This past weekend, MakerBot had a great time sharing The MakerBot Replicator with good friends from the MakerBot Community as well as probably the best manufacturing-savvy general audiences we have ever chatted with.

Special delights included:

• Inviting Zheng3 to share his open source tabletop war game called SEEJ on Saturday, followed by an afternoon of energetic gameplay. (Thanks, ShopBot, for the use of the awesome table!)
• A few MakerBot Operators headed to the Henry Ford Museum to 123D Catch the Wienermobile. (Let’s each share our results on Thingiverse, folks!)
• Bernie (aka SSW on Thingiverse) brought his kids with their Twirl Mini Mustache prints. (Our booth printed them for hours to the delight of eager children waiting for a Helsinki Sky colored ‘stache.)

We also added Chicago superuser Mike Moceri from the ChiMUG to the booth for the weekend to clock highspeed scanning time trials, using the Microsoft Kinect and ReconstructMe. He accomplished this entire process up to start-of-print in around 5 minutes per head, which Bre described as “a zero to sixty record for MakerBots.”

See you all at World Maker Faire in NYC!

Next Friday night, MakerBot will host a very special MUGNY (MakerBot User Group NYC) meeting at the beautiful Marymount School Fifth Avenue Campus right across from the Met Museum. Marymount is an an independent, Catholic all-girls day school that actually has a rocking fab lab full of MakerBots — so this is a special pleasure for us. What’s more, this venue allows us to host a special RSVP only (grab tickets quick here!) opportunity to do a walking tour through the Met Museum so that a number of the artists can share about their derivative works right in front of the originals!

At 6:30pm, MakerBot Operators, Thingiverse Makers, and the curious public will cross the street and join us at the Marymount School for refreshments, snacks, the latest community show-and-tell, and inspiring keynote talks featuring the Met MakerBot Hackathon and the Capture Your Town project that emerged: a chance for all of our community to dive in and digitize buildings, artwork, and other objects that they want to share with the world about where they live.

MakerBot User Group meetings are monthly meet ups for members of our world-wide community to get together locally to share what they have been up to with their MakerBots. The events typically include a featured guest or keynote arranged beforehand, and tend to attract a large crowd of those from the general public as well as those actively involved with MakerBot and Thingiverse — all are welcome!

Check back early next week for further details about the Hackathon artists, digital archivists, and MakerBot community members who will be speaking — and reserve your “5:00pm Pre-Event Demo and Art Talk at the Met Museum” and “MUGNY Event @ Marymount School” RSVP tickets so that you can receive instructions for attending this very special evening.

Thanks again to inspiring maker and educator Jaymes Dec for connecting us with the Marymount School.

A very, very rainy Friday afternoon in Brooklyn yesterday exploded into awesome here at MakerBot with a visit from The Hives!

This band has been rolling out legit rock music in four major studio releases since 1997, and this year they released a fifth, Lex Hives. Here’s a single from that album, Go Right Ahead, featuring the guys in their black and white suits as always, but this time riding a giant dirigible…into space.

A bunch of us love The Hives, so it was a big treat to have them around during their time in New York, especially just a couple hours before their show at Terminal 5! Luckily we had a little practice with having musicians in the house, and were able to give the guys custom guitar picks, designed by Zenix. Bassist Dr. Matt Destruction said the pick felt good and sturdy for playing. Here’s guitarist Nicholaus Arson holding his.

Guitarist for The Hives Nicholaus Arson holds his custom guitar pick, made on a MakerBot

We were smart this time: before we let The Hives leave, we had each of them spin in a chair real quick while Nick (one of our events crew members) scanned them with a Kinect. We’ll turn these into 3D models with ReconstructMe, and pretty soon we’ll have the whole band in 3D on Thingiverse, for anyone to download for free. Drummer Chris Dangerous said he could use his own head as a custom gear shift in his car. Not a bad idea.

Drummer for The Hives Chris Dangerous gets scanned in 3D using a Kinect

What we always want to know from artists we talk to is what they would do with a MakerBot. If they had the power to make anything they wanted, how would they use it? Would they download and make art? Would they upload jewelry for their fans? Or would they use it the way so many people do, to download and make things for home?

Lead singer for The Hives Howlin' Pelle Almqvist holds MakerBotted sculpture by nervoussystem

The Hives are definitely a creative group (and a bunch of freakin nice guys, by the way), and everything about them from their stage names to their website to their videos reflects that. We can’t wait to see what they’ll get into once their Thingiverse page goes up next week. If you want to know when that happens, follow us on twitter @makerbot, and be sure to check in at Thingiverse. In the meantime, you can start thinking what you might like to mash their heads up with.

I want to clue you guys into one MakerBot all-star you should know about, Mike Moceri, or Moceri on Thingiverse. Mike is easily the new go-to expert on using Kinect and ReconstructMe to scan and make models of people on a MakerBot. He has posted a couple dozen busts of people who visited him at various events in the Chicago area, and shared his expertise on how to host that type of event.

He’s a key member Tonight Mike’s going to be over at the Zhou B. Art Center in Chicago participating in an event called Facemask, which is tagged the “Eight Annual National Self Portrait Exhibit.” The exhibit is expected to draw over 800 people for the opening night. More detail:

Facemask explores the hidden personality behind our social media face. Such personality here described as our “other”. This exhibition will take place in the main gallery of the Zhou B Art Center and it is the theme of this year’s 8th Annual National Self Portrait Exhibition.The main gallery of the Zhou B. Art Center will become a national laboratory for the exploration and visual representation of the “self”. The exhibition will include works ranging from representational, non-representational and conceptual ideas of the self. It will feature works in a variety of media. The Zhou B. Art Center is home to 33 Contemporary Gallery and it is located at 1029 W. 35th Street, Chicago, IL 60609. Opening night is from 7-10pm.

Mike will be joined by several members of the ChiMUG (Chicago MakerBot User Group), including, Met MakerBot Hackathon participant Tom Burtonwood, the uber-creative MakerBotter TheNewHobbyist, and the digital artist Patrick Lichty. The team will be scanning visitors and making their likenesses on Mike’s Thing-O-Matic.

And they’ll be livestreaming it! Check out all the action here and on Mike’s twitter account @MoceriMike.

Have fun, guys!

Speaking of whether or not you could MakerBot a “real” product¹ , here’s a fairly thorough little case study of one company using a Thing-O-Matic to manufacture a final product. Conclusion?

3D printers can make “Real” products
As of today, people will pay for 3D printed parts and as we develop new techniques for combining it with digital manufacturing technologies, such as laser cutting and water jet machining, our products will become more complex. We believe that our only limitation is our imagination.

I Heart Robotics, who are also in Brooklyn, give a great breakdown of all the costs that go into making a TriK Tripod Adapter (for a Kinect), which sells on their store for $19.95.

They say the only complaint they’ve gotten so far was when they couldn’t make the adapter in the color a customer wanted. That’s a pretty easy fix.

It’s also cool to see these guys using their Thing-O-Matic to produce a part where they’re not quite sure of the market. You don’t have to do too much market research if you can make the product on demand, and if you only sell 20 of them, you probably don’t want to sink a bunch of money into injection molding costs. They’ve sold 56 adapters since buying their Thing-O-Matic in September, 2011, which nearly pays for the machine itself. As they note in the blog post, with 107 units sold overall, they certainly could never have profited from another method of manufacturing.

1. okay, we were speaking about this a while ago… [↩]

Amy Buser Reconstructed

People have been using the Microsoft Kinect with 3D printing for a while now using excellent programs like Kyle McDonald’s KinectToStl.  However, until recently, most programs can only capture one side of an object which creates a kind of relief sculpture.  To get around this limitation, you could take multiple scans and manually merge them. (hard)  Others like the blablabLAB calibrates and positions multiple Kinect sensors around a scene. (expensive) Last year Microsoft demonstrated something called Kinect Fusion that allows you to carry the Kinect around and dynamically capture all angles of a scene in real time.  Unfortunately, they did not release any software.  Profactor has just released a beta version of free software called ReconstructMe that works a lot like Kinect Fusion.

I’ve scanned a number of things so far, check out the reconstructme tag on Thingiverse!  ReconstructMe works a lot like the Polhemus scanner we used to scan Stephen Colbert where you walk around and wave the Kinect across a scene to capture all sides.  Although the resolution is lower, at least you don’t have to dust your hair in corn starch!  As a matter of fact I’ve found the best way to scan a person is to have them sit in an office chair, point the Kinect at their head, and then slowly spin themselves in a circle.  Once you have a raw scan, I suggest using the free version of NetFabb Studio Basic to rotate it, Cut away the parts you don’t want, and then Repair it to make it solid and suitable for 3D printing on your MakerBot.  The Ponoko blog has an excellent video explaining the process.  You can also place objects on a turntable, like a lazy susan and spin it by hand.  Just make sure that anything ReconstructMe sees within it’s scanning area all rotates in the same way.

There are some limitations to ReconstructMe.  It is Windows only.  In order to do real time reconstruction, you need a fairly powerful video card as it does the calculations on the GPU.  There is an offline recording option that allows you to record on a slower computer and then process it later using a more powerful computer.  However, you don’t get the realtime feedback alerting you when you move too fast or go out of alignment.  Due to the low resolution of the Kinect camera, it’s not that great for scanning small things.  For that, you might want to try something like Spinscan.  However, for scanning large objects like people – it’s awesome!  So go download ReconstructMe and be sure to tag anything you make on Thingiverse with the reconstructme tag.

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Head on over to the MakeProjects site to catch Brian Jepson’s From Kinect to MakerBot guide-in-progress for how to transform captured Kinect data on through to the STLs you need to 3D print with your MakerBot Thing-O-Matic.

His guide picks up where Kyle McDonald’s great 3D Printing with Kinect post leaves off — a great tutorial to take you from the initial STL you create using Kyle’s KinectToSTL tool through to a scaled-down, MakerBot-printable  STL. Bonus points for using only open source tools for the entire chain!

Those looking to learn more about the Open Kinect movement should check out the Open Kinect Project (offers MeetUps in certain cities) and consider attending conferences such as Art && Code 3D: Kinect-Hacking Conference, on October 21-23rd at Carnegie Mellon University.

There have been a few people asking for easier to install binary releases for Kyle’s KinectToSTL tool, compiled also for Windows and Linux. There are some complications that require fuss, not to mention the need to make changes to the code to suit the latest OpenFrameworks release (according to Matt and Kyle). If you accomplish this work, drop a comment back here and we will happily trumpet your triumph to the world.

Spherical Projector by nrp

Thingiverse citizen nrp, duplicator-of-keys, gesture-freestyle-printer, and Kinect-copier-of-people has uploaded another incredible design.  This time he has created a spherical projector using OpenSCAD designed printed parts, a frosted globe, a pico projector, and some hardware.  Nrp, like many others, has been inspired by Neal Stephenson’s cyberpunk classic “Snow Crash” as his inspiration for this project. ^1 2  Nrp’s amazing write-up and description suggests there’s more than a little math involved in converting flat digital photos of the earth into a pico-projected-globe.  I’m looking forward to reading the rest of series of upcoming blog posts detailing his work.

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1. Interestingly, one of the creators of Google Earth also cites this book for his inspiration. [↩]
2. Also interesting, Neal Stephenson’s work “The Diamond Age” is cited by many 3D printing enthusiasts as their inspiration.  Just look at Vik’s website! [↩]

Duplicating Disc Detainer Keys by nrp

Thingiverse user nrp has been working on using his 3D RepRap printer in some pretty amazing ways.  He’s already put his 3D printer to use along with a Kinect to print by use of hand gestures.  Since then he’s been working on duplicating house keys and the more secure disc detainer keys pictured above.  Nrp’s website, and the comments that go along with his detailed posts, provide a wealth of information about his project along with lots of interesting links about computer enhanced key generation.

This project and the way nrp uses his printer remind me of the very cool Nickel for Scale project by Amy Hurst and MakerBot’s own Marty McGuire.  How cool would it be to never have to go get keys made again?  I don’t think it’s too much to dream that one day you might be able to put a key down next to a nickel, take a picture or short video, and have your MakerBot crunch out a few duplicates.

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80 mm tall scan, printed with a Thing-O-Matic

I’ve been working with 3d scanning for over two years now, building my own 3d scanners and writing code to work with commercial scanners like the Kinect. When I started my artist residency at MakerBot, I knew I had to combine 3d scanning and 3d printing. One of the first ideas we had was to set up a 3d photo booth at MakerBot to scan visitors. So I wrote an app called KinectToStl which first launched at the MakerBot NY user group. I modified it a bit based on feedback from that event, and it’s since been fired up for the 3rd Ward Make-A-Thon and Maker Faire Bay Area 2011. Other artists and hackers are exploring the app, like 4nchor5 la6.

I’ve been maintaining a GitHub repository of all the code I write while at MakerBot, and the source is available for download there. If you don’t want to deal with compiling it, there’s also an OSX app available. The project has a few external dependencies that make it slightly difficult to compile right now, primarily because openFrameworks is nearing a release and hasn’t stabilized yet. The source would be most useful for someone interested in recreating this in Processing or another environment.

Once you’ve downloaded the app, plug in your Kinect and start the app, you’ll see three tabs and four sliders.

Screenshot from KinectToStl

The first tab is where the relevant options are:

• zCutoff controls how far away your cutoff plane is, in centimeters. Anything farther than this will disappear into the “background” (flat area).
• fovWidth and fovHeight control the field of view (or angle of view) multiplier in each axis. This acts like a “zoom” function, and lets you zoom into the center of the scan.
• stlSize controls the width of the STL file, in millimeters. I generally stick between 60 and 80 mm.
• useRandomExport is an experimental export option that only works when fovWidth and fovHeight are set to 1. It will attempt to do a more natural triangulation of the model.

Once you’ve framed the subject and have your settings right, click on “exportStl”. This will save an STL file to the /data folder next to the .app. They’re named like screenshots, “Kinect Export 2011-05-25 at 18.21.13.stl” These files are ready to be 3D printed. They’re scaled properly, and sitting flat on the bed. Because they have a high triangle count, they can take anywhere from 10-20 minutes to run through Skeinforge.

The second tab (click in the the second rectangle) is for lighting options if you’re having trouble seeing the live preview. The third tab is for more advanced options. I’ll mention a few:

• temporalBlur is what causes the 3d model to fade over time, and helps with the accuracy of the scan. It’s like the “exposure time” setting on a camera: shorter exposure is noisier, longer is more sensitive to motion but less noisy.
• smoothingAmount controls the level of blurring on the model. This can make a visually more appealing or better skeined model at the expense of loss of detail.
• backOffset controls the size of the backing plane. If you want more layers of backing, turn this up.

I’ve found that the best parameters for printing these models are with 3-4 shells and almost 0 infill. They’ll print quickly like this, and should be fairly structurally sound.

I also recommend playing with the “OSX Kinect Application” posted by CidVilas to Thingiverse, it has a lot more options and a prettier interface.

If you’re interested in scanning an object in a more complete way, I recommend taking multiple STL exports from KinectToStl and doing boolean joins on them after cutting off the backing plane with an intersection operator. If someone tries this out, I’d love to see the results!

All the scans we (myself and MakerBot) have been taking with this app are being posted to the 3dphotobooth Thingiverse account. So if you’ve been to any of the recent events mentioned above, check it out!