MakerBot Industries

MakerBot is excited to be part of this weekend’s Art Hack Day in Brooklyn at the 319 Scholes gallery! Participants will be using the Thing-O-Matic throughout the week, from Thursday, January 26th through Saturday, January 28th, to work on their projects. We’ll also be bringing The Replicator by for a few key appearances!

Art Hack Day is an event dedicated to cracking open the process of art-making, with special reverence toward open-source technologies. Artists and collaborators will inhabit 319 Scholes to create and explore the participatory nature of technology, bringing together hackers whose medium is art and artists whose medium is technology.

At the close of the hackathon, a giant party will be held at 319 Scholes to show off participant’s creations! The party will be open to the public, starting at 7 p.m. If you’d like to attend, please RSVP here.

The party will be one of the first opportunities for New Yorkers to be able to see the new MakerBot Replicator live and in the flesh! Stop by and say hi!

If you are in the Greater Los Angeles Area, stop by the Affordable Art Fair this weekend to catch Keith and myself as we introduce the brand new MakerBot Replicator to the West Coast!¹ The remaining hours are today until 8pm and tomorrow (Sunday) from 11am until 6pm.

We have been running “Keith It!”² versions of 3D scans of people like Laurie Anderson, Bre Pettis, Keith Ozar, Phill Niblock, and others, as well as a few other favorites such as a (newly revised v18!) Barrel of Octopi, giant chess pieces, cows, work by Micah Ganske, and others.

We have been visiting with AAF neighbors and presenters such as ArtStar.com, the filmmaker Morgan Spurlock, and the LA-based Toy Art Gallery. We are even making 3D printed versions of vinyl art toys by awesome Art Toy heroes Luke Chueh and Dave Bondi for the Toy Art Gallery staff, work the gallery hasn’t yet had the opportunity to produce.

Quite a few MakerBot Operators such as Miles Lightwood (TeamTeamUSA), Theron Trowbridge and the crew at CRASHspace, and MakerBot’s Taylor Goodman (based in LA) have spent a lot of time with us at the booth, sharing things for us to print and generally introducing us to the wonderful design and DIY community here. We are hoping that Cliff who designed Chess Set I (that we are making giant) and other Thingiverse superstars will stop in also.

At night, we have been running all over town, introducing the machine to CRASHspace, UCLA’s engineering students, galleries and museums, and other hackerspaces. We have also been printing “Keith it!” busts of a cleaned up Beethoven model at night and placing them on the Thomas Organ in the lobby of The Standard – Downtown. To date, these custom 3D printed sculptures have been either stolen or disposed of by the hotel staff within a couple of hours of appearing. But we have photos to document.

Check out our photo gallery below!

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1. Wanna visit for free? drop a request to griffin at makerbot dot com by 11am on Sunday and he’ll see about adding you to the list with a comp’d ticket! [↩]
2. The software engineers working on revisions of ReplicatorG for our new machines created a button called “Keith It” to created maximum-sized objects to suit the new three-times-Thing-O-Matic build volume by Keith’s request. This name will only persist if you request it… [↩]

Gear O’Clock by PrintTo3D

We’ve added 5 last-minute tickets for the clockathon this Sunday. It’ll be a fun day of sharing, hacking, and MakerBotting. Sign up at eventbrite!

You’ve heard about Michael Curry’s Rocket Playset and the MakerBot Astronauts who live there. So you must know that these astronauts love adventure – over their lifetimes they will be traveling to the farthest reaches of Thingiverse to discover the unknown. Follow along on their adventures or take them on adventures of your own.

What lands will your astronauts traveling to? Take some pictures of your MakerBot Astronauts in the wild and show us what kinds of adventures they’ve been having!

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So, you’ve probably heard by now that we got a few awards while we were at CES last week, but what you may not have heard is that we were also giving out a few awards there. As a team we spent some time exploring the tradeshow and seeking out some of the raddest robots, the coolest companies, and the products we could really get behind to present them with MakerBot Awesome Awards. Here’s some pictures of a few of the honored recipients.

Will Smith and Norman Chan from Tested are definitely keeping it awesome – they do a segment on their show called the MakerBot Mystery Build.

Derek from iBallz is keeping it awesome too with his inexpensive and incredibly fun ipad cases.

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Tune in at 7:30pm ET: 4:30pm PT to see the live interview with Bre Pettis from the Engadget CES stage!

Come visit MakerBot in South Hall 4, in Booth #36839

Update! Date moved to 1/22. It is now going to happen on Sunday not Saturday!

Last year, Thingiverse user Syvwlch started working on a clock mechanism that you can print out on your MakerBot. Check out the thing on Thingiverse to see how far the project has gone. Lots of work from the community has gotten this project really far. Let’s see if we can push it over the edge!

You’re invited to join us at the MakerBot Workshop for a Hackathon to work on the MakerBot Clock project. It’s going to be an adventure in clockmaking and we’re going to see what we can get done in one day of hacking on the problem. We’ll also eat pizza! Bring a laptop and if you’ve got a MakerBot, you’re invited to bring that too. My hope is that we can have a few informal workshops through the day so that folks can learn how to make gears in OpenSCAD and we can all help each other learn how to build 16-18th century inventions with 21st century technology.

If you’re going to come, please RSVP on Eventbrite so I can figure out how much pizza to order. It wouldn’t hurt to join the MakerBot Clock Maker Group as well.

MakerBot Clock Hackathon!
Date: January 22, 2012
When: Noon till we’re done.
Where: MakerBot Workshop – 314 Dean St. Brooklyn NY 11217

Here are the gears spinning with the help of a drill by Rustedrobot and another video to click through to see the escapement in action.
If you’re too far away to make it to the event, drop a note in the comments and we’ll turn on the dropcam and you can join in remotely.

New Yorkers can stop by the Wired Store in Times Square tomorrow, Saturday, December 17th, for the chance to see MakerBot demos and witness the Botmobiles in action. Demos will be held from 12pm-2pm with a talk at 1pm from Michael Curry (a.k.a. Skimbal) and John Dimatos, the team behind MakerBot Projects, who will be speaking about the creation of the Botmobile, with a Q&A to follow.

Wired Store

1472 Broadway (corner of 42nd Street)

New York, NY 10036

Stop by the Gizmodo Gallery tomorrow, December 9th at 6pm to catch a talk from MakerBot collaborator and former Artist in Residence, Micah Ganske. An acclaimed painter who has always used tech elements in his work Ganske was excited to create sculptures (like the ones above) on a Thing-O-Matic. Ganske will be speaking about his experience merging art and technology on a MakerBot, with a short Q&A to follow. These awesome sculptures are available for viewing and purchase at both RH Gallery and ArtStar.com.