This past weekend, Michael Curry and I verified that “everything is up to date in Kansas City” spending time at Hammerspace and Maker Faire Kansas City with the KC Fabricators MUG  and a bunch of the CCCKC crew. Well, we also got a chance to spend time with members of hackerspaces and makerspaces from all over the region, and have now embarked on a mini-tour to visit the home bases of handful of these great folks.

We are particularly aiming to connect with local MakerBot User Groups (MUGs) to introduce the Capture Your Town project — sharing tips and tricks from the field to help each group level up quickly and start sharing things they love about their towns on Thingiverse. Check the slideshow above for the latest snaps from our journey — and read below for chances to meet up with us on our travels this week!

ChiMUG CaptureSession — Chicago, IL — Monday, June 25th, 10am-1pm

Michael and I will be joining Mike Moceri, Tom Burtonwood, and other members of ChiMUG to hit the Art Institute of Chicago Museum and/or The Field Museum to perform some Chicago-focused Capture Your Town. This visit will be fast and furious: definitely an exciting day, all before lunchtime!

Milwaukee Makerspace — Milwaukee, WI — Monday, June 25th, 7pm-11pm

After completing the CaptureSession, Michael and I will head 2hrs north up to Milwaukee to spend an evening with the Milwaukee Makerspace crew sharing the MakerBot Replicators and printed objects we are bringing, and checking out this awesome space and community.

Sector67 — Madison, WI — Tuesday, June 26th, 6pm-8pm

Now, I’ve been excited about attending Sector67 for a couple of months now, after seeing images of Nathan Davis’s MakerBot/Arduino music project. We have heard that there are some awesome MakerBot Operators at this space and I certainly had a good time hanging out with members of this space in Kansas City. When they weren’t elbow (wrist?) deep into repairing their Power Racing Series vehicle, that is.

The Mill — Minneapolis, MN — Wednesday, June 27th, 6pm-8pm

Our first stop in Minneapolis is The Mill, a new educational industrial arts/maker space. The rumor on the streets of Maker Faire KC are that a gaggle of educators will be racing over to join us at The Mill for The Replicator demo as well as to learn about MakerBot’s curriculum resources and opportunities for the classroom. Also, there are a bunch of MakerBot Operators who orbit around this space: I’m looking forward to meeting them!

Hack Factory — Minneapolis, MN — Wednesday, June 27th, 8:30pm-11pm

After hanging out at The Mill, join us for “hacker hours” (i.e. late!) with Twin Cities Maker @ the Hack Factory for BBQ, beer, and all sorts of project show-and-tell and socializing. TC Maker has had MakerBots since the early days so I am looking forward to checking out what sort of 3D printing activity is going on here — and to see who’s running their MakerBots lately!

It’s a Back to Fall Episode of MakerBot TV and this week we’re talking about MakerBots in schools! Find out about the educational program that Liz Arum and Jon Santiago have been putting together for teachers and students using MakerBots in their classrooms. Plus get a sneak peak into the winter stash of some MakerBotted Squirrels!

Huge thanks this week to Liz Arum, Jon Santiago, Dara Ross and her students. As well as Failotron for the music.

 

Check out the educational curriculum: http://curriculum.makerbot.com/
Email MakerBot’s educational team: [email protected]

Here at MakerBot, we believe that children are our future. Imagine what your life would be like if you had owned a MakerBot as a kid!

The media is picking up on this idea too. Check out this piece in Forbes, and this one in the Wall Street Journal, covering MakerBot’s mission to get Thing-O-Matics into the hands of the next generation.

MakerBot is already in a number of schools around the U.S., including New York City public and private school teachers and NSF funded GK12 fellows from NYU-Poly University. Want to get MakerBotting on the curriculum at your or your child’s school? Email [email protected] and check out our sample curriculum here.

MUGNY OpenSCAD Study Group

This Thursday evening at the MakerBot Workshop, the New York MakerBot User Group (MUGNY) will launch a monthly Study Group focusing on the parametric CAD application OpenSCAD. OpenSCAD is cross-platform and open-source, a phenomenally powerful tool that has been getting quite a bit of attention on Thingiverse and beyond. And if it is a wee bit under-documented, counter-intuitive, and eccentric, well….that is where a Study Group comes in!

Those of us pulling this study group together (Liz Arum, Jon Santiago, and Matt Griffin) believe strongly that a wider audience of MakerBot Operators (and Thingiverse Modelers) will embrace this tool and push it even further if many of us roll up our sleeves and do the footwork to compile and generate curriculum, tutorials, libraries, and example files that demonstrate practically how to use this application.

We will be kicking off by revisiting MakerBlock and Allan Ecker’s excellent tutorial series on the Thingiverse and MakerBot blogs, investigating in-development tools such as Marty McGuire’s OpenSCAD Polygon Output for Inkscape, experimenting and reporting on the many many OpenSCAD libraries you can grab from Thingiverse and beyond, and generally digging in deep to see what we can find.

If you are MakerBot Operator in the greater New York area and want to attend, please RSVP via Eventbrite for event location details.

Before you arrive to the first session, please take a look at MakerBlock’s OpenSCAD Basics tutorial series — and make sure to get OpenSCAD installed and ready to go before you arrive:

1. OpenSCAD Basics: The Setup
2. OpenSCAD Basics: 2D Forms
3. OpenSCAD Basics: 3D forms
4. OpenSCAD Basics:  Manipulating Forms

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Start Yer Own Study Group

Members of MUGNY decided to jump into OpenSCAD for our Study Group, but there are quite a few topics and areas of research out there in the Thingiverse for other MakerBot User Groups to tackle.

If you’d like to start your own Study Group, please do so! Declare a meeting and get started with your investigations. But once you are underway, let us know what topic your group has picked and when you and your fellow MakerBot Operators and Thingiverse Modelers will be meeting for the second and later meetings so that we can share details here on the MakerBot blog to reach everyone in your area who might be available to chip in!

Some popular topics that MUGNY considered before selecting OpenSCAD:

• “Finishing Techniques” — Your MakerBot wrapped up printing a part– now what else can you do with it? What paints, sandpapers, adhesives and solvents work best?
• “Blender for Solid Modelers” — Blender has a reputation for being intimidating that might be shifting away with the release of 2.5 and 2.6. But still, with so many tools and modifiers and techniques — which are the best practices for using Blender for MakerBotting?