Thanks to Tony Buser who caught a glimpse of a familiar friend in the trailer for the brand new Sundance Channel series “Quirky”.¹ The show focuses on two new “citizen designers” each week — home grown inventors and designers from Quirky’s online community – who show up with a dream for product and then work with the Quirky team to realize a prototype. Catch the show to experience the entire process of taking a product from sketch to thing within a dramatically orchestrated, time-compressed window.

Ah, TV about innovation — what more could the MakerBot community want? We love in particular that Ben Kaufman, the founder of Quirky, is introduced standing next to a printing MakerBot Thing-O-Matic. Why not? We always do our best to stand next to a MakerBot when we want to draw in the crowds as well.²

1. Tony caught the show and confirmed that the Thing-O-Matic is in the series as well. [↩]
2. Great arm candy for your local Maker Faire or tech expo. [↩]

Heart Gears by emmett (Opened in Wings3D)

While MakerBot Operators are more than happy to print the thousands of incredible objects posted to Thingiverse, eventually many catch the design bug and reach out for guidance for how to get started designing models.

Your mission: to create a solid, manifold (“watertight”) STL-formatted file for importing into ReplicatorG. STL, created as the format for stereolithographic CAD files, is a ubiquitous format, so the design application options are vast. ReplicatorG also offers experimental OBJ and Collada file import capability — though the files are then converted into STL files. (You can open dozens of file formats in MeshLab, netfabb Studio Basic or similar 3D swiss army knife tools — and then export as binary or ASCII STL files, opening up even more models to ReplicatorG.)

Choosing Your Hammer

8-bit Heart by schmarty (3DTin.com image)

For design software, there are many powerful free and open source design tools for us to introduce to Operators. Favorites include 3dtin.com, Sketchup, OpenSCAD, Wings3D, and Blender. We have heard about but not experimented much with POV-ray (excellent tutorials here), FreeCAD, HeeksCAD, and Art of Illusion — apps that have serious fans in the 3D printing world.

Plastruder MK5 Solidworks 2011 Model by kai

For commercial solid CAD apps: Rhino (Mac users — jump on the free beta), Autodesk Autocad, Inventor, Creo, and SolidWorks are probably the biggest players in the field. But perhaps you don’t have upwards of $1k to spend on design software? Try the highly-capable $99 Alibre Personal Edition, Cheetah3D (mac only), or bonzai3d.

Below the fold is a handy five step exercise for brand new designers to get their feet wet with 3D modeling.

Read the rest of this entry »

Duplicating ducks

About two weeks ago I had taken my daughter to a friend’s house for a dinner party. ¹ She played with some kind of little board game with plastic ducks that you fish out of a moving pond.  On the way back home she asked about that game.

The best, the part that made me proud, was that she asked me about how she and I could print ducks so we could have a version of this game for ourselves.  We discussed how I have red and yellow plastic, but not orange.² How we would have to design the duck, print the duck in yellow, and then paint it with orange for the beak and legs.

I love that my daughter was thinking more about how something was constructed, how we could replicate or create a version of it, and about the material problems we would have to work around in order to create a toy for her.  Arguably, she is really thinking about how to copy existing products rather than designing or inventing.   However, I learned how to draw by copying art from comic books and how to write HTML by taking apart web pages and modifying them.

She could just as easily have asked me to buy the game for her or asked for it as a birthday or Christmas present.  I would much rather she began thinking like an inventor or designer than merely a consumer.

How has your MakerBot changed how your kid sees toys?

1. Photo courtesy of Man & Machine [↩]
2. Yet… [↩]