MakerBot Industries

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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?)

Bobblehead *Sta by tbuser

The infamous Gangsta super sized and ready to accept infinite variations of mashups with mildly amusing bobbing heads. Uses Pin Connectors V2 thingiverse.com/thing:10541 to assemble the sections together. Nameplate uses OpenSCAD Bitmap Fonts Module thingiverse.com/thing:2054 Wibbly-wobbly-bobbly head action: youtube.com/watch?v=ctFl9GKmiiE

This thing brought to you by

Brebble Head by tbuser

Bre's head with the bobblehead mount underneath. Using Polhemus Scan of Bre Pettis thingiverse.com/thing:9010

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… [↩]

Analog eggs are so fragile

Because they’re difficult to put back together again. ¹  Taking a digital object and converting into an STL will essentially shatter it into a bunch of triangles.  This is great if you’re a 3D printer.  It’s not so great if you want to open, edit, modify, scale, create a derivative, or do anything with that digital file other than just print it.

Not infrequently people will upload their designs to Thingiverse just as an STL file.  This is great for printing, but not so great for creating derivatives.  Other times, people will upload their design files, but not an STL.  This is great for creating derivatives, but deprives users of being able to preview a thing and hampers them if they don’t have a program that supports the file format.

I’m a big fan of Google’s Sketchup.  I know it’s not open source – but it is free and super easy to use.  There are several STL import plugins for Sketchup that all work with varying degrees of success.  They tend to miss the finer details on objects.  The only reliable way I’ve found to edit an STL file without a loss of data is to import it into Blender, save as a 3DS file, and import it into Sketchup.

One problem with editing an STL file even after it has been converted into a more fungible format is that what was once a simple structure is now a spider web of triangles.  Editing a mess of small triangles in Sketchup could get unwieldy pretty quickly.  In order to simplify the entire model and potentially reduce the number of triangles involved, consider using the decimate function in Blender or the Polyreduce plugin for Google Sketchup.  Either method will provide you with a much simpler digital model for editing and modification.

1. Photo courtesy of WaveCult [↩]