Tomorrow is a big holiday in the United States and this app is the perfect way for anyone with a MakerBot to make it special. And delicious.

The company dreamforge has put up a genius custom cookie cutter app for all to enjoy. Introducing Cookie Caster.

It’s web-based, and sits right inside the homepage. You can draw your cookie cutter freehand, or trace an image that you upload from your computer. As you work, the app lays down two end points to each line that you draw, with one point in the middle that you can drag to create curve. That means you really don’t need too many points in your shape if you’re tracing. Just get the basics down and add curvature later.

Once you’re finished, you can save the file to the Cookie Caster gallery (you can see my test triangle, labeled “Pelkertron” because I don’t understand naming things, or my truly terrible Dollar Sign shape). But even better,  you can download the .stl for free and make it right away. If you have a MakerBot, this means you can make custom cookie cutters in minutes. If you don’t have a MakerBot, you can pay a fee to have the Cookie Caster folks send you your finished product. Sweet!

Let’s be sure to give credit to the awesome cookie cutter work of Guru, which inspired Cookie Caster. They say in an email that their app has just made some simple updates to Guru’s and put it on the web.

One possible enhancement to Cookie Caster that stands out would be the ability to add interior shapes to my cookie cutter, like the hole in the middle of a doughnut. Try out the app and throw your feedback in the comments below.

If you come up with any good 4th of July designs, or designs for your own country’s holiday, share them in the Cookie Caster gallery and on Thingiverse!

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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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.

Read the rest of this entry »

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 [↩]