MakerBot Industries

I know I’m not through my backlog of WYMB pictures, but just look at the one we got a minute ago via twitter!

These awesome, eager, MakerBotting 4th and 5th graders come to your screen from Boynton Beach, Florida’s Poinciana Elementary Magnet school for STEM. I’m going to have to dig deeply into teacher Kris Swanson’s blog now. I want to know all about what they are making, how they are designing, and how you get a dozen 10-year-olds to look that happy and excited for a picture.

A sincere happy Teacher Appreciation Week to all of you teachers.

Instructables.com is a fountain of good stuff for the DIYer. Here are a few recent favorites:

Rubber band-powered car toy

This 18-step Instructable from Thingiverse user mrigsby is really straightforward and you get a fun toy to play with at the end! What impressed me here is that this project was Mike’s first experience with 3D modeling software. He used Tinkercad to design the car, and seems to think it was pretty easy.

To make a wheel, you just drag a cylinder onto the workspace.  Set the diameter and the thickness and you’re almost done.  Drag a hole onto the workspace, adjust the diameter and place it in the center of the wheel.  Group the hole and the wheel.  That’s it.

He made this on The Replicator, and shares his tricks, too. For example, to make these pieces with a raft underneath, Mike says he has had the most luck setting the build plate temperature to 115° C, rather than 100° C.

You can find all the files for the Rubber Band Powered Car on Thingiverse!

Tilt-Shift Lens Adapter

Here’s another Instructables/Thingiverse gem, made especially for the photo geek. A tilt-shift lens is “used to create a miniature effect or a very shallow depth of field in your photography,” and if you shoot from a high angle pointing down, the accessory “creates the illusion of looking down at a miniature model.”

What I liked about this project in particular is the cost savings here. Joe Murphy, author of the Instructable, says the professional version is pretty pricey; “we’re talking $1000- 3000.” So I decided to just make one for myself and see how much it costs in ABS.

Answer: at 7 grams, the part costs $0.30. And it took 19 minutes, from digital to tangible. So there ya go.

3D-Printed Circuit Boards

Just as a blog post at Oppino.com noted a lack of experiments with 3D-printed circuit boards, an Instructable showed up from CarryTheWhat, an Open Source Hardware group with a presence on Etsy and Thingiverse.

In this step-by-step, you get careful instructions on making the circuit board itself from files available on Thingiverse. There is a library of files for all the different components and advice on arranging them successfully. The example in the Instructable will output a simple circuit to get an LED to blink.

This is admittedly not complex stuff, but it is remarkable to see a DIY circuit project that involves no soldering or etching. All of these parts have been “thoroughly tested on the MakerBot Replicator, with ABS plastic,” according to the Thingiverse page.

Today is the day when the residents of 78 countries engage in one big gasp: “Mother’s Day is two days away!” I bet you could hear this from space.

Here’s how a Maker solves this. Go to Thingiverse.

There are a number of things to download and make that your mom would love. Flowers, sculptures, jewelry, things to hold jewelry, phone accessories, organizers, aquarium structures, things for the home.

Did you take a nice trip with your mom? Thingiverse probably has a miniature of one of the buildings or monuments you saw. Or maybe you just want to customize a picture frame for that shot of the kids.

If you have a MakerBot, you can make your mom anything you can think of. Here are a few ideas to get you going. Whatever you make, be sure to tag it Mother’s Day to help fellow citizens of the Thingiverse.

I’m taking a short break from the blog series this week, but I didn’t want to leave you hanging.  I’ve put together a short screencast on how I use the creation tools in 123D Catch, specifically reference points and reference distances, to create scans that print in my desired scale.  This tip is great for anyone who wants tight control over print size, whether you’re working in scale or not.

A Quick Note: I’m running Autodesk 123D Catch on my mac through VMware Fusion.  Autodesk just released a web version, which is great for mac users, but it lacks some of the advanced features like creation tools.  So to use this tip, you need to use the desktop application on Windows.

World, you need to be following the developments of Joe, who is now a fully fledged MakerBotter.

Joe, or Cymon on Thingiverse, was the winner of the Tinkercad Chess Set Design competition, for which we awarded him The Replicator.  And now he’s on the way toward making his famed Action Chess set!

As you can see, the sweet thing about this chess set is that the pieces are designed to assemble into this chess giant. Now that Joe has had a chance to test his design, he’s reporting success! The pieces do in fact assemble, but he says there’s a bit of calibration and fine tuning left.

Did you all catch the adorable R.Maker Adventure at the end of S02E10?

Don’t let the week end without subscribing on YouTube or iTunes to MakerBot TV!

TicTocTrac

This does not require a funny quip. These Cornell students used a MakerBot to make the casing for their wrist watch.

But this isn’t an ordinary watch.

TicTocTrac is a wristwatch that doesn’t just keep time, but measures your perception of it, allowing you to track changes over the course of days or even months.

You’ll have to read their fantastic documentation to understand how exactly the watch captures your perception of time, rather than the progression of time. But I can tell you that they used our friend Jeremy Blum‘s MakerBot to print the case for their project.

Love it!

As we did last month, we are about to live stream our MakerBot User Group New York (MUGNY) meeting! Please join us here on the blog, or come over to UStream.com. Enjoy!

Man, talk about teacher appreciation. Here is a teacher I think we can all appreciate.

In late March, I got looped into a series of emails involving our Support guys and our Education team. As I read through the long thread, I learned that a man named David Brelsford down in Baltimore was making every effort to get his hands on some MakerBots. Not for himself, but for his students. As Dave put it, his is a group of “amazing kids,” but their school sits “in a pretty rough area, a lot of gang activity, drugs and crime.”

When The Replicator launched in January, Dave asked us directly what we planned to do with all the Thing-O-Matics in the BotFarm. A lot of these were being cycled back into R&D, but we still had a handful in limbo. Dave made us this deal: if MakerBot donated the machines to his school, he would give them all the TLC necessary to get them up and running, use them to teach his students about robotics and the thrill of making stuff, and report back to us on everyone’s progress. He and I made a virtual handshake, and not too long later he was up here in Brooklyn to pick up his three new Thing-O-Matics.

These three TOMs are now down at NAF Prep, where they sit in Dave’s Bot Lot. This is where he hopes to build some momentum toward a pre-engineering class at the middle school.

After a few weeks of having the TOMs down in Baltimore, I had a chance to catch up with Dave and check the group’s progress. He told me there is a “definite ‘really interested-almost psychotically’ group of 8” kids regularly stopping by the Bot Lot after school. Even the “principal is hooked on it as well. She came by the other day, and really saw how the kids would interact with the machines. We are now working on a way to make this a part of an actual class.”

So far, Dave and the students have done some “tuning as far as resolution, and optimal temps,” but are mostly trying to refine their workflow. As a teacher, he said it was crucial for the group to talk extensively about safety. He used the opportunity to get the kids practicing conversions from Celsius to Fahrenheit.

As for design, the group is testing a variety of programs. Tinkercad, Google SketchUp, and 3Dtin. Dave says he might be leaning toward 3Dtin and that SketchUp may have too steep of a learning curve to get the kids started with a MakerBot.

I’m looking forward to checking in with Dave and hearing how he’s using the Thing-O-Matics in his curriculum. He has shown so much drive and passion just in tracking down the machines themselves that I know he is going to be a great voice for MakerBotting teachers. One quick note I’ll share from him is that the presence of the program has already had a positive effect on at least one student’s behavior at school. Dave and Kyosha have spent a lot of time printing parts for a quadcopter. Can’t wait to see this!

If you’re a teacher and you use a MakerBot, I would love to share your stories and best practices. You can always email me.

Printable Letter Scale by Maakit

A store-bought postage scale might set you back anywhere between $10-$20.  This amazing design from Maakit creates a working letter/postage scale you can build yourself and use with a minimal amount of calibration.  If you’re not sure if you need one of these – you might want to check with that special knitter in your life.  Besides using our postage scale for determining correct postage, my wife uses a postage scale all the time to weigh yarn when she’s designing knitting patterns – so she can give people a sense of how much yarn is needed for a particular design.

It may actually surprise you how many special mothers in your life might appreciate this exact gift.  You’ll have fun building it for her and she’ll love using it. ¹  (You really should call her more, you know?)

Classic style letter scale by maakit

For those in need of a letter scale. I really like the real-world-use-things and couldn't find a letter scale on thingiverse. Thought about adding a scale, but it will be too dependant on printer settings, material and counter weights, so just use a (semi-) permanent marker for this. For the small scale I used mr alligator as a letter holder: thingiverse.com/thing:13612 Had to "fix" it using Netfabb before I could import it in OpenSCAD. I've also uploaded a version2, the largest I can get it with my 180x200mm buildplate. I've made three stl's with all the parts to print. The black & yellow scale is version 2. I recommend to make the weighing platform a little thinner, so it won't need as much counterweights. Made it a work in progress again, I think it's better to shorten the arms holding the letter plate. I would like the big scale to be good for 250 grams. Make the scale more stable by moving the foot to the heavy side. For the final version 3 I added some stability by moving the legs to the heavy side of the scale and making them bigger. I added another arm to hold counterweights so these are balanced. Smaller connecting arms so it can take more weight, but also makes it much more stable.

This thing brought to you by

MakerBot Font (parametric and variable-width!) by hotkey

This is the ultimate MakerBot Font for OpenSCAD! Now tagging and versioning (!) your OpenSCAD models is as easy as writing label("v1.0"). Give it a try! Just put an ID on every print and never lose track of your rapid prototyping evolution! Features: * variable-width characters (eeeevil OpenSCAD hack!) * using new OpenSCAD string-functions (no more array ["m", "a", "d", "n", "e", "s", "s"]) * font metrics * text alignment functions * self-contained in one single file * higher and lower resolution fonts are available This file was created with my tool svgFont2scad, which takes care of all the transcoding, bezier curves, compression etc. I plan to release it later this year (currently in PHP, but I want to port it to Python). If you have fonts you would like to have converted: Just drop me a line! The font you find here is called Designer Block by K-Type (http://www.k-type.com/?p=296). It's free for personal use but K-Type require a paid license for commercial use. This thing supercedes previous fonts:thingiverse.com/thing:19484thingiverse.com/thing:6844Current limitations: Only ~64 characters at once.Reason (Caution! Geeky stuff!): Since OpenSCAD does not support stateful variables, I use recursions within functions to store variables on the stack. So when entering too many characters, OpenSCAD will just go up in flames! (Maybe someone should inform OpenSCAD's Clifford or Marius about this...)

This thing brought to you by

1. Maybe you could even personalize it with an embossed message? [↩]