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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Going to be in Detroit for MakerFaire this weekend?

Make sure to drop in on software/hardware engineer guru Matt Mets and marketing manager/chief advocate of awesomeness Keith Ozar at the MakerBot Booth!

Matt and Keith will be printing out loads of great models on their mini-BotFarm, with a focus on sharing items created for MakerBot Space Month @ Thingiverse, including Tony Buser’s gorgeous Mars Rover.

They will also be giving a short 20min presentation about the MakerBot Universe that will interest veteran Operators and new audiences alike on the Make:Live stage on Sunday, July 31st @ 3:00pm.

MakerBot Zoetrope

Matt Mets will be bringing his brand new MakerBot Zoetrope project, DIY  turntable + light-strobe rig designed for zoetrope animations using objects printing on a MakerBot. Should the delicate models survive, look to see the Blender experimentation I have been doing for Matt, printing out poses of Big Buck Bunny from the open source blender files for that character!

Matt will be printing other animations (he’d really like a Nyan Cat if the Thingiverse modelers are listening) and experiments all weekend.

Here are the MakerFaire Detroit event details

Detroit, July 30 & 31
The Henry Ford
Saturday 9:30am – 6pm • Sunday 9:30am – 6pm

See things before they are Things!

Last year MakerFaire Detroit distinguished itself as a particularly fertile place for Hackerspace project launches and the truly cutting edge. A great place for innovators to get audiences revving before the monster audiences arriving to the East Coast for World MakerFaire NYC. So if you can make it there, you won’t be disappointed.

MakerBot Operator Stewart Starbuck let us know about his experience last weekend at the inaugural UK MakerFair. He’s provided a nice pack of photos from the event to check out. In the tradition of MakerFaire, it looks like a good time was had by all, and there was an abundance of 3D Printers!

Here’s a snip from Stewart’s report.

“I’ve completely worn out, but here they are, some of the pictures taken
from MakerFaire: http://www.flickr.com/photos/stewartstarbuck/sets/72157626113449241/

It was an amazing event, which I would recommend to everyone.  I was really pleased to see such a huge interest in 3d Printing. There were a number of stands with printers, including a strong contingent from the RepRap folks, and all reported having had lots of positive feedback
from the public….We were printing out keychains (taking around 3 minutes each) that proved to be very popular. We couldn’t print them fast enough to keep up with demand. Seeing peoples faces when they watched the MakerBots print a piece all the way through then to take it with them was just simply awesome.

The wealth of other projects at the faire is just too great to put into words. There are lot of amazing people out there with some truly remarkable ideas, many of which will hopefully go on to change the world for the better!”

We hope so too, and thank you Stewart and Nick, and congratulations to everyone at UK MakerFaire!

Check out Stewart’s photostream here. http://www.flickr.com/photos/stewartstarbuck/with/5527788486/