Zen gardening is well known to be the single most dangerous kind of rock-and-sand gardening. I can’t even imagine how many minor blisters all that slow, peaceful sand raking has caused through the thousand of years.

No longer, says the Harford Hackerspace in Baltimore. Their submission to the Red Bull Creation contest puts the design part of the process into a Flash and leaves the “gardening” to a CNC drawing machine. Watch it in action, and then watch the second video to see how it erases the previous sand design.

You can see there are several MakerBotted brackets and connectors in the machine. Awesome! We want to see that sucker draw our “M” logo! Check out more detail on their page for how they worked the Bullduino into their design, which is required in the contest.

 

Welcome to David’s dining room, where there’s not much food, but plenty of food for thought. There’s a lot going on here. A Replicator, a Cupcake, a vinyl cutter; and that’s not to mention the CNC mill and CNC plasma cutter in his garage.

David tells me that where he MakerBots is also where people in the community come to hack on their own projects. He’s basically running a hackerspace (!), “…except nobody pays a membership and I sleep in the back.”

 

David’s Thingiverse page is a great collection of Things like accessories for your bot or workspace and a bunch of lasercut pieces for organizing your gear. Go check it out!

 

 

John writes that he and his wife share this space in their home, where MakerBot Cupcake CNC #1136 lives, along with some musical stuff, some drawing bots (EggBot and Polargraph with a MakerBotted Gondola), and a sewing/knitting station. I hope the tunes of that Cupcake are part of the music setup.

Thanks for sharing, John. If you think you have a nice picture of Where You MakerBot, we’d love to see it. Send it here.

 

Our tips line got this WYMB submission from another MakerBot all-star: HotKey.

 

HotKey, aka Bernhard, is the maker of the Ninja Fridge Shuriken (Thingiverse Featured!). And the making doesn’t stop there: Bernhard’s brother Leo designed Mikey, one of the totally sweet runners-up in the MakerBot/GrabCAD mascot design challenge. I bet this family gives each other good gifts.

We’ve seen several MakerBots on table tops so far, and just one sitting inside a cabinet or shelf. Bernhard has his inside an IKEA Astvik cabinet, which has a closing. When it’s rolled down, he tells us that everything looks tidy, and it’s quiet enough to watch a movie while the MakerBot does its work. Nice!

 

Remember MakeALot’s awesome Amsterdam House Chess Set from the Tinkercad challenge? Today’s WYMB transports us to that attic window in a real house in Amsterdam.

This is where Bas Pijls MakerBots.

 

Looks like the filament is pretty nicely fed from the bar overhead. Bas tells me this is his “single-person hackerspace”, and I have to agree it appears that all the tools of the trade are on hand. This must be the place where Bas designed and made his Escher cookie cutters and Bunny Footed Egg Holder. It seems like there should be a pulley system from the kitchen to the attic, so those designs can be tested right away.

The world wants to see Where You MakerBot, so go ahead and shoot us an email! Check out all the WYMB’s here.

 

There are two excellent posts from Shane Graber, or sgraber on Thingiverse, about using a MakerBot for your aquarium. The first of these is a general introduction to aquarium owners themselves as to why 3D printing can be useful for that hobby. I have to be honest, I had never thought about it, but Shane makes a pretty good case:

Picture this: It’s late Saturday night and you hear a noise coming from your fish room. Upon investigation, you find your return pump is buzzing loudly and not pumping water. “Huh? What’s going on here?!” You disassemble the pump and discover that an impeller blade has sheared off, and you don’t have a replacement on hand. … However, you are no ordinary hobbyist because you have a 3D printer at your disposal. You fire up your favorite modeling program and quickly model a replacement impeller then hit the [Print] button. The printer begins spitting out molten plastic.  15 minutes later you are fitting your replacement impeller in place and have saved yourself a lot of heartache and worry — and possibly the lives of many critters in your tank.

Well gosh, when you put it that way. Printing replacement parts is always a compelling reason to have a MakerBot at home. It’s even more compelling when it’s a matter of life and death!

Today Shane posted another great piece on Advanced Aquarist about 3D printing parts for the entire process of fragging and propagating coral in your aquarium. I know what you’re thinking: if only that previous sentence had more ‘p’ and ‘r’ sounds. I’ll try harder.

The post is a great tutorial in fragging, showing you different kinds of plugs you could use and why, and explaining that for parts you want to sink in saltwater, PLA is a better option than ABS. Shane printed all these parts on his Cupcake CNC, including the coral frag plugs that he designed, and they look fantastic. It’s also so interesting to hear about this application of 3D printing that I had never considered.

What is your hobby? How much of what you do for that hobby could be printed on a MakerBot?

 

A couple of comments have come in through the blog, our twitter, and our Facebook channels to the same effect: does MakerBot still sell the Thing-O-Matic?

Let’s clear this up!

Kits

Since The Replicator launched in January, we have continued to ship Thing-O-Matic kits. We are, however, now completely out of stock of the Thing-O-Matics. We will no longer be offering the Thing-O-Matic for sale.

Support

For those who already own Thing-O-Matics, we absolutely plan to continue our support efforts for the foreseeable future. Please feel free to contact Support at the email address below with your needs.

If you’d like to get some insights from other community members, check out the forums on Support pages, or for the more advance user, dig into the MakerBot Operators Google Group.

Parts

We do still have several relevant replacement parts in stock that you may be interested in. If there’s something that you need, and you don’t see it on the store, drop us an email to[email protected].  We’ll do our best to find what you need to get you up and running.

Feedback From You

No matter what MakerBot 3D printer you are using, we value your input and participation on this blog and in all community outlets. Got a question about an event? Want to chime in with an idea for a blog post? Feel free to drop a line to [email protected].

 

NASA’s third annual Lunabotics Mining Competition is a mere 52 days away. I know that because the NYU-Poly Lunabotics team has a countdown clock on their page. That team is working its way toward a submission for the contest using Thing-O-Matics and Cupcake CNCs to prototype the robot parts! (UPDATE: this really brings to mind tbuser’s Mars Rover on Thingiverse. It’s been copied 19 times, and someone should probably round that off to an even 20 before the end of the day. Just sayin’.)

That is exciting in itself, but we were happy to receive a quick update yesterday — we lurve updates — and find out these guys are spreading the knowledge to other entrepreneurs in the NYC area. Team member Jack Poon posted that the group brought TOMs and a Cupcake over to NYU’s MakerDay last week.

…we were showing entrepreneurs a tool that can really help their businesses jump off the ground. A lot of them had a lot of ideas sparking. Instead of waiting forever for something or contracting out prototyping to machinists, now they could do it all themselves cheaply after a initial investment of $1999. There are even free tools online to help them get started with designing such as Google Sketchup.

It was also nice to hear that the obvious evolution from Cupcake to Thing-O-Matic was inspiring for the entrepreneurs. In case you missed it, there was a cool picture up this week showing those two next to our latest darling, The Replicator.

For more info on the NASA competition, look here. We cannot wait to see what the NYU-Poly team comes up with!

Check out @schmarty‘s photo of his three generations of MakerBot. Left to right: Cupcake CNC #131, Thing-O-Matic #5564, and Replicator #7516. What a handsome family!

You can check out the evolution of Schmarty’s Things on Thingiverse, too.

Yesterday we posted about the Innovative Humanitarian Products Organization, the brainchild of Auburn student Grant Moore. Today we have a bit more background to Grant’s cool story and how he’s using his MakerBot to charge ahead on some of the developing world’s problems.

During a summer internship in 2010, Grant saved up for a Cupcake CNC in order to be able to prototype various ideas. He hadn’t yet thought of a water purification system, but says the “power and flexibility that Makerbot offered caused me to search for new uses of the machine.” Grant even has a patent pending for a special ratcheting mechanism he perfected on his MakerBot.

The idea for a water purification system grew out of a recognition of the “truly staggering” water crisis worldwide. He tells me his group now has two systems.

ALPS (Advanced Liquid Purification System) and SaL (Salt and Light). Both operate on the same principle however one is powered by a hand-crank while the other is powered by a solar-cell. The technology is effective at eliminating the majority of all viruses, bacteria, and protozoa to safe levels.

Grant and his student organization IHPO, now 130 members strong, use Grant’s  MakerBot Cupcake  to print the casings for the ALPS as well as the parts for their newest “Hybrid Purifier.” They’ve even tested these systems on the ground in Uganda! You can see a short video of the casing being printed on their Facebook page by clicking the links above. He says the organization has grown into a 501(c)3 non-profit and is “working to establish strong lasting partnerships with other non-profits.”

We are so glad Grant and his colleagues have been able to use MakerBot for global good. Do you know of anyone doing similar work, or have you had ideas for a humanitarian project that you’d like to prototype on a MakerBot? We’d love to hear your stories, too!