MakerBot Industries

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!

Matthew Borgatti put together this awesome time lapse video of MakerBots crunching out art over at Ponoko.

I attended the modeLabInteractive Parametrics seminar a month or so ago (check out our previous post on it here) and had the chance to film some Makerbots hard at work. I’ve got to thank Bre Pettis for providing Makerbot troubleshooting, Marius Watz for teaching, modeLab for hosting, and Kidd Video for the music.\

Lots of colored plastic, lots of colored LEDs, and lots of awesome!

The Mendel inspired x and y carriage lowrider by twotimes

Just how good is Twotimes’ XY lowrider? ¹  Well, take a listen for yourself.  MakerBot operator RealBaxsie uploaded videos of his Cupcake in operation before and after the installation of this must-have printable upgrade.

Printing with a Cupcake CNC before installation

Printing with a Cupcake CNC with an XY lowrider installed

Mendel inspired x and y carriage lowrider by twotimes

Here is my take on merging the lowrider and the mendel inspired y carriage for the cupcake. link to bearings:vxb.com/page/bearings/PROD/3mm/623ZZ10-1 I went with smaller bearings than the Mendel because it allowed me to do everything with M3 screws and it allowed me to drop the height a bit. This design is shorter than the standard platform by 10mm, I was pushing for more, but the bearings killed the height gains. It does mean that you can gain back about half of the height that you loose by putting in the automatic build platform. Also, the y rails have been separated to 70mms so hopefully that means that the platform is a bit more stable. I attached the solidworks file for people who want to play (WARNING - the file is messy and I was bad and made all of my parts in one part file). If you would like any other formats like .igs, .step and the like, just shout. Should have all of the holes teardropped later today. - Truncated teardrop holes are up, that's a pain. Update: The stl files from solidworks would not slice in Rep G, I have no idea why, if you know please tell me. I reuploaded all of the stl files and tested them in Rep G 19 they seem to work but I will not have a chance to print until Monday. I have all of the parts, now on to the debug... so you do not have to... The updated files are in the zip file, I got rid of the first generation of parts. Things were moved around a bit and these are the updates after printing round one and putting it into the makerbot. I should have all of the gen 2 parts printed and through debug tomorrow. Update 2 - I got the bearings in and other that a few "What the hell was I thinking..." moments that were easily repaired with an X-acto knife, everything went great. I'm in the process of printing the gen 3 parts and everything should be cool now. I'll post pictures and video once the final draft is printed. Update 3 - In process of using gen 3 platform to print gen 4 platform. Once I have printed and assembled it, I will upload files. I think that will be it for variations. Update 4 - Gen 5 files are out and I can now say you can download them and print! Update 5 - Instructions are up. Update 6 - I just uploaded the gen 7 version - I have not had a chance to print it yet, I was getting annoyed with the slight curve in my heat spreader and decided to rip it apart and lap it until it was flat. This update addresses: Adding nut pockets on all adjusting screws for bearing tension to make adjusting easier (do not have to hold nut in place) Back X bearings cluster has been reworked so the is less interference with the X pulley. Back X bearing adjustment screw head has been nested into the plastic to have less interference with X belt. Interference between Y belt attachment nuts and plastic bodies has been addressed X belt attachment point has been lowered. First shot at integrating endstops have been added. I think that that is about it. I will shout when the directions have been updated, everything should be the same except the endstop part. If you have already printed this and do not want to reprint, reprint parts 09 and 16, those have to do with X belt and pulley issues. (and they are small) I just sent out the third package of nuts, washers, and screws. If anyone else wants them, just message me. Gaffertape kindly updated the files so if you are using the older repG and skeinforge, use the resaved gen 7 files. Update: Finally updated for mechanical endstops, instructions still need to be updated though.

This thing brought to you by

1. You know, besides being the most commented thing on Thingiverse… [↩]

In the BotCave we have been loving us some time lapse video in recent months. (Automated Build Platform, Cathedral, and Water Soluble PVA, just to pick three I have put together.) These tiny videos not only allow us to make cool videos with still cameras, but also are really a great way to compress the process of printing an object right down to the best part: the Wow part.

Back when we made the three videos I listed earlier, I used a Canon 7D in combination with Dragon Stop Motion. (Oh, and a modest amount of post-shoot tweaking.) But lately we have a cluster of second-hand Canon PowerShot Sd1000s loaded up with CHDK so that we can experiment with scripts such as Sunset4.¹ (And we are looking to tweak the script to defeat the autofocus and make things happier for printing this kind of work.)

Well, there are so many great time lapse videos being put together by MakerBot Operators² using all sorts of cameras to make these: webcams, HDV cameras, and iPhone 4s. So we gotta ask! What are you using to grab video of your prints?

1. That is what I used for the above video. [↩]
2. Ah, that Betaworks time lapse video! Really raises the bar for all of us! [↩]

Scanlime designed and printed up this incredible bead-hopper. The entire plastic structure is a single printed piece! It uses a recycled CD-ROM motor to spin an eccentric hub which, via a 606 bearing, transmits vibrational forces via a linkage to the funnel, which is suspended by plastic springs. Apparently she’s working on a Perler bead printer robot!

At the “IF … Innovation Festival Kortrijk” Dries Verbruggen demonstrated his virtual pottery wheel¹ and what appears to be a RepRap Darwin² with a clay extruder to create physical models of virtually designed pots.  This video is just so brilliant!

Designguide.tv interview from Unfold on Vimeo.

Besides the super awesome Minority Report style virtual display design interface which puts Sketchup to shame, I love that the pottery wheel is basically a perfect analogy for the design “limitations” of a MakerBot.  (I say limitations because it turns out the “45 degree rule” is more of what you call “guidelines”)³

Sometimes when people send me design files to print they contain overhangs that are totally unprintable without a support structures.  For someone who hasn’t actually used a MakerBot-style 3D printer it takes a few tries to really “get” how it forms models.

Verbruggen’s virtual pottery wheel appears to strictly apply to the “virtual clay” whatever impression you make upon it – allowing you to make pots that aren’t printable.⁴  However, there’s no reason why the virtual display couldn’t make use of a simple physics engine to have unsupported clay structures fall – just as real clay would on a real pottery wheel.  I have a feeling interacting with the object as it is being formed and receiving immediate feedback if there’s a structural defect is the kind of thing people would just “get” intuitively.

1. It appears to use a green laser as a 3D scanner to detect the position of your hand and apply an equivalent force on the virtual clay. [↩]
2. The Godfather of the MakerBot [↩]
3. Thank you Captain Barbosa! [↩]
4. You can see several such models projected on the wall behind him. [↩]