MakerBot Industries

On Thingiverse, we each play a number of roles — modeler, maker, curator, cheerleader, and printer. At World Maker Faire this coming weekend (Sept 17th-18th), the MakerBot booth will be showcase some of our favorite designs from Thingiverse on our display table and printing on the BotFarm. This satisfies the first three categories.¹

So what about great MakerBot Operator masterprints that we all “coo” over on the “Whose Making What” parade?

If you have a print you are particularly proud of and want to donate to us for the Faire, bring it up to our booth and check it in with one of our “RaceWay Pit Crew” staffers. We will place your object on our display table (or within the Raceway set per your request) and tag it with the Thingiverse item number and your name as printer.

Just to make sure, you should upload a snapshot of your print to Thingiverse as an “I Made One” to preserve the memories. While we will keep these items out of the hands of our visitors, the exuberance of visitor’s love for our booth has been known to clear us out.²

Some examples of masterprints that will be on display include TheMakerGuy‘s print of Webca’s 3D Printed Full Sized MakerBot³ and Skimbal‘s & Tbuser‘s prints of some of their own designs.

When we get back from Maker Faire we will unpack our collection of prints and rebuild the MakerBot Workshop Trophy  Case, opposite the recently expanded BotFarm. Your masterprints will be labeled and added to our display!

1. And we are bringing our racing pompomps for the fourth. [↩]
2. Where or where did our brass Stanford bunny go? [↩]
3. His son Elliot, recently on MakerBot.TV, is not afraid to take up our Sword of Omens to defend his dad’s week-long print [↩]

We’ve been working overtime getting our Turtle Shell Racers ready for Maker Faire!  If you didn’t hear the news, we’re going to have a lot of racers running at our booth, and, as you can see in the above slideshow, it’s been a group effort to get everything ready.

Is something like this going on at your home?  If you’ve at home working on your own amazing, 3d-printed racing creation, we are inviting you to bring it to our Maker Faire area and run it around the track for a chance at weekend bragging rights.  Who says track days are only for car nuts?

We really want — really need — a 3D printable cute robot mascot.¹ So when we heard that GrabCAD wanted to collaborate with us, we took this opportunity to create a challenge on their site and put up a brand new MakerBot Thing-O-Matic kit as stakes for the engineer who blows our minds and warm our hearts.

The concept of the robot is wide open so feel free to enter creatures of all shapes and styles. Inspired by the lunchbox on wheels that rolled around on the Death Star in Star Wars? Great! You’re a fan of humanoid robots like the B9 from Lost in Space? Super! All shapes of robots’ designs are expected to participate. The winning entry will become the lead MakerBot Robot Mascot. It is very likely that most, if not all entries will be filmed for MakerBot.TV videos. The finalists will have their robots 3D printed on a MakerBot at MakerBot HQ and sent to them.

You may submit as many robots as you like, just don’t wait around! This competition ends on September 28th.

The inspiration for this challenge is Tony Buser’s “BOB” robot. We saw this and all we could think of was “MORE!”, especially considering the popularity of robot models in the Thingiverse, on GrabCAD’s Library, and elsewhere in the Internet kingdom.

Bob is built from a toolset of robot parts that include joints for arms and ears. This toolset gives you a nice set of components that you can use to make your robot design have pose-able parts. The toolset also includes the MakerBot M logo design to make it easy to badge the robot with it. Using the toolset is not required, but we wanted to make the functioning side as easy as possible for people to express their robo-creativity, so some of the components are offered up front for optional use in this challenge.

We’re doing this with GrabCAD, a great community and platform for engineers to collaborate and get hired to make things. Head on over to GrabCAD to read the rules and requirements, and get started with our challenge. We hope that you will post your projects on Thingiverse as well as GrabCAD so that both communities can benefit from your creativity!

1. Yeah, we said “cute.” [↩]

Another video from the GE Air Show project, this time featuring helicopters. The client (GE) has discovered what most of us already know: that watching a Makerbot print is hypnotic! The creative direction has been to emphasize the design and print process, so you’ll be seeing more timelapse takes of the print.

This is likely to be the penultimate video of the project: they are taking submissions for the grand finale right now on the Facebook page.

The GE Air Show continues, with a third episode of user-submitted designs featuring classic airplanes. As always, the printable files can be found on the GE Thingiverse page.

It’s a challenge to respond quickly to user submissions: the list of ideas is received on Sunday evening, and then the team works on it during Monday and Tuesday, starting to print on Monday afternoons. After that, the production crew puts together the video and it is usually online by Thursday or Friday. In order to work so fast, the team is using a number of techniques: some models are made in OpenSCAD, others in Sketchup and and other tools from scratch, and some are based on models from the Sketchup 3D warehouse. Netfabb is useful for slicing a model into different parts. After a few weeks of doing this, we’ve now evolved a series of useful tools and techniques, building up common part libraries (eg. for propellers) and a streamlined workflow for making objects printable (ie. almost everything is designed to print in sections, in order to avoid overhangs and support material).

A question that has come up a few times is “what is GE doing on Thingiverse?”  The answer is, a lot of things:

• Demonstrating support for innovative new companies and technologies, such as Makerbot and 3D printing
• Connecting with the community of makers, innovators and DIYers
• Learning about social media, and the kinds of things that will engage social media users (the number of “likes” on the GE Facebook page has gone from 15,000 to more than 90,000 since the Airshow started!)
• Experimenting with very fast turnaround marketing, highly responsive to users (this project involves doing in less than a week what would usually take months, and doing it repeatedly)

The exciting thing about this is that it is an experiment, everyone (including GE) is learning as it goes along. Suggestions and contributions are most welcome, via the GE Facebook page, or comments on the Thingiverse page.

The humble maple seed

A few days ago @mostley aka Sven H. suggested another design challenge – designing a “maple leaf copter.” ¹  For those of you who haven’t seen one, a maple seed has a long thin wing-like structure.  As the seeds fall, they spin rapidly.  The better the particular seed is balanced, the slower it falls and the faster it spins.  While there are some artificial models, such as this origami version, a 3D printable version would make an incredible quick-printing demonstration piece and all-around super cool toy.  Some of these links, especially this discussion forum with pictures and diagrams or perhaps a review of the origami model, might help you design your own.

So, to everyone who reads this blog…  I hereby challenge you to a “maple seed copter” design race.  All you have to do is design and upload a printable maple seed-inspired copter to Thingiverse and tag it with “mapleseed.”  There’s no prize money on this one, just bragging rights, so it’s open to everyone, enter as many times as you like, and make something awesome!  The winning design, determined by the number of likes + comments, will be announced Monday morning on the blog.  Good luck!

(Although, if are motivated by money, the $50.00 prize for the disc shooter challenge is still up for grabs!)

1. Photo courtesy of Armand Agasi [↩]

Those of you lucky enough to be in Vancouver right now attending SIGGRAPH 2011 – the world conference of computer graphics and interactivity luminaries — might have noticed that MakerBot has shown up…with a mini-BotFarm!

Make sure to drop by and say hello to MakerBot Co-Founder Adam and Distribution & Customer Support Manager Isaac!

I’ve been working on an exciting project lately: the GE Air Show. The idea is to get people to submit models, sketches, concepts or ideas for weird and wonderful flying machines, print them on a Makerbot, and then have them star in a video set in a miniature air show of the imagination. At the end of the month we’re hoping to have the airport crowded with all kinds of aircraft – so please submit your ideas.

We’re looking for submissions regardless of 3D design skills: you can submit sketches, mockups or just your brilliant idea to hello.social@ge.com, and you can check out other comments and submissions at facebook.com/ge. The models that are being built will be listed on the GE page at Thingiverse, thingiverse.com/GE, so keep checking back for updates.

I’ve been working together with Andrew Rutter on building the Makerbots, and getting 3D models ready for printing. It’s been very interesting so far: both Thing-O-Matics were up and running within a day – in fact, one of them was put together in only three and half hours! The new cartridge-based extruder is much simpler to assemble, and the Thing-O-Matic can certainly produce great results with a lot less tuning than was required for previous models.

This project is interesting because it highlights how quickly you can go from a concept to a physical object through 3D printing. By offering to model sketches or ideas that people have sent in, it makes it possible for people unfamiliar with 3D design to see their ideas made real. A lot of requests are for models of existing aircraft, but we’d really like for people to submit ideas for original and fanciful designs.

MakerBot Industries is back from MakerFaire Detroit 2011 — where Matt and Keith shared cool Space Month things from Thingiverse, met many incredible people, and found their fellow exhibitors Awesome. Check out our slideshow for highlights from the weekend.

Detroit is a special place, and the each year we make it to the Faire here it feels more and more essential that we do so. See you all at World MakerFaire NYC 2011 in September!

Colbert Head Gears by emmett

Thingiverse citizen Pattywac recently organized a “MakerStrong Mashup Design Challege.”  The winner was to receive $60.00 from Pattwac himself with MakerBot kicking in another $100.00 in store credit!  And now it is time to reveal that winner…

Despite the difficulty of working with and not ruining such a flawless bust, there were some great entries to the Makerstrong design challenge.  Entries ranging from the beautification of my favorite childhood claymation show (Gumbert by JamieClay), to a tool for the next Colbert wannabe/stalker (Large Stephen Colbert Head by ALxD) made the judging process entertaining.

In the end emmett was able to claim the prize with a “decidedly creepier derivative” of his Heart Gears, which he called the “Colbert Head Gears.”

Congrats to emmett, the first repeat winner of these design challenges!

Thanks to everyone who created an entry and hope to see you next time!

Emmett, make sure to send Pattywac your paypal info!

Colbert Head Gears by emmett

Colbert Head Gears by emmett

This is my tribute to the twisted mind of Steven Colbert. It is also a decidedly creepier derivative of thingiverse.com/thing:6291. Print, assemble, and twist Colbert's head to your heart's content.

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