NYU’s upcoming Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP) aims to tackle urban challenges by becoming a central hub for bold new ideas, urban design, and science and technology. They’ve chosen Downtown Brooklyn (370 Jay Street) as the site for CUSP because of the neighborhood’s vibrant, creative, and entrepreneurial energy.
This focus on the future and support for Brooklyn is something we can get behind! Learn more by watching the video above (you might recognize a familiar face) and on the CUSP website.
Please help spread the word by sharing this video. Tweet the video to @NYCMayorsOffice @MikeBloomberg @MTAInsider @NYGovCuomo @NYUPoly & @NYCEDC with the hashtag #CUSP.
January 10, 2012 (Brooklyn, NY) – MakerBot Industries is excited to announce the launch of its latest product, The MakerBot Replicator™, which will debut at CES in Las Vegas, NV on Tuesday, January 10th. Available in the MakerBot store for pre-order today!
The MakerBot Replicator™ is the ultimate personal 3D printer, with MakerBot Dualstrusion™ (2-color printing) and a bigger printing footprint, giving you the superpower to print things BIG! Assembled in Brooklyn by skilled technicians, the MakerBot Replicator™ is ready within minutes to start printing right out of the box. Starting at $1749, The MakerBot Replicator™ is an affordable, open source 3D printer that is compact enough to sit on your desktop. Want to print in two colors? Choose the Dualstrusion™ option!
With a build envelope that’s roughly the size of a loaf of bread, The MakerBot Replicator™ gives you the power to go big. Make an entire chess set with the press of a button. Friends, classmates, co-workers, and family will see the things you make and say “Wow!”
The MakerBot Replicator™ creates anything you can imagine with the new MakerBot Stepstruder™ MK8, the extruder is the part of the machine that turns raw feedstock, like ABS (what Lego® is made of) or PLA (a biodegradable material made from corn), into the objects you desire. You can order your MakerBot Replicator™ with single or dual MakerBot Stepstruders on it. By choosing the dual extrusion option, you’ll print with two different colors at the same time. MakerBot Dualstrusion™ unlocks the ability to make beautiful combinations of colors and opens the door to experimenting with with multi-material objects.
The MakerBot Replicator™ is ideal for personalized manufacturing, providing a new way to make the things you want and need. It is also an essential tool for children and students; parents and educators with a MakerBot Replicator™ offer the next generation an opportunity to learn the digital designing skills required to solve the problems of the future. Students with access to a MakerBot have an edge in the future job market. Just like the youth of the 1980’s, who had access to computers, children with access to a MakerBot Replicator™ will become the leaders who make a better tomorrow.
The MakerBot Replicator™ is the tool from tomorrow, today. In the two years since the company was founded, the capabilities of a MakerBot have grown from printing cupcake-sized objects in 2009 to printing things as large as an entire loaf of bread today on on the MakerBot Replicator™. MakerBot Industries continues to demonstrate its dedication to putting the tools of creativity into the hands of the those brilliant and bold enough to bring their imagination into the physical world.
Over the last few years there have been some awesome strides made to make it easy for you to make awesome models to create with a MakerBot. Here are 3 of my favorite!
Cookie Cutters! One of the easiest and most fun things to design and then make on a MakerBot is a cookie cutter. The cookie cutter software was designed in 2010 by Guru and since he published his work, a LOT of cookie cutters have been made. Go use the cookie cutter tool and make a cookie cutter and upload it to Thingiverse… then make some cookies!
Image to 3D! When MakerBot started the MakerBot Artist in Residency Program, Marius Watz was the first in January of 2011 and he rocked it! He launched an entire design tool library that let’s you use processing to create objects from data. My favorite is the photo to 3D model application. Download his code and install his libraries and run mb_04_gui_heightfield in processing and you’ll be able to turn pictures into 3D models!
Kinect to STL! Kyle McDonald followed Marius and did pioneering work with the Microsoft Kinect. Use his Kinect to STL program to scan yourself or your cat and print them out on your MakerBot.
What am I missing? What are the coolest ways that you make models to make on your MakerBot?
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.
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.
The local RC airplane club that I belong to wanted a way to attach a bomb to an airplane and drop it on a target. We will use these as part of a compatition at our fun flys.
That's F for Flower. A PVA water soluble weapon of mass foliation. Otherwise known as a Seed Bomb deployed by ninja gardeners to sew seeds in hard to reach places. See Also: guerrillagardening.org/ggseedbombs.html
Sure, there are cheaper and more efficient ways to do this... but... pfft... The idea is to stuff it with some compost and seeds and then throw it somewhere that you think could use some color, but you either can't get to it or it's where people wouldn't appreciate seeing you digging around. Then wait for mother nature to dissolve the shell and make some magic.
This of course requires water soluble PVA makerbot.com/blog/2011/02/21/makerbot-introduces-water-soluble-3d-printer-filament/ since you don't want to wait a thousand years for ABS to go away. I'm not even sure this will work, however PVA is supposedly bio-degradable eliteanglingproducts.com/PVAEnvironment.asp and is used as a seed coating celvol.com/sekisui/sek_seed-coating.htm so hopefully it's safe. However, I will assume it's not safe, I'm stupid, and advise you not to do this. Also, I am not responsible if you get arrested for defacing someone's private property with beautiful flowers. :)
However, I'm going to test it anyway (did I mention I'm an idiot and you shouldn't do this?). Unfortunately it's not the best time of the year to try it, but I loaded one and sat it in a pot outside. I also sat one in a pot indoors that I'll run some water over whenever I water my other plants to see how it dissolves naturally over time and if anything grows out of it. I also threw some of the seeds into another pot just in case these old seeds are no good and to compare the growth. SCIENCE!
Alternatively, you could print this in something other than PVA and just use it like a little box to store things in...
Last week we launched MakerBot Projects, featuring the Botmobile, the Dynamo! and the Windup Walkers. I’m excited to say we already have some great Thingiverse activity to report.
Thingiverse User Luis printed out a gorgeous silver body in PLA with an orange ABS interior (featured above). We can’t wait to see this dune buggy ride!
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:
On Sunday 20th November 2011 we did a workshop for 30 kids about 3D printing and while they were there we asked them to draw out their ideas for a shell for the hermit crabs.
Some amazing designs came in, but we had no people available with CAD skills to convert these sketches into 3D models.
My appeal to all of you in the thingiverse community is to see the sketches and convert some of them into workable printable 3D models, so that we can have them printed and put in the East and West coast Project Shellter aquariums.
This would mean a lot to the kids who poured their imagination onto paper to help out the hermit crabs!
Some other ideas were put up by some participants whose drawing skills were not as rich as their imagination: one girl wanted a shell in the shape of a plant-pot, which could grow seaweed for camouflage, another shell was in the shape of a piece of coral reef so that when the crab hides it looks like coral reef debris.
Also look at thingiverse.com/thing:14046 for a rendition by MagicDan...
When most of think us of internal combustion engines, we think of pistons exploding in a beautiful dance, with a crankshaft turning linear motion into circular motion. It’s a sight to see, and we can even print out such an example, courtesy of sirmakesalot.
However, there are other engines out there, and none perhaps more interesting than the Wankel engine. ROBK636 has created the engine rotor (as a fun keychain!) of this unorthodox design. Known perhaps most famously for being the engine of choice for the Mazda RX-7 and RX-8 sports cars, the Wankel engine has a place in hearts of many a gearhead. We thank ROBK636 for bringing this keychain to Thingiverse, and I hope this is just the start. How long before I can print out an entire assembly?
It’s not unusual for us to receive requests for DXF files for our MakerBot machines and Scott Hunter did just that – asking for the files that would enable his group of students the ability to replace the wooden components of his school’s Thing-O-Matic with various colors of acrylic. What caught my attention was that his students were 12 year old girls, from Scotland, with a penchant for designing the future of Formula 1 cars. Yep.
The students, involved in the F1 in Schools Technology Challenge, are using CAD/CAM(Computer Aided Manufacture) software to communicate their vision. The participants are encouraged to consider everything from physics, aerodynamics, design, and manufacture, to branding, graphics, sponsorship and more. It’s a comprehensive competition with wind and smoke tunnels, culminating with a race down a 20 meter track with the cars going as fast as 60 kmh (over 37 mph!).
The competition permits the use of 3D printers for the front and rear aerofoils of their miniature gas powered balsa wood F1 cars (manufactured on a CNC machine), and Scott’s team chose the Thing-O-Matic to help them get to the finish line. As you can see from the photo above, it’s looking great! With an international field of contestants (34 countries) aged 9-19 (for a total of 12 million(!) students), and fierce competition, the Challenge is more worth following…if you can keep up.
Procedurally-generated panpipes for 3D printing. They really whistle, but they aren't particularly accurately tuned. OpenSCAD file included.
It'll theoretically play a chromatic scale (12 notes to the octave) but it's too squeaky to know for sure! …
