Say hello to what kids can do with 3D printing, open source hardware, and YouTube.

Easton LaChapelle is now a Junior in high school and he’s already got some impressive credits to his name. His first robotic hand, controlled remotely by a glove with sensors sewn into it, won him 3^rd place in the Colorado state science fair as a freshman, which reserved him a seat at the national fair in Los Angeles as an observer. This also won him some nice coverage in Popular Mechanics.

While developing the project, Easton got in touch with Jeremy Blum, whose YouTube videos have over 4 million views. Jeremy helped clear up some of the code for the control glove to communicate wirelessly with the hand. To do this on the cheap, Easton bought an old Nintendo Power Glove off the Internet and raided it for sensors. Watch this video of Easton testing the hand’s strength in this video.

As we all know, award-winning robotic hands grow up to become sweet, award-winning robotic arms. After Easton’s success with his first hand, he looked for ways to improve it. The first step was to fabricate the hand how he wanted it. 3D printing services in the area quoted him $500 to deliver on his designs, which was pretty far outside his high school budget.

Back to Jeremy Blum. Full disclosure: Jeremy is a current MakerBot employee and a longtime enthusiast of open source collaboration and 3D printing. He was in college at the time with plenty of access to a MakerBot Thing-O-Matic. He took Easton’s awesome designs and advised him on how to tweak things for a MakerBot. Then Jeremy made all the pieces on the Thing-O-Matic and shipped them to Easton in Colorado. He also advised Easton on how to convert a couple DC motors on the robotic arm to servos by adding potentiometers. That way they don’t just continue spinning forever, but stop when parts of the arm have hit the right position.

Well here’s the coolest part. This arm placed in the Second Award category for Engineering at the 2012 Intel International Science Fair, i.e. second in the world. Whoa. Easton’s story is timeless – someone trying to make a machine just for the fun of it, and finding every opportunity to do it for less money. But it’s also a perfectly modern one. He was in middle school when he discovered the resources online to take his simple fascination into reality. He was able to connect with someone across the country in no time and have his designs shipped relatively cheaply.

What if he had had a MakerBot of his own from the beginning? How much sooner would Easton have been testing ideas and making waves in huge competitions?

Easton lists Dean Kamen, the inventor of the Segway and other machines, as a big inspiration. He told me on the phone that Kamen is working on a prosthetic limb, too, but that he plans to make a better one. We think he probably will.

 

We had the great fortune of being situated right next to DeviantArt at Comic-Con for the past several days, so an extra wave of great artists found their way over to our booth. It turns out there is a great collection of 3D art in that community.

And check this out, at least one person is actively using a MakerBot for some original toy design.

 

The artist, ~bohnded, writes that this is his own re-imagined series of figures, based on G.I. Joe Sigma 6 bodies, using Marvel’s Micronauts as inspiration. These figures are 8″ tall, more than twice the size of the 3.75″ figures of the earlier toy series.

~Bohnded has used the web-based design system Tinkercad to design the add-ons like armor elements, and then made them on his MakerBot Thing-O-Matic. Nice work!

 

Good morning from Juan’s MakerBot studio. What a good set up for making time lapse videos!

MakerBot wants to congratulate the NYU Poly Team Atlas 2012 on their success at NASA’s Third Annual Lunabotics Mining Competition!

These MakerBotters are an awesome group of students using their Thing-O-Matic to make all kinds of things, related and unrelated to the goal of building a lunar mining robot. Here’s the exact language from the competition page:

The challenge is for students to design and build an excavator, called a Lunabot, that can mine and deposit a minimum of 10 kilograms of lunar simulant within 10 minutes.

Team Atlas took home the Judges Innovation Award and Third Place in the Team Spirit Award category. Throughout the competition, they were making things for other teams, like actual robot parts, but also souvenirs like Dr. Who Tardises¹ and Space Shuttle models. How generous!

Here’s the team’s Lunabot, “Atlas02″ in action.

Congratulations Jack Poon, Stanislav Rosylakov, Yusif Nurizade, Jessica Aleksandrowicz, Nick Cavaliere, Salvatore DiAngelus, Matthew Izberskiy, Ryan Caeti, and advisors!

 

1. this is the plural form we have settled on [↩]

Where You Re-MakerBot?

John Foster has given his Thing-O-Matic new life as the one, the only, The Fosterbot. However it may not be the only one for long, as John has shared all the files and instructions on Thingiverse. This is an awesome resurrection of a bot, and a perfect example of how hackable our machines are.

 

TheNewHobbyist has taken Where You MakerBot to a new level: he’s made it a playset.

 

What?! How awesome is this? It looks just like the picture we’ve already seen, and it looks like fun. In his words,

So now on Thingiverse you have the option of downloading and printing a playset for astronauts, medieval knights, and people that like to make things in their spare time. Who knows, maybe it’s the next big thing in kid’s toys!

Yes! Workshops-as-playsets are the new thing in toys. Make your own garage or living room into a playset, or find one on the blog that you like. And while we’re on the topic, remember to vote for the Ladyada’s Workshop LEGO set!

 

Thingiverse user sirmakesalot has been busy in the last month, with several good uploads, and a few more soon, he tells us.

I really like one of his recent Thingiverse additions in particular, this three-legged chair.

 

This is especially cool for a couple reasons. The first is why Greg made it. As a person with a disability, he wanted to draw attention to the idea of something being disabled. This chair, as he puts it, was “born without one leg.” It turns out this was a project that became real furniture in his home (the final product is a beauty, go check it out), and the chair is fully functional. It stands upright without the need for the rest of the fourth leg.

This use of Thingiverse for awareness is interesting. There are a few other examples, and I bet we’ll see a lot more in the future.

The other cool thing is that Greg didn’t design this to make on a MakerBot. He designed it in Rhino for a class and ultimately made it out of wood. However, he shared the design file with the world on Thingiverse and now someone could easily MakerBot it if they wanted to. The original may be in Greg’s living room, but you can have a sirmakesalot 3 legged chair of your very own.

 

Sharing this picture of Adam‘s lab, but you have to check it out on Flickr to see all the tags he’s added. This room has a paper stegosaurus, some Diet Mountain Dew, even a 2D printer, folks. And a tip: keep those PJ pants close at hand (on the back of the chair, perhaps) for those emergency bursts of all-night creativity.

 

Where do you MakerBot?

 

UPDATE: okay, the video doesn’t work as an embed, my bad. Watch it here!

Speaking of architecture, here’s a video for:

• Architects
• Thing-O-Matic owners
• Anyone who ever played Nintendo and craves the music
• Anyone who loves — and I mean loves — LEDs
• People who just can’t get enough time lapse video

Wasn’t that fantastic? Wasn’t that the most dramatic showing of ReplicatorG you’ve ever seen?

This video comes to us from Andreas Kretzer und Dennis Röver, whose Thing-O-Matic is on display at the German Architectural Museum (Deutsches Architektur Museum) until the middle of September, 2012. The team has students giving live demonstrations of making things on the Thing-O-Matic, but they also made hundreds of souvenirs available for visitors.

 

Thomas sent in pics from Endeavour College in Adelaide, South Australia. For US readers, this “college” is a secondary school. Check out where these high school students huddle up to make things on their three MakerBots.

Look at that banner, and those modded Thing-O-Matics! This is customized MakerBotting to the max. Good on ya, guys!