photo-to-model program.)

If you’re looking to pick up some 3d modeling skills while you’re waiting for your Replicator, this is one of many great programs to learn!

In the past, I’ve decried the lack of kitchen-related items on the Thingiverse, but previous few of us (myself certainly included) have done much to fill in this gap.

It thus gives me all the more pleasure to share this brilliant, largely 3d-printed solution to one of mankind’s oldest and most challenging culinary problems: the drying of fresh, hand-made pasta.

At one time or another, our less culinarily-oriented partners have all walked in on a horror scene of kitchen chairs festooned with eggy, yellow strands, fresh from our well-loved Marcato Atlas.  If only we had known we were just a few dowels and 3d-printed connectors away from a workable pasta-drying solution!  Think of the pasta-related arguments we would have been spared…

Thank you fma for your thoughtful design!

Pasta dryer by fma

This is a pasta dryer, inspired from ones you can buy. But this one is printable!

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Thingiverse use RyGuy gets a special shoutout for presentation on this design: an 8-bit version of the indispensable piggy bank.

While we of course love saving our pennies for a rainy day, we may have selected a different design if it weren’t for the excellent photographic documentation, showing off our super-bright fluorescent plastic.  Also, check out the staging: it uses actual money!  Very appealing.

Cheers to RyGuy for making Thingiverse look very pro!

8-bit Piggy Bank by RyGuy

Yes, this is a fully functional 8-bit big money piggy bank! My 3yr old daughter need a safe place to keep all her high-stakes rock/paper/scissors winnings. She sat down with me in-front of a clean Sketchup session and we began to construct a piggy bank that Mario would approve of. Check my screen shots, I uploaded a plethora of images including object dimensions. I printed this in ~6hrs using no support on my Thing-O-Matic's ABP. My RIG: TOM # 4890 MK6+ 1.75mm .4 nozzle ABP with aluminum plate topper and titanium belt covered in kapton

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Well now…it’s the end of January, which means the post-holiday glow has subsided and we’re back to the long slog…in a few months, there might be vacations to look forward to (or maybe just warm, sunny days) but for now, we’re all just trying to get through the week.  If you’re like most people on the internet, this means only one thing:

Cats.

So why not print some cat enhancements on your MakerBot?!  Luckily, brand-new Thingiverse user Surveyor has posted a cool design to let us do just that.

Just in case you’re wondering, links to youtube videos of your cat playing with this printed toy will be appreciated.

Cat Toy by Surveyor

I made this to keep my cat occupied. I've printed about a dozen but they keep disappearing. I suspect they're under the couch.

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A remarkable message came into the support desk this week: the story of an active-duty soldier who went the extra mile to get and build his MakerBot Thing-O-Matic while on deployment in Iraq.

Here’s a bit more detail from Josh:

The story is taken from a publication called ‘Expeditionary Times’, it was a newspaper that was circulated in Joint Base Balad, AKA Anaconda in Balad, Iraq. It served soldiers assigned to Iraq during the Iraqi Campaign. My roommate just happened to work at the Newspaper and he was intrigued by my build, which took about five weeks (Sometimes you have to be patient!).

It took me forever to find a 240V Solder Gun. I eventually found one in a Iraqi Bazaar. It was obviously not for sale, but I tried anyways. At first the guy totally refused since they use it to fix nicknacks they sell soldiers, but I started haggling. Iraqi men love to haggle more than anything else so he sold it and I got robbed for the outrageous price of $12.00, I’m sure I could have gotten him to $5 but I wanted that iron bad. Keep in mind a dollar there is like ten here, probably 15 in Brooklyn!

My roommates didn’t complain but I didn’t use it quite as often as I’d like, sharing a 12×12 room with three other soldiers requires diplomacy that i wasn’t sure melting plastic could mend. I moved a couple of more places and the MakerBot was always the first thing out.

It generated a lot of interest. The motorpool Sergeant loved it, he even got me a donated travelcase for it. Those things aren’t cheap!

Needless to say, we are quite impressed with the lengths to which the Staff Sergeant went in order to build his Thing-O-Matic.  What’s more, it sounds like he’s got dome fever (a condition we share) — he’s using his bot to protoype geodesic dome connectors as a type of low-cost housing.

MakerBot Operators are generally pretty interesting, but this is definitely one of the best stories we’ve heard in awhile.  Staff Sgt. Rucinski: We salute you for vision and tenacity!

For the complete story, click here: Pdf