MakerBot Industries

Okay, I’m not the only one getting truly excellent first prints out of The Replicator. Check this video from Teehan+Lax Labs in Toronto. This bust looked great right after they took the support material off, but beautiful after some quick finishing.

Design firms, you’re on notice. This is how it’s done.

Also, what are these gears for, guys?! So glad you’re off and running.

Printing gears off the @makerbot for our next project – bit.ly/KpJ9yN

— Teehan+Lax Labs (@tllabs) May 10, 2012

You gotta love this. Have you heard about the Pebble Watch? Eric Migicovsky’s company Pebble has raised a record-breaking $10 million+ on Kickstarter¹ — with a week left in its campaign — to produce its Bluetooth supported smart watch.

They thought they’d raise enough money to make 1,000 of these beautiful and highly sought after watches. Well, now it looks like they’ll have to produce 85,000. That’s a tall order, except that they say they’ll use The Replicator to help the production process.

The team has smashed the Kickstarter record for funding, and collected its initial goal of $100,000 in a matter of two hours, and had surpassed $200,000 within four hours.

The Pebble crew is a ten person startup, which Migicovsky says is working around the clock on perfecting the software. Regardless of the team’s heavy workload, Migicovsky assures that backers will receive a Pebble in the order in which they were purchased. In the future, says Migicovsky, the production phase will bolstered upon the purchase of a MakerBot replicator.

More proof that a MakerBot is an essential tool for the entrepreneur.

via Digital Trends

1. !!!!!!! [↩]

Need everyone’s input on this. Someone just posted a comment on a BusinessWeek feature on MakerBot and our CEO Bre Pettis.

I Like Bre…Great Charisma and energy. I wish him well. I think his printers will be successful but ultimately real manufactured goods will still be made with industrial 3D printers. I believe that his equipment is perfect as an educational piece, hobbyists or even classrooms.

Is this true? This sounds like the commenter is taking for granted that manufacturing will never change, as if it’s always been the same. We make MakerBots so that people can make the things they want and need, not just one copy of something that was made a million times. The way things are done now satisfies the broadest base of customers.

What does it mean to say something is a “real manufactured good”? Does that mean that something you make for yourself can’t be just as good as something that was made for you? We totally disagree.

By the way, the article in BusinessWeek today is great. And in case you’re wondering, you can now scan yourself in a number of ways that don’t involve cornstarch! But the cornstarch method is still fun. 4Chan founder Moot and new media guru/Internet philosopher Clay Shirky were into it! Watch the video of their scans below.

On Teacher Appreciation week, I’m remembering my elementary school teacher Ms. Harrelson, who said nothing has to be perfect; just give it a shot and see what happens.

Unfortunately for Ms. Harrelson, I made something on Monday and it’s basically perfect. This was really exciting because it was one of the first things I made with my new Replicator, I barely changed the default settings, and it printed flawlessly the first time. Behold, my apple.

Apple by jbakutis

This started with the purely awesome Original Apple logo in 3D by acen. I wanted to photograph some of our people here offering an apple to a teacher they really liked. But acen’s has a bite taken out of it. First I discussed with the design guys how we could change this into a dualstrusion model, with a red peel, and natural colored fruit on the inside. Jason suggested another route: why not split acen’s model in half and mirror it to get a whole apple?

Bing, bang, boom.

I made this on a Replicator at 0.27mm layer height, feed rate of 55, 5% infill. I wanted something that would look good from a distance in a picture, but I’m telling you this thing looks beautiful. No cracking, no irregularities, and honest to goodness practically no effort. In Replicator G, under Scale, I clicked on “Fill Build Space!” – or in other words, I Keith-ed it¹ . This made the model 6” tall, so I scaled down by 0.7 to get an apple that’s just over 4 inches tall. For this, we made the leaf a separate piece, so this isn’t a dualstrusion file.

Sminnee asked on Thingiverse if I used any support material, but the answer is no. I might add another shell if I make it again; I just used one this time. I wonder if the very top, right where the leaf piece fits snugly into the apple itself, would have looked smoother with a little more structure in that area. One of our modelers, Jason, thought the model should have a hole all the way through the center of it. This gives the stem area, which dips down, a little beam of internal support.

But on account of the hole all the way through, this is also now a possible jewelry piece.

There are several fruit pieces, fruit bowls, and other accessories on Thingiverse (listed below). So here’s one more for your collection, or perhaps you think your mom would want a fruit bowl on Sunday. Enjoy!

Fruit Platter by madebydan

This is a design for a platter that I came up with for my first attempt at 3D printing. Its made on a SLS 3D printer out of Nylon. It is very durable and looks great when you stack some fruit on it. Second file is another iteration.

This thing brought to you by

the.most.sleek.fruit.bowl by diegoego

With such elegant form, this fruit bowl will entice you to take a bite from its sensuous fruits. This design offers the opportunity for individuality and creative design in every day-use objects. Sparking the commentary for customization of common elemental objects with a predisposition form which then allows for a more engaging lifestyle through design and self-manufacturing. The form of this particular example is derived from the idea of a net holding fruits together; the solidity of the surface created expands and is varied to retain the different shapes of the fruits as they are placed in the bowl. The physical realization of this and many other objects is achieved through 3D printing, opening the doors for more people to design-build.

This thing brought to you by

Fruit Bowl by Prattotyper

Unique bowl design by Pratt student Steve Aung.

This thing brought to you by

Fruit Holder by mraiser

Feed the birds, they will love you for it.

This thing brought to you by

Strawberry by cawalke3

A printable model of a strawberry. Object comes out at just under 40 mm though it has been scaled up successfully.

This thing brought to you by

Banana, non-edible by AbFabFab

Its a banana (in two halves). Don't eat it.

This thing brought to you by

Yummy Pineapple by Viztu

A tasty pineapple made digital using hypr3d.com 's image-based 3D reconstruction.

This thing brought to you by

1. not surprisingly, I did this at Keith’s suggestion. [↩]

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. [↩]

A mere two days from now — 50 hours, to be precise — we will host the second big MUGNY (MakerBot User Group, New York) event of the year. We have been invited by Parsons School for Design, part of The New School in New York City. Check below for important details on how to be a part of this event.

For fans of 3D design, creativity, awesome things, learning, and making (did I leave anyone out?) this is going to be a blast. At the last MUGNY, we featured some MakerBot staff members and various short tutorials. This month, we will have two rock star designers from our community: PrettySmallThings and Cushwa.

PrettySmallThings, occasionally known as Kacie Hultgren, is a scenic designer, among other preoccupations. She uses her MakerBot to print scale models of detailed furniture and sets for Broadway productions, and you’ll see she has nearly 30 beautiful, original designs on Thingiverse. This is a rare opportunity to hear a specialized artist speak in person about her trade. Awesome!

Tom Cushwa, or Cushwa on Thingiverse, is similarly specialized. He creates 3D models for film and television, and has lately become fanatical about making his digital designs tangible with a MakerBot. His Owl Statue has been downloaded over 1,200 times; WHOA.

This event is open to the public and not one to miss. Check this address carefully, since Parsons does have buildings in different spots of the city. Join us on Thursday for enlightening talks and a chance to meet other MakerBot operators.

Where:

The New School
Parsons School of Design
“Masters in Design & Technology Thesis Show”
6 E 16th Street
12th Floor, Room 1200

When:

6:30pm – 8:00pm
MakerBot will provide light snacks and refreshments.

…and lurves it.

CNET’s Rich Brown has some nice things to say about The Replicator, “the most capable 3D printer for under $2,000.”

Yes, but it’s also fun.  And what did Rich use that Mr. Jaws clip for?!

Stay tuned for Rich’s full review of The Replicator, which is due out tomorrow.

There’s something so cool about Dualstrusion.

The winner of the Engineer vs. Designer iPhone design competition, aubenc, has just added a cool kind of mashup. Rather than mashing up two kinds of shapes, he alluded to two animals by adding a zebra pattern to his Paper Bird model.

Now who’s going to add a cheetah skin to cushwa’s Owl statue?

Zebra Paper Bird by aubenc

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.

This is the second entry in a series of posts discussing MakerBot & Miniatures.  Check out last week’s post!

My journey to 3D modeling started at a drafting board and most of my CAD work still ends up in two dimensions on a piece of paper as a plan, section or elevation.  As many of the things I model in CAD are much larger than a piece of paper, it is common practice to create full scale geometry in a CAD program, and then choose a scale in which to depict the project in a layout. When I sat down to design my first model for 3D printing, I wasn’t sure how to get started.  Should I continue to create in full scale, and then scale down when I wanted to make it with my MakerBot?  Or should I design directly in scale?  I currently use both methods in my work, and today I’ll talk through the pros and cons of each approach.

I already had a workflow to go from CAD to 2D, but how would 3D printing change that?

Read the rest of this entry »