MakerBot Industries

Are you up to date on MakerBot’s newest videos? If you missed the Replicator Music Video or the Thing-O-Matic Assembly Time Lapse be sure to check them out now! And while you’re on our YouTube page go ahead and subscribe to our channel so that you won’t miss the launch of Season 2 of MakerBot TV next month!

Or subscribe to our video podcast on iTunes!

Tune in at 7:30pm ET: 4:30pm PT to see the live interview with Bre Pettis from the Engadget CES stage!

Annelise made an awesome  video that showcases fun things she’s done with sugru in the last few days- we can’t wait to see what our users come up with!

Here’s another awesome video for you to watch! BBC News has just featured Bre and Thingiverse in the latest edition of their Living Online series. The piece focuses on companies taking to the Internet to push innovation and Thingiverse is name checked as a prime outlet for creative collaboration. Consider this video a friendly reminder to design something new and share it on Thingiverse today!

If you’ve been following the GE Air Show on Facebook, you might be interested in the Grand Finale, posted above. Tons of new models, and as always, funny animation.

All the models shown will make their way to the GE page on Thingiverse shortly, so keep an eye out.

It was really fun to work on this. The teams from Impact Media and Evolution Bureau were smart, creative, talented and great to work with. I’d like to highlight the participation of Gabriel Bentley from Impact Media, who basically taught himself Sketchup and Makerbot operations in the space of weeks, and was running a one-man model airplane factory by the end of the project.

Also, one more thing: the observant amongst you may have noticed that there was never a Week 2 video. Well, fret no more – that footage was discovered, and is posted below:

Check out minipimmer’s longboard camera mount! ^1 2  While designed for his specific camera phone, phone case, and board – the ideas here could easily be adapted for use with just about any combination of phone, camera, and skateboard.  Minipimmer offers a sage disclaimer that “Note this is meant to take movies while cruising and going around in a calm way, this is not meant for tricks, please don’t blame me if you use this and you run over your phone!!”

Now I’m thinking someone just might need to design one that is designed to hold a camera/phone in place during tricks.  Also, how about a snowboard cam mount!

Samsung Galaxy S phone skateboard mount by minipimmer

This is a simple mount to attach a mobile phone to a skateboard to record movies. It is made to match the shape of a Samsung Galaxy S but may be modified to fit other phones easily. The mount is split in two pieces which makes it easy to print and also allows to easily detach the phone from the skateboard when not in use without having to unscrew anything. The bottom piece is meant to be screwed to the board. The holes are made to match the existing holes in the board used to hold the wheels, some boards (specially longboards) have spare holes so you can change the distance between the wheels. These spare holes can be used to hold the bottom piece. If you don't have spare holes you might need to make them :-(. The union between the two pieces is based on friction and there's 1mm of gap between the hole and the peg, depending on your printing results you may need to adjust this so that they hold tightly. Note this is meant to take movies while cruising and going around in a calm way, this is not meant for tricks, please don't blame me if you use this and you run over your phone!! UPDATE: I made an enhanced version with a leg and a slightly bigger bracket to hold the phone with a rubber cover. The model name for this version is "grapaFUNDA". UPDATE #2: Here comes a lame video I recorded using this: youtube.com/watch?v=qzGVhhiwzAs

This thing brought to you by

1. aka “ShoeCam” [↩]
2. I made that up. [↩]

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! [↩]

DocProfSky, aka Schuyler St. Leger, helped get the crew at Noisebridge psyched for Maker Faire Bay Area 2011 during their “5 Minutes of Fame” lightning talk series on May 19, 2011 by giving an encore performance of his critically acclaimed hit, “Why I Love My 3D Printer.”  While his original presentation at Ignite Phoenix was in front of a crowd of 850 people, the original video posted to YouTube now has more than 120,000 views.¹  Schuyler has been an amazing advocate for helping explain how 3D printing can be accessible and useful to anyone of any age.

1. Not to diminish this, I’m pretty sure several thousand of those views could be traced back to the BotCave… [↩]

Hello intrepid Botsters!  We’ve prepared another episode of our spectacular weekly video series to cap off what’s been an amazing week.  As you may know, Bre was on The Colbert Report, and, possibly even better, we scanned Stephen Colbert’s head so people can make crazy mashups.  Not content to stop there, we just launched a fully assembled version of the Thing-O-Matic.

We show off some of those amazing mashups, and our newest member of the support crew, Sam, also has some tips about the new calibration script in the recently-released ReplicatorG 25.  And that’s not all!  There’s some other fun stuff in there, so check it out.

Hey Botters — in case you haven’t already heard, there’s going to be a Robot Film Festival in New York this July 16th & 17th, spearheaded by the illustrious Heather Knight.  This will certainly be a cool event to see as their Vimeo teaser gallery proves.

But hey, aren’t we all robot operators?  Maybe some of us have films to share too — luckily, submission is open until June 5th, so there’s exactly one month to make a robot-based film.

This seems like an amazing opportunity for MakerBotters to let their creative juices flow, so sharpen some pencils, scout some locations, oil up the Bolex (or charge up the 5d Mark II) and make some movies, Bot-people!