Okay, who can beat this? John Biehler writes on his Flickr page that he had had his MakerBot Replicator 2 for just over a month (as of December 11), and already clocked 222 hours of build time! That looks like a figure we’d expect here at our headquarters.

To find your build time numbers, use the arrows on the interface of your Replicator or Replicator 2 to navigate to “Info and Settings”. From there, select “Bot Statistics” and see the sum of all your hard work. This feature has only been available in the latest versions of MakerBot Firmware for Replicators. If you haven’t updated to Firmware 6.2, go ahead and do so now through MakerWare or ReplicatorG.

Can you beat 222 hours?

This weekend, while Keith, Nick, Sasha, and Andrew will be on the West Coast at San Diego Comic-Con at the Toy Tokyo booth collaborating with art toy superstar Ron English, Glenn, a gaggle of MakerBot web, software and R&D staffers and I will be making the far shorter pilgrimage over the bridge into Manhattan to spend time in the company of another breed of superstar — the hacker superstars at HOPE Number 9 at the Hotel Pennsylvania!

H.O.P.E. stands for Hackers On Planet Earth (and also “HOtel PEnnsylvania,” the venue for the event) and does beg the question — are there hackers for whom this designation does not apply? (Check through the schedule to see if there is a talk on this topic: are astronauts/cosmonauts the first Hackers Off the Planet Earth?)

HOPE Biennial Conference

For those of you who have never heard of or attended 2600: The Hacker Quarterly‘s biennial conference before, you should take note: not only is this the premier east coast conference dedicated to an impossibly diverse and interesting list of talks budding off the core topics of security, privacy, computers/technology, Internet/broadcast/transmissions, associated legal/policy implications, open source development, and hackers/hacking, this series is constantly pre-saging its own imminent demise – and this might be the very last year! (Just like they said the last two times. No, really this time!)

This year’s keynote speakers William Binney and The Yes Men are unlikely to disappoint, but also take the time to sift through the entire list to learn more about what this conference has on offer. We are hoping that MakerBot’s own Rob Vincent (Rob T Firefly), part of HOPE’s organizing team, will sneak us tips about the best talks and events to attend at this rambunctious, infectious, 24-hour programming hacker conference extraordinaire. Generally the rule of thumb is that if you manage to score a badge and make your way to the event, you are bound to stumble on activities, concerts, talks and people who you will find interesting.

MakerBot @ HOPE Number 9

MakerBot has secured two-tables-worth of vendorspace at the venue where I will be setting up two BotStands featuring our latest MakerBot Replicators, 3D-printed parts, Thingiverse.com, MakerBotTV videos, and a Thingiverse data visualization that Thingiverse participants will tremendously enjoy.

The BotStands are also display cases — so anyone in the MakerBot / Thingiverse community is invited to bring over their 3D printed work to display proudly at our booth (bring a Thingitag or similar label so we can brag about who created what).

There is also a rumor that I can neither confirm nor deny that one of the tables will devolve into a Seej tournament partway through the conference. This likely depends upon whether anyone in the community can come even close to competing with the MakerBot Seej Masters.

But wait, there’s more!

Check out what the MakerBot’s software team will be up to at the conference!

• Friday 10AM @ Dennis: “Community Fabrication: Four Years Later” – talk by MakerBot’s Far McKon, a follow-up to the one he gave 2 HOPEs ago before joining MakerBot
• Saturday 4pm-6pm @ MakerBot Booth: “How to Get Hacking on ReplicatorG” – tech demo lead by MakerBot’s software team
• Sunday 10am-11am @ MakerBot Booth: “How to Get Hacking on MakerBot Community Software Early on Sunday Morning” – tech demo lead by MakerBot’s software team

A Special Note

And if someone asks to borrow your cellphone or laptop “to check something” … well … you might be about to learn a very valuable lesson in computer security practice, if not policy and assumptions made about said policies at network/computer security conferences. Don’t say I didn’t warn you: pranks are an inevitable if unofficial part of the entertainment on offer.

Once again, like a groundhog on February 2nd, the MakerBot software crew emerges from our den of creativity to blink at the sun and tell you that summer is only a few weeks away. But, unlike our friends of the Marmota monax species, we come bearing gifts. Gifts of software, firmware and shiny new features!

ReplicatorG 0034 Released

Since we last announced a new ReplicatorG, we’ve quietly released a few intermediate versions, but for most users this jump will be from ReplicatorG 0029 direct to ReplicatorG 0034. That jump includes a lot of under-the-hood changes and a few UI and usability improvements. They include: faster two-stage warm-up for printing, new UI for the Bot Control Panel, Nozzle Offset tweaking, alternative preferences system, spelling mistake fixes, updated print anchor code, updated start and end gcode, fixed dual extrusion bugs, skeinforge 47 for The Replicator, new GCode commands, and much more.

Installers

To make our Windows and Mac friends happy, we have wrapped ReplicatorG in installers!  And we’ve even made some instructions about how to use them! Sadly, our Linux users are stuck with ye-olde tar.gz installer for the moment.

And more!

After the break, we’ll tell you a little bit about some user interface changes in this new version of ReplicatorG.

Replicator Firmware 5.2 Released!

This firmware is smarter than ever! On some of our first batch of bots, the distance between the Right and Left extruder is further than expected. Replicator Firmware 5.2 includes tools to customize that setting, so your dual material prints can be more accurate than ever. To update your firmware on The Replicator, follow the instructions in the Upload New Firmware wizard found within ReplicatorG’s “Machines” menu.  Make sure you choose “MakerBot Replicator (MightyBoard)” !

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Amy Buser Reconstructed

People have been using the Microsoft Kinect with 3D printing for a while now using excellent programs like Kyle McDonald’s KinectToStl.  However, until recently, most programs can only capture one side of an object which creates a kind of relief sculpture.  To get around this limitation, you could take multiple scans and manually merge them. (hard)  Others like the blablabLAB calibrates and positions multiple Kinect sensors around a scene. (expensive) Last year Microsoft demonstrated something called Kinect Fusion that allows you to carry the Kinect around and dynamically capture all angles of a scene in real time.  Unfortunately, they did not release any software.  Profactor has just released a beta version of free software called ReconstructMe that works a lot like Kinect Fusion.

I’ve scanned a number of things so far, check out the reconstructme tag on Thingiverse!  ReconstructMe works a lot like the Polhemus scanner we used to scan Stephen Colbert where you walk around and wave the Kinect across a scene to capture all sides.  Although the resolution is lower, at least you don’t have to dust your hair in corn starch!  As a matter of fact I’ve found the best way to scan a person is to have them sit in an office chair, point the Kinect at their head, and then slowly spin themselves in a circle.  Once you have a raw scan, I suggest using the free version of NetFabb Studio Basic to rotate it, Cut away the parts you don’t want, and then Repair it to make it solid and suitable for 3D printing on your MakerBot.  The Ponoko blog has an excellent video explaining the process.  You can also place objects on a turntable, like a lazy susan and spin it by hand.  Just make sure that anything ReconstructMe sees within it’s scanning area all rotates in the same way.

There are some limitations to ReconstructMe.  It is Windows only.  In order to do real time reconstruction, you need a fairly powerful video card as it does the calculations on the GPU.  There is an offline recording option that allows you to record on a slower computer and then process it later using a more powerful computer.  However, you don’t get the realtime feedback alerting you when you move too fast or go out of alignment.  Due to the low resolution of the Kinect camera, it’s not that great for scanning small things.  For that, you might want to try something like Spinscan.  However, for scanning large objects like people – it’s awesome!  So go download ReconstructMe and be sure to tag anything you make on Thingiverse with the reconstructme tag.

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OpenJsCad: like OpenSCAD, but using JavaScript

There’s always room for another open source Solid CAD modeller! While I’m a huge fan of OpenSCAD, it does have some limitations.  While you can do some amazingly complex operations in OpenSCAD, you cannot reassign values to variables.  This means that a lot of the usual programming techniques are simply not applicable to OpenSCAD.  With OpenJSCad, you can use dynamic arrays and store solids in variables.

So, if you’re rocking Chrome or a WebGL browser, check out joostn’s OpenJSCad!

ReplicatorG 0029 is now available. This release is a minor update, with only one new feature, one click Print-O-Matic defaults. MakerBot operators indicated that they wanted a better and easier way to put Print-O-Matic settings back to the Defaults we recommend. So we added a ‘Defaults’ panel to Print-O-Matic for resetting to the Factory defaults for all of our Stepper based extruders. Since there are a lot of new Bot Operators during the Holiday season, we choose to roll this now to make it easier to tinker with their new bots.

If you are new to 3D printing, this is a really helpful set of buttons. New users can now test and experiment with Print-O-Matic settings to their hearts’ content, safe in the knowledge the factory defaults for Print-O-Matic are a button click away!

Ye olde workhorse of 3D printing, ReplicatorG,  just got a new release!   Along with the shiny shiny new revision number (which is a perfect number!). it has some great added features.

• Pre-heat for build? Check.
• Build right from the STL View window? Check.
• Better support for international number formats? Check.
• Temperature info right in the Machine Status Bar? Check.
• Squashed some small user reported annoyances? Check.

If you do a lot of 3d printing you’ll love the new updates in ReplicatorG.   The Pre-Heat system will speed up printing on older bots. The ‘Print from STL View’ will make it easier to just click ‘print’ and go.  Plus with temperature info in the Bot Status Bar at the top of ReplicatorG, gone are the days of wondering ‘Is that Bot at temperature yet?’

Overall this update doesn’t add any crazy new features. It just makes printing a little faster, a little easier, and a little more fun.  But why take my word for it?  Why not go download it for yourself.

iPhone dock created in Shapesmith and printed on Thing-O-Matic

How can I model the thing I want to print?

As the population of 3D printer operators continues to grow, answering that question will become more important than ever. Combining parametric modeling and a clean UI, browser-based Shapesmith hopes to provide an open source answer.

The developer, MakerBot operator, and Thingizen Benjamin Nortier tells us all about it.

Q: Who are you and what is Shapesmith?

I’m a software developer with an Engineering background and I’m also a 3D printing enthusiast. Shapesmith is a browser-based 3D modeling tool that I’ve been working on, and am very excited about. It is aimed at users who want to create high-quality parametric models for 3D printing, but who don’t want to spend thousands of dollars on expensive 3D CAD software.

I wanted to design an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) after being inspired by DIY Drones. I realised that it would be very attractive to 3D print aeroplane parts and I was using tools like Blender and Sketchup to design some airfoils or wings.

Because I had worked on a 3D CAD tool for electromagnetic simulation earlier in my career, I was very dissatisfied by the free design tools that were available. This dissatisfaction was reinforced when I bought a MakerBot Thing-O-Matic and started to design some models. So I decided to try and make something better.

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We constantly get great ideas for additions or improvements to ReplicatorG from our users. They range from the fantastic to the fantastical. Almost always it’s hard to tell someone: “No, sorry, we can’t work on that right now.” Since our hardware and software are Open Source, it’s possible for people to add their own features to it, but it’s not always practical.

I’m sure many of our readers know that what Open Source is, but I want to take this paragraph to explain as a refresher. While there is some lawyering as to the exact definition of Open Source, the general idea of Open Source is: Users get the design docs as well as the product, so they can understand and modify what they use. For MakerBot that means our hardware designs as well as our Source Code are available on the web for our users (and anyone else) to inspect, mutate, or just ponder. A great example of how open source super-charges innovation is some of the great work Rob Giseburt has done to tweak his own setup, and support the MakerBot community. Because we open our designs to the community, Rob has been able to create nifty hardware add-ons as well as some great software updates.

We’d like to make this kind of innovation easier for MakerBot users, to help them expand, tweak, and improve their own setup. To that end, we are hosting a “Tinkering on ReplicatorG” class for the New York MakerBot User Group and other makers. It will be an introduction to updating and changing ReplicatorG. The class will be on December 8th, from 6:30 to 8:30PM, at the MakerBot Workshop (314 Dean St in Brooklyn). Hosted by MakerBot’s own Software and Support folks, it will be an hour of setup, tutorial, and discussion, followed by an hour of DIY workshopping. We will have experienced ‘botters on hand to answer questions, help out, and give suggestions.

If you every said “Geez, it would be really cool if this window did X” or “Wow, if only I could make the program also Y” this is your chance for some hands-on help doing that. All you need to bring is a laptop that has a USB port and runs Windows, Mac, or Linux. Well, that and some curiosity and creativity!

The Skinny:
Tinkering on ReplicatorG Class
Dec 8th, from 6:30PM to 8:30PM
@ The MakerBot Workshop
314 Dean Street (between 3rd & 4th Ave)
Brooklyn, NY 11217