There is still time to enroll your child in a very important learning opportunity, and good news: the price has dropped and the eligibility has expanded!

NYU Poly’s Center for K-12 STEM Education and MakerBot are combining powers to get kids introduced to 3D modeling and 3D printing. This is an excellent chance to give them a leg up with a set of skills that will become very advantageous in the near future.

Here are the details:

Where: NYU-Poly Campus
6 MetroTech Center
Brooklyn, NY
Room RH 214

When: July 9th-13th, 2012 from 9am to 3pm daily

Who: Ages 10-13

Cost:  $500 $400/student (includes a lunch voucher good in our cafeteria)

Email [email protected] to find out more.

Click here to sign up!

If you’re a parent in the New York City region, take a look at this great summer workshop being organized by NYU Poly. “On the Move” is a week-long program targeted to students entering 6th, 7th, and 8th grades in the fall, and it is focused on 3D modeling and 3D printing. These are the skills that will set the next generation of creative kids apart from their peers. Get them started now!

We’re especially proud to recommend this program, since the MakerBot Education Team, Liz Arum and Jon Santiago, will be leading the instruction. Here’s some info from the website.

This workshop will focus on 3D Printing, one of the most disruptive technologies around. 3D printers allow anyone at any skill level to become producers, inventors and artists, and they are changing the way we create and learn.  During this one-week intensive workshop students will learn how to make and personalize 3D models with free, readily available software like Tinkercad, OpenSCAD and Blender. Our theme will be “On the Move,” and we will be focusing on making gears, interlocking parts and other physical mechanisms to make our creations, walk, shake, dance and fly. No prior modeling, computer or printing experience is necessary.

Where: NYU-Poly Campus
6 MetroTech Center
Brooklyn, NY
Room RH 214

When: July 9th-13th, 2012 from 9am to 3pm daily

Cost:  $500.00/student (includes a lunch voucher good in our cafeteria)

Questions? Email Susan Hermon at [email protected]

There’s one week left to sign up for our third class in the “How to MakerBot” series at Tekserve in Manhattan. Liz Arum, our education specialist, will be leading the class.

This class is focused on the program modeling program Blender. In order to participate, those attending the class should take some time to download the following programs before class:

• ReplicatorG
• Blender
• MeshLab
• KinectToStl
• NetFabb

And then you should bring that computer, a 3-button mouse, and a desire to learn some awesome stuff about 3D modeling and MakerBotting!

RSVP now to reserve your spot! You can view the invitation here.

Tekserve – Seminar Room
119 W 23rd Street
NY, NY 10011
212-929-3645

Thursday, May 10; 6:30 p.m. – 8:00 p.m.

Photo credit

• projectshellter.com
• @ProjectShellter
• bit.ly/​ProjectShellter
• bit.ly/​ProjectShellterShells
• youtube.com/​ProjectShellterVideos

This guest post is part of Project Shellter.

MakerBot’s Tony Buser has been doing quite a few experiments with mashing up the heads we have been 3D scanning lately. He put Bre’s head on the Statue of Liberty, Stephen Colbert’s head on a Teddy Bear, and made a classic statue bust and plinth of his own 3D scan. Well, this line of investigations has lead finally to the inevitable, the highest form of statuary … bobbleheads!

Now, “bobbleheads” (also bobbing head dolls, nodders, wobbler, dashboard nodders, and “those things you get at baseball games sometimes”) have been a quest for MakerBot Operators for a while now — one actually calling up to ask what the “bobblehead setting” was for ReplicatorG.¹ Well, Tony didn’t stop his work at producing one bobblehead, he created parametric tools to help all of us make the bobbleheads we have been dreaming of!

Check out his detailed step-by-step instructions for how to use his negative object or “nega-thing” to punch the bobblehead cavity and spring mount into the base of your own head model! Or a hero’s head model. Or an enemy.

He includes a great “*sta”² base — and you can use his tools to design and share your own base as well. Tony has observed that mounting bobblehead on the turning spool works pretty well.  Bonus points to the first MakerBot Operator to artfully integrate a bobblehead into beatbot’s Spazzi! (Perhaps next to Isaac’s Sign of the Horns?)

Untitled by tbuser

This thing brought to you by

Untitled by tbuser

This thing brought to you by

1. True story. [↩]
2. ie the classic Gangsta mashup model [↩]

Going to be in Detroit for MakerFaire this weekend?

Make sure to drop in on software/hardware engineer guru Matt Mets and marketing manager/chief advocate of awesomeness Keith Ozar at the MakerBot Booth!

Matt and Keith will be printing out loads of great models on their mini-BotFarm, with a focus on sharing items created for MakerBot Space Month @ Thingiverse, including Tony Buser’s gorgeous Mars Rover.

They will also be giving a short 20min presentation about the MakerBot Universe that will interest veteran Operators and new audiences alike on the Make:Live stage on Sunday, July 31st @ 3:00pm.

MakerBot Zoetrope

Matt Mets will be bringing his brand new MakerBot Zoetrope project, DIY  turntable + light-strobe rig designed for zoetrope animations using objects printing on a MakerBot. Should the delicate models survive, look to see the Blender experimentation I have been doing for Matt, printing out poses of Big Buck Bunny from the open source blender files for that character!

Matt will be printing other animations (he’d really like a Nyan Cat if the Thingiverse modelers are listening) and experiments all weekend.

Here are the MakerFaire Detroit event details

Detroit, July 30 & 31
The Henry Ford
Saturday 9:30am – 6pm • Sunday 9:30am – 6pm

See things before they are Things!

Last year MakerFaire Detroit distinguished itself as a particularly fertile place for Hackerspace project launches and the truly cutting edge. A great place for innovators to get audiences revving before the monster audiences arriving to the East Coast for World MakerFaire NYC. So if you can make it there, you won’t be disappointed.

You might remember a few weeks ago when we announced that the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, had acquired a Thing-O-Matic. Well, registration is now open for a FREE Cooper-Hewitt workshop for teens, focused on prototyping with a MakerBot. Starting on April 30th, the workshop will consist of five hands-on sessions led by MakerBot’s Matt and Mike: four at Tekserve, with a fifth hosted by MakerBot in the BotCave and BotFarm for final prints and critiques.

For more information, take a look at the Cooper-Hewitt posting for the series here. Very limited slots, so register quickly!

Workshop participants will learn to:

• Design and print prototypes in 3-D.
• Use 3-D apps like Rhino, Blender and brand-new Tinkercad. (We are going to tune our choices a bit based on experience of teens participating.)
• Assemble, modify, and troubleshoot Makerbot hardware and software.

Mike and I are looking forward to team teaching this series. Also, we will be sharing our curriculum, tips & tricks, and student models-in-progress with the MakerBot community here and at Thingiverse for those of you who don’t live in NYC and will miss out on this opportunity.

Heart Gears by emmett (Opened in Wings3D)

While MakerBot Operators are more than happy to print the thousands of incredible objects posted to Thingiverse, eventually many catch the design bug and reach out for guidance for how to get started designing models.

Your mission: to create a solid, manifold (“watertight”) STL-formatted file for importing into ReplicatorG. STL, created as the format for stereolithographic CAD files, is a ubiquitous format, so the design application options are vast. ReplicatorG also offers experimental OBJ and Collada file import capability — though the files are then converted into STL files. (You can open dozens of file formats in MeshLab, netfabb Studio Basic or similar 3D swiss army knife tools — and then export as binary or ASCII STL files, opening up even more models to ReplicatorG.)

Choosing Your Hammer

8-bit Heart by schmarty (3DTin.com image)

For design software, there are many powerful free and open source design tools for us to introduce to Operators. Favorites include 3dtin.com, Sketchup, OpenSCAD, Wings3D, and Blender. We have heard about but not experimented much with POV-ray (excellent tutorials here), FreeCAD, HeeksCAD, and Art of Illusion — apps that have serious fans in the 3D printing world.

Plastruder MK5 Solidworks 2011 Model by kai

For commercial solid CAD apps: Rhino (Mac users — jump on the free beta), Autodesk Autocad, Inventor, Creo, and SolidWorks are probably the biggest players in the field. But perhaps you don’t have upwards of $1k to spend on design software? Try the highly-capable $99 Alibre Personal Edition, Cheetah3D (mac only), or bonzai3d.

Below the fold is a handy five step exercise for brand new designers to get their feet wet with 3D modeling.

Read the rest of this entry »

3D printed blender fix

When Laszlo’s blender stopped working, he did what any self-respecting owner of a 3D printer would do – he took it apart.

A quick look at the broken part, 15 minutes with OpenSCAD, and he was ready to print the replacement part!  Perhaps best of all, he’s uploaded his designs to Thingiverse for anyone else who needs to fix their blender.

As in a 20 minutes of video tutorials.  MakerBot’s summer engineer and the creator of the Makerbot 3D Scanner v1.0 Kit, Taylor Goodman, has put together another great video explaining how to turn a point cloud into a mesh using Blender (11:37) and another video on how to turn a mesh into a 3D printable object, also using Blender (8:43). ¹  Tyler has also incorporated these instructions into his “Blender Tips” page on the MakerBot wiki.

Cloud to Mesh with Blender

Mesh to 3D object with Blender

1. I know when clothbot watches that video, he will wish it were just two minutes longer… [↩]