MakerBot Industries

Buy all 3 of the brand new MakerBot Projects today and drive your own 3D printed RC car, generate electricity, and conquer the world with your windup robots!

Today we’re launching MakerBot Projects with 3 fun projects. The MakerBot Wind Up Walkers, The MakerBot Dynamo, and the MakerBot Botmobile Remote Control Car. (Store Link)

MakerBot projects is an ongoing collection of kits to make everything in your world with your MakerBot printer. We’re on a mission to give every MakerBot owner the parts and instructions for making everything in their lives.

The MakerBot Botmobile is the first open source remote control car. MakerBot’s own designer Michael Curry, took everything he learned from creating the Turtle Shell Racers which were featured on the track at Maker Faire, and created the Botmobile kit. All you need to do is get the kit, print out the parts from thingiverse and you’ll have your own RC car. It’s got a great 12 volt motor, a 2 channel radio controller, a tiny servo for steering, rubber racing tires; all rolled into a a ready-to-go kit. The BotMobile kit requires no soldering, all the parts snap together – It really is a perfect weekend project. The body design is a slick dune buggy – and it’s already on thingiverse (link), ready to be printed. You want to change it or customize it? The design files are open source and are ready for you to turn it into a hot rod.

The MakerBot Dynamo is a wonderful project that shows how hand motion is converted into electrical energy. The kit comes with a toy motor, 3 metal screws and 3 large bright LEDs – you print the big gears and a handle on your MakerBot (thingiverse link). Simply put it all together following our assembly instructions to make a simple science project that showcases some basic principles of engineering and energy production. We can’t keep our hands off this thing at the office, and have put in 100s of hours of electricity generation while fidgeting in meetings.

The MakerBot Windup Walker was inspired when Bre declared: “everything on Thingiverse should be able to walk”. The Windup walker pack comes with 5 barebones windup feet, ready to start walking. They’re cool, but they’re mostly soulless and require your creativity to bring them to life. Need a robotic posse? Fire up the MakerBot and start printing them out! Elliot Cohen here at MakerBot modified R.Maker for you to get started (thingiverse link), but we expect a flurry of windup walker designs to start popping up on thingiverse as soon as you start designing the next greatest wind up toy.

Today and through end of day Monday we are offering a limited time special deal. Buy the Botmobile and the Dynamo, and get the windup walkers for free (Store Link) – We know you’ll like them as much as we do!

best,

John D.

Here we have a very exciting new Thingiverse item: a Lego-compatible train!  This is a seriously viable toy, especially since we can already print compatible train tracks.  Add in the Lego blocks that you’ve already got at home (don’t pretend you threw them out…) and voilà: infinitely customizable train set!

You know, for kids.  I mean, I definitely don’t see any adults printing out these parts.  Who plays with toys at our age?

Thanks are due to prolific Thingiverse modeler sconine, who created this (and other) awesome 3d models for playing with.  I’m sure that he just printed these parts out to make sure they’re optimized for play.  For children to play with, I mean.  These things are for kids to play with.  Kids.

Toy Train for Legos by sconine

This is a derivative of my original train thingiverse.com/thing:11101 This version has wheels that work on the standard wood tracks that are a fairly common kids toy. There is also a 3D printer version of these available here: thingiverse.com/thing:8805 This version also accepts Legos and Mega Blocks. You can just snap them onto the top and build whatever you want.

This thing brought to you by

Miniatures for War Gaming by epengr

Thingiverse citizen epengr posted their very detailed and well finished gaming miniatures.  While many people have asked about whether a 3D printer is suitable for creating gaming miniatures, this is the very best example I’ve seen. ¹  These little guys were clearly painstakingly painted to look like a real army.

Miniatures for War Gaming with DBA or FoG Rules by epengr

These are a selection of elements that can be used with the ancient miniature war game rules De Bellis Antiquitatis or the fantasy version, Hordes of the Things. They may also work with Field of Glory, but I'm not very familiar with that game system. The most current version of these rules can be downloaded from the developers website (http://www.wrg.me.uk/) in the "History of WRG" section. They are planning to release a new version for sale later this year. These rules are sol as rules only, leaving it to the players to acquire figures from whatever vendor in whatever scale they choose. So why not just print your own! I settled on 10 mm scale after trying 15 mm and 6 mm. At 15 mm, the resolution limitations of the printer are rather obvious. At 6 mm... well, I just wouldn't want to paint 40 little men for one element of troops... 10 mm is a nice compromise and it give a good impression of massed troops. So far I've uploaded 4 of the 16 element types in the game. I hope to design the rest and upload them soon. There are a few additional elements in HotT such as dragons and Behemoths that I may or may not tackle, but I encourage anyone interested to jump in and supply their interpretation of these units!

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1. This was a farily common question at Maker Faire Bay Area 2011 [↩]

What would you ask Santa's elves to make for you?

Or…  A gnome of your own?

Just over a year ago the idea of a DIY 3D printed toy with moving parts seemed a little far off. ¹  Then Kparanya uploaded their Toy Car with Captive Wheels.  Since then we’ve seen all kinds of multi-part toys uploaded to Thingiverse including lots of puzzles, a transformer, and Beco building blocks.

Although I use my Cupcake CNC to print a lot of tools and things to assist with repairs, what I really love using it for is printing toys – especially those I’ve designed.  At the moment I’m really enamored with the idea of designing an open source disc shooter.  But, this is just something which interests me. ²

If you had a MakerBot at your disposal, what kind of toy would you want to design?  I suppose another way to ask this question is, “If you had one of Santa’s elves³ at your disposal to create any toy imaginable, what would you ask for?”

If there’s enough interest, perhaps I could do a series on the process of brainstorming, designing, creating a proof of concept, prototyping, and creating a polished design for a toy.  (Although, I suspect this process is reasonably similar for any kind of inventing)  Leave a comment and let me know what you’d like to see!

1. Photo courtesy of jpellgen [↩]
2. Although, it seems like at least one or two others would want to print them out if the designs were available. [↩]
3. Or, perhaps a fussy gnome? [↩]

Modular designs rule

The other day I was chatting with a friend about printing toys on my MakerBot. ¹  My favorite kind of toy are multi-part toys that snap-fit together.  There are a lot of benefits to designing and printing toys as modular parts.

• Handing a pile of parts to a kid is a pretty magical thing. ²  They may put them together in a way that may surprise you.  And, once they assemble the toy, they have a real sense of accomplishment.  It also teaches them how parts can fit together – and gets them thinking about how to improve on your designs.
• Taking a toy apart is almost as natural as playing with them.  There’s really nothing like taking something apart and reassembling it to teach you why certain design choices were made.  It also gives confidence that they might just be able to reassemble something once they’ve taken the time to pull it apart.
• It allows you to print up a replacement part if something breaks.  If you are making something cool, you’re going to be using small, delicate, or intricate parts. ³  Your kid is going to break their toys – but if you designed them in a modular fashion, they’re going to be easy to repair. ⁴
• It leaves room for improvement and upgrades.  You never know how your kid will actually play with a toy.  Maybe the boat will be a robot or microphone.  Or, maybe they’ll demand a third arm, tail, or wings.

1. Photo courtesy of fdecomite. [↩]
2. Do you remember the first time you saw a Lego set? [↩]
3. Also known as breakable parts or points of failure. [↩]
4. My Leonardo Robot has two broken hips and a bad elbow. [↩]