MakerBot Industries

Eggbot omelet recipe by dnewman

If you thought an egg sporting it’s own nutritional information was awesome, it’s time to check out Dan Newman’s egg with a recipe for omelets written on it by use of an Egg-Bot.¹

Eggbot omelet recipe by dnewman

...or "omelette" if you prefer. These files are for plotting an omelet recipe on eggs using an Eggbot. Use the file omelet.svg or omelet-1-serving.svg if you park the "pointy" end of your eggs at the egg motor cup. Use omelet-flipped.svg or omelet-1-serving-flipped.svg if, like me, you park the fat end of your eggs at the egg motor's egg cup. (Less slippage when you do that, eh?) Note that the text is sized such that you don't need a nano sized pen tip: I used a Sharpie Ultra Fine for the pictured egg. So how many servings for omelet.svg and omelet-flipped.svg? Those two files have a "2 serving" recipe which calls for two eggs. If you desire a more self-contained recipe, then go with the "1 serving" variants. And, if you need nutrition info, well just see thingiverse.com/thing:7232 and then mentally add in the 2 or 1 Tbsp of cream and 3/4 or 1/2 Tbsp of butter. (Butter is about 100 calories per Tbsp and there's about 50 calories per Tbsp for heavy cream [the yummy stuff].) Bon appetit!

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1. On a slightly related note, I really love how unpredictably meta Thingiverse has become. [↩]

Panoramic Egg (parametric too!) by MakerBlock

Basic Egg Cup, printed by Mark Cohen

I talked with Keith, MakerBot’s Marketing Manager, last week — he had a theory why so many great things went up on Thingiverse around Easter / Passover: ”This season is already really crafty, like Halloween. You are expected to create decorations while drawing families together — so this is a great Thingiverse season.”

So much awesome¹ went up after my Stanford Bunny post last week that I wanted to highlight a few more favorites. A number are egg-focused, including MakerBlock’s incredible parametrical panoramic egg.² So another reason must certainly have something to do with eggs, eggshells, egg-bots, and the things you can do with all of these things.

Portal Turret by EggyWeggs

Easter and finishing Portal 2 inspired me to make this basic turret template for use with the Egg-Bot. The back of the design has one of the famous quotes by everyone's favorite, child-like home defense product. Watch it being printed here: youtube.com/watch?v=U4bl18mVOv4

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Ether Egg by linuxwrangler

Diethyl Ether diagram to make "ether egg". Happy Ether!

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Egg TARDIS by pmcall221

It is an TARDIS in egg form. A must have for any doctor who fan. This is in honor of the season preimer of Doctor Who April 23rd at 9 / 8 Central on BBC America.

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1. Keith’s favorite word [↩]
2. Mashups are no longer just hijinks, they are becoming some of my favorite designs on Thingiverse. I cannot wait to have the time to try to print MakerBlock’s design, as well as Chick In Egg by nicholasclewis [↩]

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 [↩]

TSP crossing

The question behind the “Traveling Salesman Problem” is basically, what’s the most efficient path through a large number of points? ¹  There are probably many important applications of this difficult mathematical problem, but the most interesting for me is line art.  If you’ve been following the progress of the MakerBot Unicorn or Egg-Bot projects, you’ve already seen some incredible examples of “TSP” line art.

Mona Lisa by mifga

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Nikolai Tesla by mifga

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Thomas Edison by mifga

Here is a Unicorn printable version of the Thomas Edison TSP Art line work by dnewman!

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The current process for converting a picture to TSP line art is pretty involved.  From the excellent TSP line art tutorial over at Evil Mad Scientist labs, the process involves converting the image to greyscale, converting it into a stippled image, putting the points through a TSP solver such as the Concorde TSP solver package to create the TSP line art from the stippled image and end up with an SVG file.  At that point you could probably use Schmarty’s Inkscape GCode extension. ²³

I would love to see this process become simplified.  I suspect the best method for doing so might lie in the creation of a GIMP⁴ plugin.  GIMP already has the mechanisms for many of the above steps.  A GIMP plugin could probably automate the “grayscale -> stippled image -> point puddle” process.⁵⁶  Once that was done, the resulting “point puddle” would still need to be fed through the TSP solver.  However, I suspect this might be able to be done by having GIMP call the Concorde TSP solver.  This would take it from “point puddle -> TSP solver -> SVG file” which could then be turned into GCode using the above Inkscape extension.

Besides my belief that there just isn’t enough TSP line art in the world, there are a bunch of reasons I’d love to see this plugin pop into existence.   The top three reasons being the Unicorn, the Egg-Bot, the CNC Etch-a-Sketch.    After that, I’d have to say – TSP line art renderings of photographs and old master works of art.  I would love to see a web cam hooked up to a Unicorn for instant TSP line art photobooth style sticky note generation!

1. Photo courtesy of robotson [↩]
2. Basically, image -> gray image -> point puddle -> TSP solver -> printable SVG path [↩]
3. I say point puddle since it’s not a 3D point cloud.  Just a 2D … puddle of points. [↩]
4. My favorite open source image manipulation/editing software [↩]
5. See note above last for explanation of “point puddle.” [↩]
6. “Point puddle” you heard it here first! [↩]

Thingiverse citizen Pattywac recently launched two design challenges – a Holiday Design Challenge and a MakerMe Design challenge.  Each winner gets $40.00 from Pattywac and an additional $100.00 in MakerBot store credit from MakerBot Industries!  Without further ado, here’s Pattwac’s announcement of the winners!

Holidays Challenge

Nicholas C. Lewis' print of Kliment's Holiday Prusa Mendel Set!

There ended up being 21 holidays-tagged items to judge, many of them being closely evaluated to each other.  Thingiverse citizen Kliment ended up winning with the Holiday-ized Prusa Mendel design, in part, due to the huge response from the community.  This design was able to incorporate the holiday spirit and will continue to give for years to come by allowing others to print other Things and hopefully other 3-D printers.

MakerMe Challenge

Nutcracker by psync

There were only two entries to this contest but they were both pretty cool.  Citizen psync was able to fit his Holidays Nutcracker into the MakerBot for some z-axis walnut smashing action while citizen Nickames was able to create an egg-bot style attachment for the Makerbot.  Nickames ended up taking home the W with the egg-bot attachment due to the response from the community and the fact that it will allow a whole new range of designs to be posted on and printed from Thingiverse.

Congratulations Kliment and Nickames!

Earlier this week, Andy put together our newest kit – Evil Mad Scientist’s Egg-Bot!
Before we got ourselves all yolky, we decided to try some light bulbs.
I was hoping we could get a cool gobo-effect from printing on the bulb.
The light effect didn’t work so well, but they do look great, especially if you have ‘em on a dimmer!

Here’s a video of it printing a demo pattern that we found on the website.