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!

MakerBot is hitting up another awesome Maker Faire, this time in Detroit. We love going to events because it gives us a chance to show people what our technology and our community are all about. If you have a chance to see us in Detroit this weekend, here’s what you can expect!

***Double Plus Good Announcement: We will indeed be selling MakerBot’s latest machine, The Replicator, during Maker Faire Detroit! Come find us in the Maker Shed for details.***

Saturday @ Noon
Jim, aka “Zheng3”, will be on hand for part of the afternoon to share his adventures creating an open source tabletop wargame with the world on Thingiverse! Join him for a quick talk at noon — and then take him on in a match!

Saturday @ 2:00 p.m.
Mike Moceri will give a quick demo of how he uses a Microsoft Kinect, ReconstructMe, and his MakerBot to quickly scan, clean-up, and print 3D portraits. Many have tried, but Mike is by far “the fastest scan-to-print operator in the Thingiverse.”

Saturday @ 4:30 p.m.
Sign up in advance at the MakerBot Booth to join MakerBot’s Community Manager Matt Griffin on a Capture Session in the Henry Ford Museum. We will be heading out from the booth promptly at 4:30pm to travel through the museum, hunting for interesting pieces of history in the areas that permit photography for personal use. We’ll contribute the object to the Capture Your Town project on Thingiverse by using 123D Catch to create a 3D model and then repairing it using Meshmixer.

Sunday @ 3:00 p.m.
MakerBot Family Portrait! Calling all MakerBot Operators at Maker Faire Detroit. Join us briefly right at 3PM to take a quick family portrait at the MakerBot Booth — quickly followed by some special treats we brought to share with all of the incredible MakerBot Operators in our midsts.

On Thursday, myself and three of my MakerBot colleagues Michael Curry, Tony Sherwood and Dave Neff, headed to the great midwestern metropolis that is Kansas City, Missouri, to prep for Maker Faire: Kansas City this Saturday.

Sticking to (what we were told to be) strict KC greeting traditions, we hosted a huge Oklahoma Joe’s MakerBot BBQ+Hackathon at Hammerspace last night, joined by a gathering of KC Fabricators MUG and other CCCKC & Hammerspace regulars, all itching for a chance to see a small herd of The MakerBot Replicators in action.

This town has a very special place in MakerBot’s (mechanical) heart – Michael and Tony in particular have spent a great deal of time here — and it has become over time the undisputed US midwestern Paris of the 3D printing world. Actually, it just might be the 3D printing “Paris” of anywhere in the world — take that Paris, France! — with more passionate 3D printing enthusiasts than just about anywhere you’ve heard of.

Maker Faire: Kansas City: Delights for Makers and Minions

Between the MakerBot booth and the tables of MakerBot Operators from all over the country, there will be quite a few 3D printed and 3D printing delights on hand for this “Show Me State” crowd — including sneak previews of MakerBot’s new colors of plastic, a tremendous printed Heart Gears to melt yours, a gorgeous data visualization of the Makers of Thingiverse created by Tony Buser, and Michael Curry’s robot Minion table.

What’s more, MakerBot’s Jeff and RJ have flown out to join us today and they have a handful of Replicators for visitors to purchase on-site, only the second time in history that this opportunity has been possible.

Capture Your Town: Kansas City Style (i.e. Slow-Smoked)

A “special mission” has been declared by the KC Fabricators MUG team: a call for anyone with pride in Kansas City to help capture or model a few of the many distinctive elements of the Kansas City skyline and get them up on Thingiverse.com with the tag “captured” and “kcfabricators“. The options proposed so far (that I have heard) have included the gigantic Shuttlecocks (see below) at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, the Liberty Memorial, the Power and Light Building, and (perhaps meant less sincerely?) 3D scanning the many merry locals staggering from location to location in the Power and Light ”drinking district.”

I’ll be on hand all weekend to help any of you who wish to dive into capturing tools like Autodesk’s 123D Catch – and keep your eye to the Community Capture Your Town project page for information and advice. I have promised to Craig and Luis that if KC Fabricators get KC monuments and other delights up by Friday or Saturday night at 10pm, I’ll download and take a look at printing the KC landmark at the MakerBot booth during the weekend.

They’re multiplying!

Backstory: after their debut at the Maker Faire Bay Area 2012, the creatures of the MakerBot Robot Petting Zoo were put onto Thingiverse. First Wheely, then Bumper Bot, Button Bot, and Bubble Bot.

And then we noticed that a couple of these bots were quietly re-made by two brave Thingiverse citizens. Woot!

Here’s Xephius’ version of Wheely, with a hilarious description below.

This is a descendant of early high performance sport UAV’s that settled in BC’s Fraser Valley. They can easily be identified by the bright yellow and red markings and tell tail Stainless Steel Rodgers hardware in Imperial not Metric. (Canadian Tire doesn’t carry any M3 hardware!) Because of the relatively low number of wild UAV’s in BC (420 in last count), they are protected by the Province. Recent observations show they are attracted to Poutine, Hockey pucks, and Timbits, seen here courting a Sieg X2 CNC mill…

Just hours ago, a new cousin to this Wheely derivative popped up, too! Here’s cornwarrior’s version of Bumper Bot.

Awesome work by these two superstar Thingiverse members Xephius (aka John Cooney) and cornwarrior (aka Josh Kugler)!

Two down, two to go. Who will complete the happy family?

Life's a Beach

Woohooooo! Memorial Day Weekend is upon us and hot dang are we excited to blow off some steam! It’s been an absolute whirlwind here at MakerBot HQ. The Wall Street Journal scooped our big move to to the Brooklyn Tech Triangle,  but we still managed to put the final bolts on our traveling Robot Petting Zoo and pack them off to the first Maker Faire of the year in San Mateo! We hooked up with our old pal Schuyler and talked to thousands of people about changing the world with desktop manufacturing, and more importantly, customizing our own LEGO blocks. We captured some magical moments  in our photo booth and went hunting for bots in the wild. We exchanged much needed hugs with our west coast family. We made @hugs idea come to life and helped a really cool kid fix his Go-Kart in 45 minutes flat. It was AWESOME. We got home just in time to cause a disruption at TechCrunch and say a bittersweet farewell to our second season of MakerBot TV. What should we do next season?

Oh! We also  helped a team of engineers light up the Bay Bridge in San Francisco and gave Jared Leto a giant PLA frog.

How to Start The Summer Off Right:

Head to the beach.

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Crack open a cold one.

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Catapult.

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Get patriotic.

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In further celebration of Geek Pride Day, we are pleased to announce that the masterpieces collection from the MakerBot Design Team known as the Robot Petting Zoo will now be available on Thingiverse!

You heard us talk about these and you saw it all over Engadget and CNET and a bunch of other spots. We are incredibly proud of these little guys, and not just because they won Editor’s Choice from Maker Faire. They represent what a MakerBot is capable of and the power of combining open-source hardware technologies.

Now it’s time for the more important phase in the project: when we put the files in your hands and tell you to run free with them. (Don’t run too free. In our experience, you’ll need a fence to keep these robots in one place). In keeping with the open-source, collaborative spirit of everything we do here, the designs are now yours to use as you please. And the beauty is you can take these and be inspired to come up with other pet robots, and help us turn this petting zoo into a robot circus.

The first set of files to go up are for Wheely, the “robotic chicken” designed by Michael Curry. Here is how Michael describes his pet robot.

Wheely is a domesticated subspecies of the common Flightless Aircraft.  Found in the disused aerodromes of the southwestern deserts, Wheelies descend from earlier generations of autonomous UAV’s.  They live in rigorously organized communities called ‘squadrons’ and spend most of their lives socializing.  Largely ambivalent to other mechanical organisms, Wheely retains his ancestors ability to detect electric fields.

Wheely is up on Thingiverse right now (!!), and the rest of the bots — Bumper, Bubble, and Button — will be up in the next couple of days. Go make these, make them different, make them yours!

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A lot of the pictures and shots from Maker Faire last weekend hit the cutting room floor, but we wanted to share them with you to give you a feel for the environment. Saturday and Sunday were two action-packed days as you can see. Read the rest of the post to find out who else made MakerBot a part of their booth in order to show off their own technology or just the joy of Making.

What do you mean anything?!

Another question from Maker Faire from a family was – “What materials can you build using a MakerBot?”  I told them there was no limit to what they could create with a MakerBot.  While the most obvious use was with plastic, a MakerBot can help you create nearly anything you want out of nearly any kind of material.

Want gold, silver, copper, bronze, or any other metal?  Use the lost-wax casting technique for an amazing result.  How about frosting, chocolate, jell-o, wax, or ice?  Need an ink stamp, wax stamp, embossing stamp, cookie cutter, or stencil?

What’s that?  You just have to MakerBot a vegetable?  Yeah, you can even do that too.

This is what it’s like to live in the future.

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People write us and ask us to explain why our community is so special. It’s because there are thousands and thousands of people out there who own MakerBots and use them to do things, and then they bring them to events like Maker Faire and teach others. That community is invaluable.

And in the case of Schuyler St. Leger, it’s just…awesome. We’re so proud of you, Schuyler, for being a great kid and a patient teacher. Here’s an interview Schuyler gave to PandoDaily this weekend during Education Day at Maker Faire, and a picture below the video of Schuyler and his MakerBot Awesome Award.