Thingizen deeeep conducted a Project Shellter workshop at TEDxYouth@Flanders last week. The enthusiastic kids envisioned all sorts of fantastical shells for hermit crabs. Now they need to be modeled so they can be printed and introduced to the crabitats!
Will the Karshellians like a multi-room shell? Will Paris Shellton dare to wear a shell adorned with wings? There’s only one way to find out: empirical science!

Are you a Blender ninja or a Sketchup wizard? Maybe your Maya-fu is legendary. If you’re looking for a unique challenge please consider helping out by modeling one of the drawings produced at the workshop.

Drop a comment here if you take on the challenge then upload a finished model to Thingiverse and tag it with shellter.

The kids and crabs thank you!

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/​ProjectShellterVideos

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This guest post is part of Project Shellter

The New York Times addresses the issue of copyrighting physical objects on their Bits Blog, and of course, mentions MakerBot. In what they he calls Industrial Revolution 2.0, the Times’ Nick Bilton looks at the impact of 3D printing on the future of manufacturing, and on the idea of ownership in general.

Unlike music, movies, or books, printed objects typically cannot be copyrighted because they are useful items rather than simply aesthetic ones. Bilton uses the example of a coffee mug to illustrate his point. Who knows what the future holds, but for now, keep printing those coffee mugs! Trust me, I went to Ikea yesterday, and I would rather print my own mug any day than wait in that line!

Here at MakerBot, we believe that children are our future. Imagine what your life would be like if you had owned a MakerBot as a kid!

The media is picking up on this idea too. Check out this piece in Forbes, and this one in the Wall Street Journal, covering MakerBot’s mission to get Thing-O-Matics into the hands of the next generation.

MakerBot is already in a number of schools around the U.S., including New York City public and private school teachers and NSF funded GK12 fellows from NYU-Poly University. Want to get MakerBotting on the curriculum at your or your child’s school? Email [email protected] and check out our sample curriculum here.

Miles Lightwood, AKA, TeamTeamUSA is in town doing an artist in residency in the MakerBot Industries workshop. He arrived into town and we wandered over to check out Occupy Wall Street and we got a chance to hear Tom Morello, who’s part of Rage Against the Machine and is righteous. They are using the human megaphone technique since they aren’t allowed to use electric amplification. The way it works is speaker says MIC CHECK and everyone who can hear them repeats it and one sentence at a time gets repeated so that the speaker can be heard.

Miles was inspired to make MIK CHK, a megaphone to extend the range of the human microphone technique. Miles modelled up a clip that connects a coffee cup and two manilla folders and adds a comfortable grip. Viola! You’ve got yourself a MIK CHK megaphone that will extend the range of the human microphone technique.

Download it and go be heard!

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What would you do with a bionic eye?

Tony Buser posted his own take on the “MakerBot Goggles” phenomena where you see everything as DIY 3D printable:

I think I’ve discovered a corollary to MakerBot Goggles – Spinscan Goggles. Now everything I see I wonder if I can scan and MakerBot a copy.

Making a rote copy and merely duplicating an existing object can definitely be useful.  What I find more interesting is being able to scan a physical object in the world around you and manipulate the 3D image to be remixed into something even more useful.

So, if you were wearing your own Spinscan Goggles, what would you want to scan and duplicate?  What would you want to scan and mashup or remix?

Erik Beck is a video making machine! We had him by with Justin Johnson, another video-otron to the MakerBot Botcave to immortalize them in 3D by scanning them with the Polhemus 3D scanner!

Download Erik here and Justin here!

After months of intensive research and development, MakerBot Industries is proud to announce a newly realized capacity of the MakerBot Thing-O-Matic 3D Printer- the ability to print listenable vinyl records from the desktop.

“The process of transcribing an audio file into a vinyl record is so simple, anyone can do it.” Said Chief Audio Engineer Isaac Dietz. “Right now, I’m using the Automated Build Platform to rip my entire MP3 collection to individual records!”

“It’s an exciting innovation for MakerBot, as we all grew up listening to vinyl. We all wish that more records were available with the latest hits,” said Audio R&D Associate Marisol Murphy. “I can never get enough Justin Bieber or Rebecca Black until I listened to them on my turntable.”

The process utilizes the MakerBot 96khz AudioNozzle™ technology to print audio waveforms in real time. Using the MakerBot Generation 4 Electronics microstepping capacity, the AudioNozzle™ modulates the amount of plastic deposited to create a high-fidelity waveform. The results often surpass the dynamic range of 24-bit recordings and can contain frequencies up to 57khz — even higher than the Nyquist frequency for 96khz digital recording. You can even record directly to your 3D Printer by attaching a microphone to your computer, and singing into it.

Says Ethan Hartman, Vice President of Audio Operations: “MakerBot’s pioneering spirit has always hearkened back to early inventors like Thomas Edison. We are honored to be able to re-invent the audio record for the personal manufacturing space in the burgeoning 20-teens.”

Pre-orders for the 96khz AudioNozzle™ will be available shortly.

MakerBot 3D Printed Vinyl Records can be downloaded from Thingiverse here.

Nylon Bicycle on BBC

Take a look at this coverage of a Bristol-based engineering outfit that have released a nylon, 3D-printed bicycle to demonstrate the strength of 3D printed products to British manufacturing industry. The vid contains an excellent demonstration of selective laser sintering applied to a much classier model than you typically see supplied by the industry.

The discussion at end about the potential role for 3D printing to bring manufacturing back to the UK by closing the gap between innovation and end product is also worth a listen. And it mirrors conversations I’ve had with DIY 3D printing evangelists about the economic opportunities offered by local, small scale 3D-printed manufacture as a way to eliminate off-shore manufacture and boost local economies.

I’d also like to mention that I have received a number of support emails today asking when a MakerBot designed affordable selective laser sintering product will be available…..

Anthony Atala: Printing a human kidney

Well, we have been hearing about the 3D printing of organs for a while — and there are reports that a MakerBot Operator with a heavily modified Cupcake is engaging in this very work: printing plastic scaffolding for stem-cell “curing” of organs.¹

Here is a great talk about the present practice and future potential of 3D bioprinting.

And here is a great link to read more about the program exploring this technology.

1. Or as Marty in the Botcave has just said it — “rafting an organ on a 3D printer.” [↩]

Check out Michael Fonda’s Blog post about his experience at the BotCave: “Democratization of Manufacturing”

As it sometimes happens, I am working at my desk, and one of my coworkers taps me on the shoulder, and I hear a now familiar phrase- “Isaac, we have guests!” This is my cue for me to give a walk through tour, and run down as many salient points about MakerBot as I can pull from memory. Last Friday I walked up to the front of the BotCave and was greeted by Michael and Tyler Fonda, who were on a quest to learn about the 3D Printing sphere, and visiting Brooklyn.

They had both recently read The Economist’s cover story on 3D Printing, and wanted to gauge for themselves the possible impact 3D Printing will have on manufacturing. Michael works for Avison Young, a real estate company that often caters to manufacturing industries. His son Tyler, is a Director of Strategy for Gotham and was doing his strategic due diligence on 3D printing.

Michael wrote a post about his experience at the BotCave, and it’s an interesting perspective on their experience, and his view of the potential impacts of 3D Printing.

“Suddenly, the future came into focus as I visualized how my sister-in-law and her husband would utilize 3D printing in their sunglass business Centerline Optics. They would no longer have to source product from China. No more ordering months in advance of their selling season. No supply chain risk of political upheaval in China, of a lost TEU on the Pacific Ocean, of a longshoremen’s strike at the Port of Long Beach, a diesel fuel spike that drives up the cost of transporting the product across the North American continent. All design, manufacturing, marketing, distribution, and sales would happen out of the Centerline “headquarters” in Old Lyme, Connecticut. Centerline’s customers are all within four hours of the “headquarters”. Talk about efficient allocation of resources.”

Check out Michael’s original post here.