Photo by Divide
This holiday weekend, the MakerBot team will be out in Eastern Washington at a remote Missile Base teaching a MakerBot workshop at Toorcamp.
We had originally set it up to be a 12 person building workshop, but 29 people signed up so even though we’re still planning to build a machine while we’re there, we’re adding a focus on designing and printing with the MakerBot so we’ll have enough stuff for that many people to do!
With that in mind, if you’re planning on being there, take some time before you go to download ReplicatorG (which includes skeinforge in the package), Blender, Sketchup, Sketchup pro trial edition (for exporting OBJ files), MetaCAD and Art of Illusion. Bonus points for coming with an STL model you’ve made and uploaded to Thingiverse!
Update: go ahead and download meshlab too, it’s a great tool!
Of course we’ll be there all weekend, so even if you don’t go to the workshop, feel free to come find us and we’ll find a way to show you a MakerBot in action!
It’s a new record! I’ve been itching to find a model that really tests the limits of a MakerBot, and the other day I stumbled upon this AWESOME creative commons model of Walt Disney’s head (on a plate). I downloaded it and took a look. Unfortunately it was intended more for 3D animation than printing, but about 30 minutes later I had closed all the holes and fixed all the non-manifold vertices. I scaled it up to be nice and big, and then let her rip. 2 hours and 45 minutes later I was looking at my very own fist-sized bust of Walt Disney.
This may be one of my favorite prints to date. It certainly is impressive, and has a very nice heft to it. Not only that, but I printed this using a fan which really improved print quality. For example, the chin had very little sagging . Other than the ears, the only part that needed any cleanup was the very first layer of the nose. There is a bit of vertical pixellation, but that is not very noticeable when you hold it in your hands. It does get highlighted under bright light though. It has a very nice feel to it.
If you want to print your own, you’ll need to get a MakerBot and then head over to Thingiverse and download it. Enjoy!
At some point in the very near future, 3D scanning is going to be huge. How do I know? Check out these scans of siamese twin skeletons that have been 3D printed! I can’t wait until people start uploading their medical files to Thingiverse for sharing and printing on MakerBots! Read more!
Photo by Steve Garfield
Last night on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, the man himself ate a cupcake frosted by Goldie the MakerBot with a frostruding attachment. Earlier in the evening, Erykah Badu saw the machine and the cupcakes and plastic parts that it made including a model of the empire state building and said, “Your machine made that? Get The F*** Out!”
It was a great time, but the gremlins were on set. The air conditioning of the studio affected the hotglue holding the drive gear to the motor and it fell off mid frosting! It still frosted the cupcake in what appeared to be a Twisted Sister logo, saving the day!
We’re going to attempt to set a better record and shorten the time and improve the frosting distribution soon! Make sure to check out URDB.org to make your own records!
We have found our factory and will be moving into it in July and our battle station will be fully operational in August. Here’s a walk through video!
Our landlords totally get it and even included a special clause in the lease that all robots made on the premise must follow Asimov’s 3 rules of robotics. M4V Link
I’m leading a MakerBot 3D printing workshop down in Philly tomorrow. It’s going to be a blast and we’ll be designing and making some cool things. Here are the details:
This workshop I do know about. The MakerBot workshop is happening right here at Hive 76, starring MakerBot founder Zack Hoeken. The class is Saturday June 20th, from 1PM to 5PM. You just need to show up on time, and with a laptop, and we do the rest. We’ll teach you everything you need to do a first design, and a first printing using the MakerBot. Tickets for the 4 hours class are $25 (or $5 for students).
New releases of the Generation 3 electronics firmware and ReplicatorG are now available! These are primarily bugfix releases, but include a few user-visible features as well. Among the changes:
- Machine reset on build completion– you can now run multiple builds without having to restart ReplicatorG or your machine.
- Enable/disable steppers from the machine control panel.
- Added a “Recent” folder to the File menu that remembers your most recent builds.
- More robust initialization.
- Added a visible status bar to the top of the window to indicate machine driver and status.
- Updated version of Skeinforge.
Keep in mind that since we bundle a new Skeinforge with ReplicatorG, you’ll need to delete your old Skeinforge preferences directory before using the new version. These are normally stored in the .skeinforge directory in your home directory; Skeinforge will generate a new preferences directory when you run it.
Also, remember that upgrading the v1.1/v1.2 motherboards can be a little tricky. Here’s our FAQ about how to ensure that the firmware gets uploaded to the board properly.
Give it a try, and let us know how it goes!
Update: The initial release of ReplicatorG 0004 for Windows had issues with serial timeouts. The R1 release fixes this problem. If you have the initial release of 0004 for Windows, download the R1 release now.
There are so many amazing things on Thingiverse these days for you to make with a MakerBot. Here are some that caught my eye.
Chess Set
Caterpillar Robot
Yashica D Lens Hood
Printable Desk Clamp
If you design something, we encourage you to share the design on Thingiverse so that others can benifit from your work!
Also, The Masked Retriever, AKA Allan Ecker is crushing the thingiverse blog these days with lots of great posts. Check it out!
We received some emails about missing pieces in the kits in early batches of kits. Making kits is martial art requiring the ability to both count and retain numbers in memory, which requires a relaxed and zen like vigilance. To make the whole thing more reliable, we’ve undergone some changes to our quality control process at MakerBot HQ. Each batch of kits is now verified for completeness before being shipped, and on the shipping end of things, each invoice is checked three times before going into an envelope. While mistakes are bound to still happen here and there (we are human, after all… for now), we are doing everything we can to make sure that if you buy something from MakerBot, be it a fully assembled Cupcake CNC or a handful of ethernet cables, you’ll be satisfied. Let us know if you there are any issues by sending us an email to contact@makerbot.com.
