MakerBot Industries

Turning kids’ silly drawings into physical toys. What a beautiful idea!

Child's Own Studios turns children's drawings into toys

via i09

If you are a mover, a shaker, and a Maker, let us stamp your passport! We’ll have our passport stamps at Maker Faire this weekend, including a special edition Robot Petting Zoo stamp. If you don’t have your passport yet, you can grab one from Adafruit. Collect stamps, prove your cred.

It’s about to get really Maker Faire-ish on this blog! The MakerBot team is gearing up for our trip to San Mateo this week, where we will be throwing down some awesome with Makers from around the globe. Whoa-I-can’t-wait-why-isn’t-it-Saturday-yet?

If you’re going to be a part of Maker Faire this weekend, please stop by and say hello to us. But be prepared for MakerBot staff to be super interested in you and what you like to make.

Lots more info to come, but here are our Top Five Makers this year that we can’t wait to visit. Notice: this list is subject to change before the day’s out.

Cory Soto’s Dalek — building a “Dalek Mutant Vehicle…on a Yamaha G9 gas engine”. He’s been documenting his progress here.

Christian Ristow’s Face Forward — oh come on you have to be kidding me! A 12-foot tall robotic human face controlled by a bunch of joysticks. “Members of the public may operate the levers and play their part in the orchestration of an ongoing “river” of facial expressions.”

Wearable Computing Fashion Show by Lynne Bruning – “A fashion show that features wearable computing, soft-circuits and eTextiles from multiple designers, innovators and makers.” What more can I say?

Andrew Kaye’s 8x8x8 LED Cube — MORE LEDs!!!!! Filling a giant box with 512 LEDs is one of the best things one person can do for another person. Awesome.

Evil Mad Scientist’s High Tech Pumpkins – electronic, robotic pumpkins this Halloween. This is the world we want to live in. Evil Mad Scientist is going to show us how.

I saw this video yesterday of a bird-like robot landing on a target perch through a combination of gliding and shaping its wings asymmetrically in a few different ways. The result is a micro-aerial vehicle that can make a delicate landing on a person’s hand.

I’m trying to get a good look at the wings themselves to see what material those are. Their paper, “Dynamics and Performance of a Tailless MAV with Flexible Articulated Wings,”¹ has a lot to say about choosing a material for the wings based on its relative rigidity. My quick scan makes me think ABS would do well in the range they lay out, given its elasticity.

The point is I want to make this bird on a MakerBot. And even though Daniel Terdiman writes at CNET that there are military applications for this project, I was a child in the 90′s and I just want my own Zazu. This isn’t trivial. I had a bird once, and I’m pretty sure it…well, let’s just say he “set himself free” in the saddest possible way. I imagine pet robot bird would stick around a little longer, and there would be no need to keep him in a cage.

1. A. A. Paranjape, S.-J. Chung, H. H. Hilton, and A. Chakravarthy, “Dynamics and Performance of a Tailless MAV with Flexible Articulated Wings,” AIAA Journal, vol. 50, no. 5, May 2012, pp. 1177-1188. [↩]

If this isn’t the most perfect MakerBot companion accessory, I don’t know what is.

Yes, that is a lasercut, open source, DIY custom cell phone, from the researchers at MIT’s High-Low Tech group. Those are all the things we love. These are the questions those guys and girls are asking themselves as they go.

How close can a homemade project come to the design of a cutting edge device? What are the economics of building a high-tech device in small quantities? Which parts are even available to individual consumers? What’s required for people to customize and build their own devices?

This looks like a great start. I really just want to see this being held by a MakerBot Arm.

A group of designers at the Brooklyn consultancy Pensa did something really awesome last week, and graciously called it their own response to the “DIY ingenuity” of companies like MakerBot.

While we make machines that allow a person — among other pursuits — to prototype in plastic, the fellas at Pensa have made a machine that makes 2D and 3D shapes by systematically bending wire, and they’re calling it the DIWire Bender. Watch it in action.

The closest thing to a machine that can output lines is a CNC wire bender, but these machines are used almost exclusively for mass production in factories. They are not used for rapid prototyping because the equipment is large, expensive and takes trained personnel to run. So, we decided to make the DIWire Bender.

I love this machine for its practicality, but the sculptural possibilities are endless, too. I can’t wait to see how far people in the DIY community push the DIWire Bender. This second video shows the production process from digital to tangible, which the Pensa blog outlines like this:

Simply draw curves in the computer, import the file into our software and press print. Our software can read vector files (e.g., Adobe Illustrator files), Rhino or Wavefront OBJ 3D files, text files of commands (e.g., feed 50 mm, bend 90° to right…) or pure coordinates (from 0,0,0 to 0,10,10 to….). All inputs are automatically translated into DIWire motor commands. During the print, the wire unwinds from a spool, passes through a series of wheels that straighten it, and then feeds through the bending head, which moves around in 3 dimensions to create the desired bends and curves.

I’ve blogged about Matt Compeau before, the guy making the coral-like prints on his Replicator (speaking of, maybe someone should print this and put it in an aquarium, as my colleague MakerBlock suggested).

His latest post at Emergent Forms shows us how he delivered a “randomized” ceiling for a client.

MakerBotted model of a custom ceiling section, by Matt Compeau

The piece above was printed, presumably on The Replicator, to show how the same section of segmented wood baffles would piece together to give a random looking solution. Each of these represents a 2′x8′ portion of ceiling, and Matt shows how those sections themselves are laid out in a way that will maximize the look of randomness.

Go to the original post to play with the web-based tool he devised to demonstrate the process to the client. Fun stuff.

This post reminds me of Kacie Hultgren, aka PrettySmallThings, in that she and Matt both use their MakerBot Replicators and/or TOM’s to demonstrate final products to clients. Did you see Kacie’s post over the weekend about how to work in scale? It was the first in a series that she’s put together for us, and the next one is pretty tops, too. Look for that on Friday.

Do you use MakerBotted scale models to communicate your ideas? Tell me about it.

And then there are business cards that turn into rubber band guns.

Built-to-Spec, the company on the business card/firearm (rubberarm?) in the picture, has a page of MakerBot accessories. Looking for an acrylic lasercut casing for your TOM? Look no further.

The games going on in St. Louis as I type are a culmination of “three separate robotics competitions for the ultimate Sport for the Mind. The event includes the FIRST Robotics Competition Championship, the FIRST Tech Challenge World Championship, and the FIRST LEGO League World Festival.”

And be warned: “…it’s the hardest fun you’ll ever have.”

Anyone wondering how to incorporate MakerBot into a robotics education program should browse our Curriculum Page. There are tutorials for several web-based 3D modeling and design applications, as well as a number of specific lesson ideas under Science, Math, Computer Science, and Interdisciplinary categories.

Any maker/hackerspaces out there with an embroidery machine: Urban Threads is giving away some of its sweet badge designs for free.

It looks like the company wants to recognize such spaces for their contributions to the community by giving away the designs that are otherwise for sale on their site.

All they need to do is contact us at support@urbanthreads.com with the name & location of their hackerspace and their preferred format for their embroidery machine and we’ll set them up with some awesome designs.  We’re happy to support crafty hackerspaces as best we can, because we think machine embroidery is pretty awesome and hope everyone gets a chance to give it a try.