Are you guys watching the Thingiverse blog? There’s some new activity on there.

I noticed this one earlier: a little hut for your garden that traps slugs and — hmm… — kills ‘em. I’m with Greg on this one, I kinda like slugs. They’re peaceful. But if they’re a nuisance for your garden, make one of these things today and set it out.

If you look at the Thingiverse page for this Slug Trap, you’ll see a little conversation about alcohol and plastic. Since this trap is supposed to use beer to attract the slugs, one commenter wondered if it might degrade over time.

I asked one of our resident materials experts and got an answer: as long as the beverage is less than 8% alcohol by volume, all should be ok! So go on, get rid of some Bud Light and some slugs at the same time.

I’m still buzzing from Maker Faire, which Annelise captured beautifully in the last episode of Season 2 of MakerBot TV. I met thousands and thousands of people at the MakerBot tent, including people who were discovering us for the first time and people who had all three generations of bots at home.

And then there were people in the middle, like Jason Huggins, or hugs on Thingiverse. Jason was part of the Grid Beam booth just down the path from our tent, and stopped by during set up on Friday to say hello. When I asked him whether he was a MakerBotter, he said no, but that he was a part of the community and had a good Thingiverse success story. Incidentally, Jason is the founder of Sauce Labs, a cloud version of the website performance testing services Selenium that he also started. But he is an enthusiastic open source hardware guy, too.

Last fall, Jason started his project Bitbeam, which he explains this way on his blog:

Bitbeam = Lego + Grid Beam = Awesome

To clarify: Grid Beam is a construction system created by Phil and Richard Jergensen, and Bitbeam is a miniaturization of that concept to just the right scale that it’s compatible with Lego, and especially Lego Technic.

Jason added Bitbeam to Thingiverse last September as a file for laser cutting, and before the day was out, there were two derivatives including a version you can make on a MakerBot. He was really excited to tell me about that, and I was excited to hear it. One person put an open source hardware idea into the community, and someone else, a total stranger, took it from one way of making things into another in just a few hours.

And here’s how Maker Faire chapter of this story makes it more awesome. When Jason told me at our tent on Friday that he had still never seen his Bitbeams made on a MakerBot, I said I could easily run the file through ReplicatorG for him. I did that in a spare moment that same evening, which took me all of two minutes, and finally caught up with Jason on Sunday to show him the final product. This was the look on his face.

A Happy Hugs

And this was his tweet to me:

@pelkertron Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! /cc @MakerBot @bitbeam

— Jason Huggins (@hugs) May 21, 2012

It’s nice when a grown up can be genuinely surprised and delighted by something. Jason told me that he has no real interest in laser cutting the Bitbeam pieces in balsa wood — although, I have to say I really think they’re nice looking — and would rather just tell the world to get a MakerBot and make all the pieces themselves. He twisted and bent the ABS parts in his hand and said the durability was better than the wood. Just to be sure of the quality of the design, we linked one up to one of his Bitbeam constructions on display. Perfect fit!

MakerBotted Bitbeam attached to laser cut Bitbeam

I was thrilled to meet Jason and to give him a little confirmation that his idea of making his designs on a MakerBot was a great one. This was really easy because we were at Maker Faire together, but this is exactly the kind of thing that happens in hackerspaces all the time. If you own a MakerBot, I hope you give yourself the thrill of making something for someone, and letting them tell you their ideas that could take over the world.

This stuff never gets old.

Cat Litter Trap by Triskite

It’s a testament to the wonders of 3D design and MakerBotting that a 3D printer is just so dang useful.  You can use it to whip up a toy, broken latch, and now… keep kitty litter in it’s proper place.

It may seem like a small matter, but it’s never a good thing to see kitty litter outside of a kitty litter box.  Thingiverse citizen Triskite’s cat litter trap takes care of this problem with aplomb.  While many kitty litter boxes even include similar litter traps, not all of them do.  This is such a simple and useful modification to a litter box or home that no cat lover should do without it to keep the rest of their home free of pesky pet particles.

Cat Litter Trap by Triskite

Porous stepping platform to provide a barrier + litter trap between a cat litter box and the rest of the house...

This thing brought to you by

It’s going to be a big weekend for everyone attending Maker Faire Bay Area. Here are a few quick ideas for what you could make to be fully prepared for the festivities.

Card holder by eM5

Business Card Holder with Top by eM5

I saw one of these on Annelise’s desk the other day, and I have to have one. If you get a card from me at MakerFaire, it’ll be from one of these suckers!

But here’s why you should have one for MakerFaire. Trading cards! Shawn  Wallace at Make Magazine has designed these awesome 3D printer trading cards for this weekend. There’s no word on whether there will be actual cards – looks like these are just designs right now – but in case some enterprising person turns these into cards, you’ll be prepared with your card holder!

Mustache and Monocle by chefmaki

Disguise!

Are you supposed to come into the office on Saturday, but you’re planning to sneak over to Maker Faire instead? You need this Mustache and Monocle by chefmaki, just in case your boss shows up. Also, if I see you walking around Maker Faire with this thing, I will feature you on the blog, no questions asked.

Whistle by madkite

A Whistle, either this one by Zaggo, or this slightly modified one above by madkite. If you’re bringing your kids to Maker Faire, and if they have a tendency to run off, you can use your whistle to get their attention. Or perhaps you can use it to referee some robot basketball. These are just ideas; a whistle is always useful.

Nepenthesis by Ecken

A beautiful Nepentheses Planter by Ecken. One thing I want to do at Maker Faire if I get the chance is visit some of the gardening booths. I like the idea of making these Guerilla Garden bombs full of wildflower seeds and throwing them around my neighborhood. Maybe you could leave the planter at home, but it would be a great home for some of the flora you might pick up over the weekend.

Trebuchet by jam4ar

Trebuchet

When does one need a reason to make a trebuchet? Make this and launch things; at Maker Faire. Case closed. Here’s one from jam4ar.

The tail end of this fun little history of the clothespin in the New York Times Magazine sounds like a MakerBot call to action, from an organization that thinks people should wash their clothes in cold water and use clotheslines to dry them. Read the article for the history of the invention, but here’s what I want to call your attention to:

HOUSEHOLD HELP

Glen Berkowitz is the executive director of Project Laundry List, a nonprofit organization that advocates washing clothes in cold water and hanging them out to dry. Here, he shares his thoughts on the clothespin:

What role does the clothespin play in Project Laundry List? Looking backward, the clothespin is a relatively easy way to dry your clothes without having to lay them on the ground or drape them over something. Looking forward, the clothespin is a phenomenal interest of ours because we’re in the process of setting up a brand-new national design competition.

What kind of design competition? The clothespin hasn’t changed for over 150 years. Is there a better clothespin just waiting out there by some young or creative mind? By the end of this year, we will formally launch this. We’re excited to see what we find.

This one’s for us, Makers! I’ve started to think about clothespins without springs that come in a variety of sizes depending on the job. But take note of this last point, too:

Do you recommend the wooden or the plastic variety? If the wooden clothespin was still made in the United States, we would recommend it, but what’s made in America now are plastic clothespins. One is less economical and the other is less sustainable. It evens out.

There are several arguments one could make about why making your own clothespins in ABS on your MakerBot reduces material waste. But to drive the point home, maybe we should be thinking about PLA pins. There are a few awesome clothespins on Thingiverse already, like the one below from PolygonPusher. Let’s build off of these and think about a new design that can be MakerBotted.

Clothespin by PolygonPusher

Not all upgrades are a good idea

Sure, it seems harmless and innocuous at first.  A little upgrade here, a little upgrade there.  A super strong metalic arm, a sweet head’s up display, maybe an embedded MP3 player.  People, don’t you understand – no good can come of mashing up evil cyborgs and dispensers of delicious candy?!  The next thing you know we have replicas of talk show hosts and disruptive CEO’s.  I urge, no – I implore you, please stop the madness.  And, whatever you do, do not create an evil cyborg action figure that can walk on it’s own.

Cyberman by jbakutis

This is the future of humanity. This is the future of humanity...

This thing brought to you by

Cyberman by 7777773

Cyberman. Cyberman. Does whatever a Cyber can.

This thing brought to you by

Bre Pettis Bioloid Head by Skimbal

Bre Pettis' head adapted to match the Bioloid bracket system and artfully grafted onto a new, superior, robot body. I for one welcome our new robotic CEO... Video of Bre Bot in actionmike-ibioloid.blogspot.com/2011/09/brebot-10.html Bre Bot is a derivative of:thingiverse.com/thing:9010 &thingiverse.com/thing:5192 Is a collaboration of: Michael Curry (Skimbal) Michael Overstreet (I-Bioloid) & Luis E. Rodriguez (Luis) And is brought to you by the letter: C

This thing brought to you by

Dalek Edition - Candy Dispenser Topper by TeamTeamUSA

DISPENSINATE! Show that pesky Davros what his Daleks are really good for - dispensing candy! The Dalek thingiverse.com/download:23816 is just one topper that can be printed using the attached dispenser_insert.stl; virtually any thing on Thingiverse can be turned into a topper with the correct transformations and support material (so sharpen your support-fu)!

This thing brought to you by

Mashup Dalek Walker by tbuser

This is a modular Dalek that uses pin connectors from thingiverse.com/thing:10541 to make dalek mashups. It also has a version of the legs with a slot to fit a MakerBot windup walker! I've made the slot deep so that the legs are enclosed inside the body. This "skirt" around the legs of the walker makes it MUCH more stable (at the expense of not being able to walk as far) when you attach tall things on top. Without a skirt, these walkers tend to fall over very easily. Even when I attach my big fat head on top, it shuffles along and doesn't fall over: flickr.com/photos/tbuser/6609202223/ The Dalek body is from: Doctor Who New Series Dalek Body by InnovationByLayers thingiverse.com/thing:1600

This thing brought to you by

P.S. A special thanks to TeamTeamUSA, 7777773, Tony Buser, jbakutis, skimbal, I-Bioloid, Luis, and InnovationByLayers for bringing us just a little closer to Judgment Day and the robopocalypse.

P.P. S.  Okay.  You got me.  I’m not really that worried about the coming robopocalypse.  I really just wanted a post highlighting awesome Doctor Who-themed things on Thingiverse so I could post THIS:

Thanks for the head’s up Sasha!!!

I was crushed this morning to hear of the death of Maurice Sendak at age 83, author of such timeless classics as Where the Wild Thing Are and In the Night Kitchen. When the popular author of books you loved as a child dies, you are sad for the loss of that childhood self as well as for the one who enriched those early experiences.

That said, my sense of sorrow at the death of Sendak is acute and specific. Here is an author that my adult self admires on level with that childhood self. (Have you picked up one of his books lately? Take another look: his work invites revisiting.) At grad school¹, I had the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to study writing for a series of sessions under Sendak at his workshop in Connecticut. The one thing that you wouldn’t guess meeting him – a tough-as-nails Brooklyn intellectual, talking with fiery passion and strong language about politics, art, music, opera, literature, and “people who are idiots” — is that he is not only a children’s book author, but the household name for children’s book authors.

It is important to acknowledge when taking time to remember him this week that he largely detested the children’s book industry that sprung up in the wake of his tremendous early successes, going so far to refer to the field as “a publishers scam.” He took great pains to draw the attention of my classmates to a whole range of notable exceptions throughout history, condemning those who write children’s books for the money, pandering to a sanitized, publisher’s notion of what children want to read: ”These writers are liars; these writers are selling something they don’t believe in. And children know it.” Here is an author as well-versed in Herman Melville and Henry James as Randolph Caldecott and Ruth Krauss. If you haven’t had a chance to read his collection, Caldecott & Co: Notes on Books & Pictures, you should hunt for it to get a sense of the depth of his thinking about the work he created — I suspect it will soon be coming back into print.

Here is where I can connect this discussion back directly to the MakerBot community. Sendak’s “secret” method, something he was never reticent about sharing, was his commitment to retain the raw spirit and untainted perceptions of his childhood self. It is not an easy process to make yourself so vulnerable to your experiences, to be an exposed nerve to the baffling and potentially hostile world erected by the adults towering over you. And yet, seeing the world through these eyes grants your creative efforts the directness of a truth unsullied by the cascade of assumptions about life, politics, and what people want to hear that shackle the adult writer wishing to speak to children at their level. The reason that good children’s books stand the test of time isn’t that they were tuned by a council of publishers to match statistical models for what children want to hear, but because they are darned good books that are true enough that children do not discard them as yet another finger-waggling speech from the adult-monsters.

I suggest that each of you take some time today to wander through the Thingiverse, this universe of invented objects that we are all contributing to, with your childhood eyes in place.² Test what you encounter against Sendak’s rubric for “truth and honesty” in creativity. You have the tools to create whole new worlds, but maybe the killer app for helping you create work that will be successfully transmitted from one human to another is to take up Sendak’s challenge — rather than making objects that you think people might like, create the object that your childhood self wishes into existence.

Today, May 8th, is National Teacher Appreciation Day, and MakerBot Blogger Andrew has gathered together a bunch of us at MakerBot to offer 3D printed apples to the many teachers who shaped our lives. Here’s my contribution to this effort: an apple for Maurice Sendak. Maurice Sendak — you and your voice will be dearly missed.

1. for Fiction at Columbia University School of the Arts [↩]
2. this will be far easier for our many 9-year-old customers, no doubt [↩]

There’s something so cool about Dualstrusion.

The winner of the Engineer vs. Designer iPhone design competition, aubenc, has just added a cool kind of mashup. Rather than mashing up two kinds of shapes, he alluded to two animals by adding a zebra pattern to his Paper Bird model.

Now who’s going to add a cheetah skin to cushwa’s Owl statue?

Zebra Paper Bird by aubenc

Credit: KMJ, via WikiMedia Commons

Are any of you participating in this? The New York Times is hosting an everyday innovation challenge that several of you may be interested in.

They write:

For a special issue on June 3, we invite you to share an innovation that you have made in your daily life. Maybe you’ve figured out a way to make waking up more pleasant by jury-rigging your alarm clock. Or maybe you’ve invented a foolproof method for shining your shoes, or for finding time to exercise. It could be a gadget you’ve fashioned, or something less tangible. We want to hear what you’ve come up with.

Yes, but more importantly, we want to hear what you’ve come up with.

The judges for this are Paola Antonelli, Curator for the Department of Architecture and Design at MoMA; James Dyson, of never-lose-suction-vacuum fame; Ben Kaufman of Quirky; and Martha Stewart, who is Martha Stewart.

You all have submitted thousands of things to Thingiverse that would knock readers’ socks off. In fact, Thingiverse is a veritable catalog of relevant submissions for this challenge. Perhaps you have favorite things from Thingiverse that you think ought to be recognized! If you leave a comment here, I’ll get in touch with that Thingiverse user and urge them to participate.

There are two excellent posts from Shane Graber, or sgraber on Thingiverse, about using a MakerBot for your aquarium. The first of these is a general introduction to aquarium owners themselves as to why 3D printing can be useful for that hobby. I have to be honest, I had never thought about it, but Shane makes a pretty good case:

Picture this: It’s late Saturday night and you hear a noise coming from your fish room. Upon investigation, you find your return pump is buzzing loudly and not pumping water. “Huh? What’s going on here?!” You disassemble the pump and discover that an impeller blade has sheared off, and you don’t have a replacement on hand. … However, you are no ordinary hobbyist because you have a 3D printer at your disposal. You fire up your favorite modeling program and quickly model a replacement impeller then hit the [Print] button. The printer begins spitting out molten plastic.  15 minutes later you are fitting your replacement impeller in place and have saved yourself a lot of heartache and worry — and possibly the lives of many critters in your tank.

Well gosh, when you put it that way. Printing replacement parts is always a compelling reason to have a MakerBot at home. It’s even more compelling when it’s a matter of life and death!

Today Shane posted another great piece on Advanced Aquarist about 3D printing parts for the entire process of fragging and propagating coral in your aquarium. I know what you’re thinking: if only that previous sentence had more ‘p’ and ‘r’ sounds. I’ll try harder.

The post is a great tutorial in fragging, showing you different kinds of plugs you could use and why, and explaining that for parts you want to sink in saltwater, PLA is a better option than ABS. Shane printed all these parts on his Cupcake CNC, including the coral frag plugs that he designed, and they look fantastic. It’s also so interesting to hear about this application of 3D printing that I had never considered.

What is your hobby? How much of what you do for that hobby could be printed on a MakerBot?

Shane's Coral Frag Plugs by sgraber

This Thing is a coral frag plug that is used when propagating (i.e. "fragging") coral in the saltwater aquarium hobby. Coral fragments are either cut or broken off of the mother colony and then glued to this frag plug using cyanoacrylate gel (superglue). The resulting fragged coral plug is mounted into 14mm eggcrate that is submerged in the saltwater aquarium where it is left until it is either traded with another hobbyist or sold at a frag swap. I have uploaded four variations on a concept that I have been toying with for what might be useful to a coral farmer. I am keenly interested in optimizing this concept so that it Works for those needing a good, quality, multi-purpose coral frag plug so please leave comments on how I might improve this Thing.

This thing brought to you by

Shane's Two-Piece Coral Frag Plugs by sgraber

This Thing is a coral frag plug that is used when propagating coral (i.e. "fragging") in the saltwater aquarium hobby. The post for this frag plug has been made removable making it much easier to glue a mounted frag into place in your aquarium as you now don't have to deal with the post being in the way. Rejoice! Coral fragments are either cut or broken off of the mother colony and then glued to this frag plug using cyanoacrylate gel (superglue). The resulting fragged coral plug is mounted into 14mm eggcrate that is submerged in the saltwater aquarium where it is left until it is either traded with another hobbyist or sold at a frag swap.

This thing brought to you by