MakerBot Industries

Success!

Thingiverse user arkatipe recently posted their designs for a “device to repair plastic hangers.”  The device itself is little more than a hollow plastic cylinder.  However, the way arkatipe used this simple PLA cylinder is particularly interesting.

This is intentionally a little bit smaller than the hanger diameter. I’d recommend that you clean it up, drop it in a cup of water, then stick it in the microwave for a minute or so. After it’s softened up, press it on the hanger and hold it in shape until it hardens.

PLA softens at a much lower temperature than ABS and tends to hold the heat a little longer, staying malleable.  Having a little plastic part that can be printed very close to what you need, softened, molded, and then left to cool and harden could be incredibly useful.  It really opens up a world of possibilities.  If there were a particular shape that one could foresee being very useful, you could print up several of them and keep them on hand.  When you’re read to use them, moisten, nuke, mold, harden.

Thanks arkatipe!

Device to repair a plastic hanger by arkatipe

Because hangers cost $1.00, and the plastic to fix them is less than $0.01. Design is intended for PLA. Additionally, this can be used to justify the expense of your 3D printer to your significant other, provided you have several hundred broken hangers.

This thing brought to you by

Photo credit

• projectshellter.com
• @ProjectShellter
• bit.ly/​ProjectShellter
• bit.ly/​ProjectShellterShells
• youtube.com/​ProjectShellterVideos

This guest post is part of Project Shellter.

Mark Sproul of the Rutgers School of Engineering has his students putting together their senior design projects in Industrial Engineering using MakerBot electronics!  For those of you who remember the very early days of MakerBot¹ probably recall that our electronics have been used in everything from RepStraps, to home-brew 3d printers, to CNC mills.  Right now, one of Mark’s students have begun construction of a CNC pick-and-place robot and the other is working on a CNC cutter for vinyl or leather.

A pick-and-place machine is a robot that picks up very small surface mount electronics and places them in the appropriate location and orientation.  Having such a device allows a user to quickly create electronics using smaller and cheaper surface mount electronics parts.  A DIY pick-and-place machine is a pretty big deal because commercial machines are incredibly expensive – in the tens of thousands of dollars for even a used machine.  Here’s a short video of their prototype pick-and-place machine going through some calibration steps.

Keep up the awesome work guys!

1. Which is really funny given that we’re less than three years old! [↩]

Thingiverse citizen deeeep is organizing a workshop around Project Shellter at TEDxYouth in Flanders, Belgium on November 20:

We are organizing a workshop for kids from 11 to 18 year old during the TEDxYouth@Flanders event in Belgium.
The idea is that the kids will sketch out their ideas for the shells and then some of them will get picked and made in CAD and printed. I will try to post the sketches and CAD files on thingiverse once they are done, so everybody can enjoy them and the kids can see their models online and see people liking them and printing them.

Thanks for the interest and support deeep!

We can’t wait to see what shells the kids create! Upload them to Thingiverse and we’ll print them out put them in the @ShellterEast and @ShellterWest crabitats!

If you’re in Flanders on November 20, go check out the event!

Follow, share and contribute to help save hermit crabs by keeping natural shells in the wild! Use the hashtag #shellter:

• projectshellter.com
• @ProjectShellter
• @ShellterEast
• @ShellterWest
• Thingiverse
• bit.ly/​ProjectShellter
• bit.ly/​ProjectShellterCams

This guest post is part of Project Shellter.

As many of you know, the recent release of ReplicatorG has introduced some of the software features that are necessary to use your Thing-O-Matic with two extruders, a process we like to call DualStrusion.

DualStrusion is highly experimental right now, and we’re all learning about it — engineers, developers, and tech support agents included.  While it’s a very exciting process, don’t expect DualStrusion to work right out of the box without some serious troubleshooting: that’s the cost of being on the cutting edge.

In light of that, we’ve just created a new support forum for DualStrusion experimenters to share their learning and experiences.  And so, I give to you: the DualStrusion experimenters support forum.

Guess what?! I got a fever, and the only prescription is more USB cables!

One of the coolest features of the MakerBot Thing-O-Matic 3D printer is the enclosed electronics contained entirely within the base of the machine.  Not only does it help keep the cables organized and electronic bits out of the way, but it makes for a more polished and clean looking machine when sitting on your desk.  Once your bot is assembled, you’re going to be having too much fun making things to ever want to open it up again.

…which is the source of inspiration from today’s Thing-O-Matic pro tip courtesy of resident MakerBot software developer Matt Metts.  Matt suggests running an extra USB cable, A to B, to the extruder board inside and leaving it there.  That way you won’t have to keep opening your Thing-O-Matic each time you want to update your extruder’s firmware!

This is one of several guest posts I’ll be making during the Project Shellter residency.

While Project Shellter is new, it did not emerge from a vacuum. Exploration into the mathematics of sea shells dates back decades, and the desire to help out hermit crabs, years. Project Shellter benefits from these investigations and innovations.

In chronological order, here is a partial list of precedents that inform the project.

Mathematics

In the 1960s, interest in the beauty and mathematics of sea shells held the attention of computer graphics pioneers. One of the first to publish his findings was David M. Raup. His landmark papers have informed generations of researchers since, serving as canonical references within the fields of both biological and computer science.

Alternative Material

Glass blowers have created shells that are beautiful and photogenic. However, due to cost and the rambunctious nature of happy healthy hermit crabs – a broken shell could be fatal – glass shells are a seldom-used novelty. This image by photographer Frank Greenaway was created in 2004.

Alternative Design

Photo credit

In 2005, Dr. Elizabeth Demaray and a group of engineering students at Rutgers University explored alternative hermit crab shell designs. The Hand Up Project was the culmination of their research and it was the first project to use rapid prototyping materials and processes to manufacture hermit crab shells.

Project Shellter

Photo credit

Building on these and other precedents, Project Shellter aims to engage the community of 3D printer operators to crowd-source the science and resources necessary to design and manufacture viable hermit crab shells for domestic use. The goal is to reduce harvesting of natural shells as a way to address shortages in the wild.

It is an open source, pragmatic, social investigation into hermit crab behavior as a means to create 3D printable shells. The public nature of the project is designed to encourage simultaneous investigations.

The first prototype shell model has been placed in the public domain and is available now.

Project Shellter is social! Follow, share and contribute to help save hermit crabs by keeping natural shells in the wild!

• ProjectShellter.com
• @ProjectShellter
• @ShellterEast
• @ShellterWest
• Thingiverse
• bit.ly/​projectshellter

For those wishing to dig deeper, here is a partial bibliography of research informing Project Shellter.

Computer as Aid in Describing Form in Gastropod Shells 

Geometric Analysis of Shell Coiling: General Problems

Population Consequences of Shell Utilization by Hermit Crabs

Competition and Mechanism of Coexistence in Three Sympatric of Intertidal Hermit Crabs

Modeling Seashells

Hermit Crab Shell Design

Shell-selection behavior of the hermit crab Pagurus granosimanus in Relation to Isolation, Competition, and Predation

Thing-o-Matic Alternate Front Panel by dougkeenan

Sometimes a simple hack is all it takes.  Just look at dougkeenan’s “Thing-o-Matic Alternate Front Panel.”

Why would you want a front panel that has a little divot in the left side?  Well, if you’re rocking a MakerBot Automated Build Platform, you already the know the answer.  The MakerBot ABP has gears that advance the conveyor belt so that it can keep printing part after part.  However, those gears on the side rob the operator of a few precious millimeters of build space in the X direction.¹  My making a little cut out, dougkeenan has effectively increased the build area for his Thing-O-Matic.  One of the cool things is that you could even just cut this little piece out of your front panel and gain the extra build area too!

Thing-o-Matic alternate front panel by dougkeenan

panel outline is slightly trapezoidal, with a notch for the ABP gears

This thing brought to you by

1. Left and right. [↩]

Those of you who got a chance to stop by Maker Faire this weekend (or read our earlier blog post) are probably wondering when you too can experiment with dual extrusion heads. The answer is: now! We’ve integrated tools into ReplicatorG that simplify the process of creating a two-material print. They’re not in the released version of ReplicatorG yet, but they are available in a git branch for experimenters who want to get a jump start on the future. And who doesn’t want to get a jump start on the future? Details for the bold below!

Read the rest of this entry »

Gnome and Gnome

There is no doubt Tony Buser has definitely done more for the 3D printing community than anyone else when it comes to advancing gnome duplication and teleportation technology.  However, I’m convinced that his SpinScan open source software and hadware has a larger potential besides assisting in the controversial practice of gnome cloning. ¹  Tony hasn’t finalized the materials list, but the final project would probably involve a decent web camera with good low light performance² , a cheap laser³ , a stepper driver, a stepper motor, an arduino, a few bearings, threaded rod, and some nuts and bolts.  The whole lot would set you back around $200 and significantly less if you can scavenge a few parts.

So, if you could scan and print anything, what would it be?⁴

Spinscan by tbuser

Gnome Scan #3 by tbuser

This one came out pretty well and is the most complete 360 degree gnome scan yet. It was also the first scan using my new printed turntable and spinscan software from thingiverse.com/thing:9972 Spinscan isn't calculating the Z axis correctly, so if you download the point cloud you'll see it was stretched. I had to shrink the Z axis in blender. Other then that and 2 steps in meshlab, it required no cleanup or merging of multiple point clouds, spinscan got a complete scan of all sides in one go.

This thing brought to you by

1. I mean, the anti-gnome-stem-cell lobby is just insane! [↩]
2. Perhaps around $100 [↩]
3. He got a $4 laser from eBay [↩]
4. But, perhaps a better question is…  what are you waiting for?! [↩]