What do you mean anything?!

Another question from Maker Faire from a family was – “What materials can you build using a MakerBot?”  I told them there was no limit to what they could create with a MakerBot.  While the most obvious use was with plastic, a MakerBot can help you create nearly anything you want out of nearly any kind of material.

Want gold, silver, copper, bronze, or any other metal?  Use the lost-wax casting technique for an amazing result.  How about frosting, chocolate, jell-o, wax, or ice?  Need an ink stamp, wax stamp, embossing stamp, cookie cutter, or stencil?

What’s that?  You just have to MakerBot a vegetable?  Yeah, you can even do that too.

This is what it’s like to live in the future.

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Thank you to all of you who joined us for the April 3rd, standing-room-only MUGNY event. Great start to MUGNY’s 2012 season!

MUGNY might be the “flagship” MUG given its proximity to MakerBot HQ, but this particular event was something of a special case. I assembled a heavy-hitter list of MakerBot colleagues to each deliver a short talk on frequently requested topics. Future MUGNY editions will focus on show-and-tell directed by community members, along with a sprinkling of A-list superstar keynotes.¹

I am following (cue the TV mad scientist hand-rubbing) a secret plan: the plan to generate a number of great talks and tech demos that can be later transposed into full-out tutorials on MakerBot.com to share with our community — so that all of the MUGs can benefit. Those physically able to visit weren’t the only ones attending — despite our same-day notice, we had at least seventy-five visitors via the event’s livestream, chatting with MakerBot blogger Andrew while following the proceedings. And this is just a piece of the MUG-to-MUG exchange that will become possible as more MUGs come online and swap activities with each other. So keep your eyes on this space — I’ll be blogging about these tutorials as we post them. I encourage MUGs to give these tutorials a try at their own events.

Across the planet, dozens and dozens of MUGs have been forming to bring MakerBot Operators together regularly to share prints, models, stories, and (frequently) pizza. Are you on the hunt for fellow MakerBot Operators to meet with in your area? Or maybe you have a group and you’d like to tell us about it? In either case, drop us a message to mug at makerbot dot com and I’ll be happy to follow up with you.

Wanna check out the run down for the night? Click the “read more” link below for the Techniques Swap summary!

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1. I have lined up some really outstanding contributors for the upcoming season! [↩]

How to: Grow a Portrait Gourd

Apparently, growing gourds in molds is an ancient 500 year old Chinese artform!  By creating a mold of a sculpture and placing that mold around a young gourd, the gourd will grow and take the shape of the mold.  While this artform was almost lost in the 1970′s, the craft was revived by Mr. Zhang Cairi and the basics have now been condensed into this instructable by Make’s Tim Anderson.

This is one of those times when I’m just surfing the ‘net and realize, “Hey, that would be PERFECT for Stephen Colbert!”  I know there are Colbert chocolate mold makers out there.  Is anyone game for creating a Colbert gourd using a 3D printed mold?

From Instructables via Make Blog!

Chocolate Bunny Ear Mold by rweaving

Thingiverse citizen rweaving is now the proud winner of all the prizes and privileges that accompany a design challenge win!  There were four possible ways to win this challenge and rweaving has fulfilled three of them – first to design a plastic mold for chocolate bunny ears, print the plastic mold, and create chocolate bunny ears from such a mold!  (You can still win for “First to directly print bunny ears out of chocolate”))

I hereby confer upon rweaving all the powers and privileges that accompany such a design challenge victory – 27,000 internet points, mad blog nods and kudos, and three everlastings of fame on the internet.  Awesome work!

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As everyone knows, the top of a muffin is easily the most desirable and delicious part.  This is reason for muffin-top pans.  So, it occurs to me that a bunny’s ears are clearly the most delicious part of a chocolate bunny.  With the season of chocolate bunnies and eggs on the horizon, Thingiverse should really have some kind of chocolate mold for bunny ears.  The prizes consist of blog-nods, major kudos, 9000 internet points, and everlasting fame on the internets.  One prize to each of the following:

• First to design a plastic mold for chocolate bunny ears (look to Chris Palmer’s work for inspiration)
• First to print a plastic mold for chocolate bunny ears
• First to create chocolate bunny ears out of a printed plastic mold
• First to directly print bunny ears out of chocolate (use a frostruder or some other kind of chocolate extruder)

Here are a few items from Thingiverse to help you on your way:

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It’s finally happened: a team of researchers at University of Exeter has created a dedicated machine for extruding 3d objects out of chocolate.  While we are a bit jealous of their accomplishment, we must applaud them.

In all seriousness, this is a very cool project, and we do wish them the best of luck with it.  Hopefully they’re already planning Thingiverse integration.

We do have some technical questions though — first off, what exactly is that they’re printing?  Is that low-cacao-content stuff that only England (ok and the US) will label as chocolate?  Can we print fancy dark chocolate like we have here in Brooklyn?  Is there an automated tempering system?  Can we have one?

Regardless of details, this is truly a proud day for all mankind.

Brass Stanford Bunny, printed by Isaac Dietz

As with every holiday calendar event that rolls through the T-verse, the approach of Easter this coming Sunday has been the inspiration for a number of outstanding seasonal objects contributed to Thingiverse.com. Ethan featured Zydac’s cute Eggbunny last week¹, but check out some of the other great offerings. (Thingiverse-tagged as “easter.”)

HASENFRANZ Easter Bunny Cookie Cutter by elk

There are a few cookie cutter options, including Elk‘s Easter Bunny Cookies and brettjones Easter Bunny Cookie Cutter. (Make your own cookie cutters by using guru‘s Cookie Cutter Generator v2!) Stage your stained/painted/chocolate eggs in bpijls‘s BunnyCup – Bunny Footed Egg Holder. Of particular usefulness to those of you working with OpenSCAD to design Easter-flavored objects, you’ll want to grab nicholasclewis‘s Parametric Egg and take a look at TeamTeamUSA‘s impressive Virtual Easter Eggs color/multi-print assembly project for ideas and parts for your OpenSCAD or MeshMixer masterpieces. Also, if your Easter egg hunt actually involves firearms, don’t forget vik‘s Egg-Shaped Target.²

And this doesn’t even get us started with the t-verse’s prolifically breeding colony of Standford bunnies….

Stanford Bunny

Stanford Bunny, printed by mah_digilife

The Stanford Bunny model has a venerable computer visualization pedigree previous to becoming one of the more iconic Thingiverse first objects for printing or mashing-up. The bunny is but one of the more popular models from the Stanford 3D Scanning Repository, a collection of high resolution scans made available by Greg Turk and Marc Levoy in 1994 to assist computer scientists working with mesh tools who do not have access to high resolution scanning hardware. According to the Bunny’s Wikipedia article, the Bunny was scanned from a ceramic figuring, and “consists of data describing 69,451 triangles.”

Here’s an intriguing note from the scanners about their models:

As you browse this repository and think about how you might use our 3D models and range datasets, please remember that several of these artifacts have religious or cultural significance. Aside from the buddha, which is a religious symbol revered by hundreds of millions of people, the dragon is a symbol of Chinese culture, the Thai statue contains elements of religious significance to Hindus, and Lucy is a Christian angel; statues like her are commonly seen in Italian churches. Keep your renderings and other uses of these particular models in good taste. Don’t animate or morph them, don’t apply Boolean operators to them, and don’t simulate nasty things happening to them (like breaking, exploding, melting, etc.). Choose another model for these sorts of experiments. (You can do anything you want to the Stanford bunny or the armadillo.)³

Well, thank goodness for this, as the Stanford Bunny, as brought into Thingiverse very early on from Operator archiveman and then cleaned up for easier printing by phooky, has become along with the Gangsta one of the most frequently mashed-up and manipulated base models. It is even a base model in Ryan Schmidt’s wildly useful MeshMixer app.⁴

So when you are looking for treats to print this week (or this year, given that this is the Year of the Rabbit), don’t overlook gpvillamil’s Tron bunny, mrbug’s Bunny Trouble game or Optime Bunnyus, mifga’s Rabbitsta, and of course phooky’s printable-classic Stanford Bunny. My favorite Standford Bunny print involves simply taking phooky’s model and scaling it to 0.4 or 0.5 in ReplicatorG for execution with a Stepstruder MK6.

The Original Egg-Bot

While the Original Egg-Bot kits are currently back-ordered at Evil Mad Science, we still have a number of the kits in stock. Finding chocolate Easter eggs hidden in the backyard is one thing … but what if your love ones discovered a kit for building a robot to plot artwork on egg-shells on their Easter egg hunt?

A t-verse catalog of several compelling Easter-related models follows after the jump.

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1. an instant “I must print!” design [↩]
2. A note from Vik’s Thingiverse post: “Unlike real Easter Eggs, you should only practise on these targets with plastic Airsoft BB’s – Unless you just get a kick out of blowing things to smithereens” [↩]
3. Ed. My emphasis. [↩]
4. MeshMixer is back in active development now — grab the latest version for Mac or PC and add some literal Easter eggs to your other models [↩]