MakerBot Industries

MakerBot Industries has a brand new online video series hosted by ME! Annelise Jeske – MakerBot’s Video Superstar! And it is AWESOME!

Let me take you on a virtual adventure to an Afro Punk head-scanning party, watch how we MakerBot the heads of Angelo Moore (of Fishbone) and comedian Reggie Watts, get some tips and tricks for using ReplicatorG, and have some fun with a few Thingiverse creations. You may or may not also get to hear some of yoda’s wisdom and watch me swing a sword around.

Special Thanks to: Tony Buser for the use of Bobble Head Bob, 2ROBOTGUY for his alphabet design. And all these great folks for the use of their music: Doctor Popular, 8-bit Ninjas, memotone, Goto80 and Kevin MacLeod.

This week’s installment of the wackiest weekly webshow about 3d Printing with MakerBots includes a demonstration of one of the Thing-O-Matic’s lesser-known properties, a timelapse of us printing a super-cool comedian, and a reminder from Matt about the new Thingiverse t-shirt.

Ever since the earliest days of the first proto-MakerBots, time-lapse footage has been showing up in videos featuring MakerBots. The reason is obvious: watching a MakerBot print¹ is an inherently visually experience, and a time-lapse compresses the entire process of printing into a few minutes like a magic trick.

Last week, Becky and Matt from the MAKE Live invited MakerBot to share behind the scenes tips and tricks for creating time-lapses on their live-streamed show. As I have created many of the recent time-lapses here (posted below), I went on to share my thoughts, and chat with Matt.²

Some Tips I Shared with Matt and Becky

• You need something that is fixed or moves slowly to “gel” the time lapse.
• Be careful of auto-exposure and auto-focus, as these kill illusion.
• Sell realism by simulating camera moves — s-curves and ease in/ease out help give the viewer a cinematic handling feel while direct lines feel kinda mechanical (security cameras).
• Typically folks add music after the time lapse — but if you pick music you like, you can make adjustments to the time lapse to connect it to (or work against) the music.
• Shoot a big enough image to give you room for reframing — but make sure the resolution for a tighter shot looks good enough for your needs.
• Many time lapse/stop motion/intervalometer type tools can be hacked to be queued by something other than time. If you are recording something that changes over time, you can create a tool to trigger the shots that are interesting (motion sensing, tracking, sound sensing, etc).
• Once you are done shooting, it is like you have a strip of film. You can use any number of batch file renaming or image processing tools to change parts or all of your sequence well before encoding it as video.
• You can “thin” out your time lapse to have only images doing what you want, and then use a batch file renaming tool to create a new consecutively numbered sequence of images.

What Time-Lapse Videos Are You Watching?

Well, watching time-lapse projects of unboxing/MakerBot assemblies as well as printing and frostruding is always a real treat for me so I wanted to direct you all to take a look at some great videos NOT created by MakerBot and encourage you all to post links in the comments to other great MakerBot-related time-lapses that you have created or encountered in your travels through the Internets.

The above is my currently reigning favorite of the MakerBot kit assembly videos — this one takes advantage of lots of manually triggered time-lapse events as well as tricks to shoot large formats and then re-frame for nice, believable pans and camera moves. Great work!

Another great MakerBot assembly time lapse — the camera position directly above makes this a really fun group build video.

The above video isn’t a time-lapse, but it is a video showing MakerBot Operator RobertHunt working to update Thingiverse Web Warrior Marty McGuire’s gcode-activated time lapse script for the Thing-O-Matic. With a stepper driven extruder going, the time is prime for slipping your camera automation into the gcode for your print!

1. or even putting the kit together for the first time [↩]
2. Doing my best to hold off just talking about MakerBot the whole time, a real temptation! [↩]

Hey everybody!  It’s Friday, so, despite having just been upstaged badly by the amazing sun-printing video, we’re back with another episode of everyone’s favorite web-show about all things MakerBot.  We’ve got a Thingiverse round-up showing off a printable flyswatter, a 3d-scanned sign of the horns and its first mashup, some printable keys, and just a few of the cool folks we’ve scanned with the Polhemus FastScan.  Then, our artist-in-residence Jonathan Monaghan tells us a bit about the scanning process, and invites everybody to next Thursday’s party.

In last week’s Robot Hospital, I was remiss in mentioning the test piece I used to demonstrate that Skeinforge issue.  So I just wanted to give credit where it’s due, and spotlight this useful calibration print by the tireless MiseryBot.

This is a really nice calibration piece, and it should be helpful for many issues other than the one I mentioned.  It can also bring out other skeinforge bugs, as you can see from the main item photo.

And of course, it’s brilliant at demonstrating the “extra shells” bug — print one with 2 extra shells, and you’ll see see that the narrowest X’s and O’s are unfilled — then print one with zero extra shells and it’s hunky dory.  Remember that next time you’re printing an item with very thin walls and they’re coming out hollow!

And don’t forget to check in tomorrow afternoon for this week’s episode of Robot Hospital!

Wall Thickness Calibration Test Piece by MiseryBot

THIS THING IS FAMOUS! Shows up at 1:54 on this episode of Robot Hospital: youtube.com/watch?v=shpt1hD4z7Y This thing can be used to see what your skeinforge settings and bot will do for certain wall thicknesses: 0.3, 0.4, 0.5, 0.6, 0.7, 0.8, 0.9 1.0, 1.2, 1.4, 1.6, 1.8, 2.0, 2.2 The OpenSCAD is included in case you want to try other thicknesses. The image has the "as designed" thickness in green, the measured straight wall thickness "as printed" in red (for my bot, of course), and the measured cylinder thickness in purple. My bot is set up with 0.25mm layer thickness and W/T of 2.0 for theoretical wall thickness or 0.5mm. For reference, I am using the MakerBot 0.4mm nozzle, but that really does not come into play. Slightly related to: thingiverse.com/thing:7114

This thing brought to you by

In the latest delivery of everyone’s favorite 3-minute video series about DIY 3d printer kits, I run you through some notable Thingiverse objects, including Renosis’ MakerBot Castle and flower toy, and MakeALot’s amazing pencil holders.  Isaac has some words about a new product, and Matt continues his tutorial series about 3d modeling from a real object…in this case, a squirrel.

Enjoy!

In this episode Ethan gives you a worms-eye view of perfecting your build surface, Matt gives you an nifty intro to solid modeling withTinkerCad, and Isaac runs down the latest notables from Thingiverse! Check it out!

Hey folks!  It’s Friday so the three of us on the customer service crew have some awesome stuff for you.  This week on Robot Hospital: tips on bot decoration with Marketing Director Keith Ozar and a quick tip on the fastest way to get your files to the SD card for printing with yours truly.  Also, another Thingiverse roundup with Isaac, featuring the Bunny-Footed Egg Holder, a printable hand-cranked pump, a cool arty shape thing, and more!

Hello noble readers and watchers of videos!  We’ve had some feedback that our recent Robot Hospital Episodes, though still full of entertaining information and helpful tips (obv.) didn’t answer enough questions from users.

Well, we agree.  And we’re only missing one thing — your questions.  So if you have a question about building or using your MakerBot, please submit it as a comment to this blog post.

Or, even better, submit your question as a short video — make your vid, post it on one of the popular video hosting sites, and submit the link in your comment.  (It’d be cool if you used one of the ones where we can get the source, so we can include your question right in Robot Hospital.)  If we use your video, we promise to send you a super-awesome, top-secret Mystery Prize! (LEDs.)

The first question will be answered during the Friday, April 22nd episode of Robot Hospital.  We’re really excited to get your questions and even more excited to answer them!

This weeks Robot Hospital! Episode Two is truly reaching for new heights of pre-production here at the BotCave! Those crazy live-stream days are fading into memory~ We have a great instructional segment from Ethan, who teaches you proper Stepper Driver Calibration, and later he covers the 3D Printing blogosphere in his weekly “Blog Rap.” Griffin and Marty demonstrate connecting the Unicorn to the Thing-O-Matic in fine style, and Matt details some great, and not so great, ideas for finishing techniques to use on your printed objects. We have a second interview with Marek from BeatBots, and the Keepon stops by and teaches robots everywhere how to hold space on the dance floor. Isaac drops in to discuss MakerBot Water Soluble PVA, and debuts version one of the Robot Hospital! intro! We’re going for it with this episode, it’s a new benchmark for what’s to come! Musical intro chops from “The Insider”