Mark Ganter is fun-u-facturing glass beads with a play doh like concoction of glass dust and methol cellulose jelly. Check it out!
Buttons with 3 holes! Very cool!
via Fun-u-facturing (to answer a DorkBot’r question) « Open3DP (Open 3D Printing).
Sometimes I have to travel for a day and I tend to end up in hackerspaces in evenings. On Monday I was in Seattle and ended up hanging out at Metrix!
It’s an awesome place to hang out. If you live in Seattle, I heartily recommend that you become a member. They have a laser cutter and MakerBots that you can rent time on! There are regularly smart folks hanging out and coding and making things. I even ran into my pal Eric Butler who was “just there.” There were many new friendships made at Metrix that evening! Old friends stopped by too!
Matt runs the place like a coffee shop with tools. Normally there is a robot that makes coffee, but it’s broken and everyone seemed to be in withdrawals about that. (It’s Seattle, the entire city is coffee powered!) Have no fear, they have mate!
I got to hang with the LearnMakeCupcake crew from the UW which is an awesome class research project where the students are both learning how to make a MakerBot and researching the process of collaborative innovation and developing infrastructure for community creativity. Very cool.
I got to meet Mark Ganter, one of the heros of 3D printing. He even gave me some 3d printed glass objects. Awesome. I must learn more about microwave foundries.
3ric showed up with a massive and beautiful array of programmable lasers and I also got to meet the Masked Retriever, of Thingiverse blogging fame.
Needless to say, it was a great evening full of magic and wonder!
We live in the future. The super customization side of 3D printing can change people’s lives.
For Summit, the peak of what’s possible with 3D printing may be found in the medical and prosthetic fields. Because of 3D scanners, he said, it’s possible to craft prosthetics that almost perfectly mold to a wearer’s body, unlike more standard models from the past.
Personally, he works on making 3D printouts of legs for those who have lost their own, both in plastic and metal. Summit’s 3D-printed legs are even dishwasher-safe, he said, and curbside-recyclable artifacts of the materials that can be used in the production of such items.
Because the models can be shaped based on patients’ remaining legs, Summit suggested that they are more attractive than what has been possible in the past. Indeed, he said those who have sported early models have reported regular admiring comments from kids and even girlfriends.
“For the first time in his life [as an amputee], kids on the street are jealous of him,” Summit said of one customer. “No one’s ever been jealous of him.”
And to Summit, hearing that those who have used his prosthetics find them to be a pleasant part of their lives–insofar as such an item can be pleasant–is a big part of why he’s set out to transform an industry that has been helping people for years, but with little regard to their specific individual needs.
“If the first thing you see in the morning is this by your bed,” Summit said of one of his more attractive prosthetic models, “you’re pretty psyched. That’s my goal.”
Hat tip to Greg Marra who pointed this article out to us!
via 3D printing changing prosthetics forever | Geek Gestalt – CNET News.
Keith moved his Extruder circuit board to the outside of his bot for better filament viewing. I am always taking the sd card out all the time so this wouldn’t work for me, but I like the idea and his wire wrap is beautiful!!!
I’d previously mounted the extruder PCB up on the highest two screws of the extruder housing, placing it above the feeder face instead of covering it, but that was pretty fragile and I was constantly worrying about bumping it and snapping it off. This weekend I moved the extruder controller to its new permanent home on the right side of the CupCake in the empty space above the motherboard. It fits nicely and shares a mounting screw with the upper Z-axis endstop.
via Relocating the MakerBot CupCake Extruder Controller « Keith’s Electronics Blog.
Vandebina found a way to turn MakeBotted objects into gold… well at least covered in gold! She did it at Miss Baltazar’s Laboratory at Metalab in Vienna. I asked her how she did it and this is what she said!
I demonstrated four different types of gilding a surface. The one with the makerbotted cup is a kind of oil gilding. You have to coat the surface with varnish or an oil-based gold size (oil/resin) that will dry and develop a tacky surface. The oil that i use is known as Mixtion. After the drying time (12 hours) you just have to apply the gold leaves. To protect the surface it can be painted with some acrylic finish, or whatever you want.
There are also other ways to gild the surface —> gilding milk as clay, it takes just 10-15 minutes to dry. The next weeks i will try to gild makerbotted things with galvanic method, the first tests failed. But i’m on it. heh!
Thanks Vandebina! Keep us posted with future experiments!
Have you ever been in the situation where you’re printing the most amazing object that you downloaded from Thingiverse and the plastruder fails you? You know you’re going to have to rebuild it and it might take you a week to find the half hour it’s going to take to fix it and it’s very frustrating.
Instead of shaking your fist in the air, you can get a spare parts kit and assemble a heater barrel assembly on hand and swap it in if there are any problems.
Besides the heater barrel assembly, the MakerBot Spare Parts Kit includes an extra plastruder pulley and enough nichrome for 3 heater barrels so when you rebuild your first one and build your spare, you’ve still got enough for one more rebuild. Over time these wear down and installing a fresh one can really breathe some life back into your MakerBot. Oh and there is an insulator retainer and idler wheel so you can just slap those in if they break!
Here’s the complete list.
That’s a lot of awesomeness in a small kit! Get your MakerBot Spare Parts Kit today!
We literally ordered tons of colored plastic in 5 pound rolls. As soon as we put it in the store, folks asked for smaller rolls. We tried a few ways to break them down and none of them were fun at all and all of them resulted in a big mess. Then, in a lightning bolt of inspiration we realized it would all work better with a bucket!
And so we offer you 1 pound rainbow packs. We’re going to offer these at an introductory price of $12 a pack. We’re going to sweat through the weekend turning the bucket and plastic so that you can get some colors, try them out and make some beautiful colored objects.
Cathal Garvey, the man who brought you the makerbottable dremelfuge and micro-lathe needs a mousetrap and he’s willing to pay $25 for someone to design it.
I have a problem. There lives in my house a tiny mouse, and as I am friend to all animals I wish him no harm.
The live mousetrap I tried didn’t work: crafty mouse escaped it repeatedly. I also invented a few wacky methods involving pitfalls, narrow bottles full of bloating foods and even tried to suck him out onto a vacuum cleaner head covered with cheesecloth. No avail!
I am offering a bounty for something:
$25 to the first design that catches the mouse. It must:
- Not harm the mouse
- Be printable on a Makerbot
- WorkMouse get!
Whichever design Cathal chooses, we’re going to sweeten the deal and send them a MakerBot t-shirt if they will upload the design to Thingiverse under an open license.
Can you build a better (MakerBottable) mousetrap?
Robert W. Lucky over at IEEE has written about MakerBot as the precursor to teleportation. Check it out!
Teleportation: Finally, a Little Science Behind the Science Fiction
Will we look back on the MakerBot as the beginnings of teleportation?
BY Robert W. Lucky // March 2010
Teleportation has been an enduring dream of science fiction. We’re nowhere near the ”Beam me up, Scotty” stage, but there are already hints of teleportation today. It started, in fact, in the 1970s, when—first with facsimile and then with computer networking—we began to reproduce paper documents at a distance by scanning, transmission, and printing. For all practical purposes, the document has been teleported. Now, what about physical objects?
Transmission of the information necessary to reconstruct an object is not a problem; what we need are 3-D scanners and printers. I’m not sure there are any 3-D scanners, but there is a fascinating open-source effort going on now to develop a 3-D printer, called the MakerBot. The MakerBot works like a computer-controlled hot-glue gun, squirting melted plastic onto a platform moved by stepper motors. Under software control, it can reproduce plastic objects up to about the size of a small milk bottle.
You can buy a MakerBot kit for about the cost of a typical personal computer. When assembled, it looks like a trap for small animals made with an Erector set. No one would confuse it with a consumer product, and I get the impression that it takes an engineer to run it. But then, so did the first personal computers (remember the Altair and Heathkits?). Engineers should find the idea intriguing. When I saw a recent demonstration, one attendee cried out, ”I’m really excited, and I want to buy one, but I don’t know why!” I thought that this perfectly encapsulated the experience.
There is already a dedicated group of experimenters out there assembling MakerBots, using 3-D modeling software to describe objects, and using the MakerBot to create teakettles, Darth Vader heads, custom Lego blocks, ornaments, model railroad buildings, and more. While this sounds like a cute hobbyist toy, what it portends for the future could be very significant.
The last piece of the teleportation puzzle is a 3-D scanner that generates data in a form that the MakerBot can use. Such a scanner doesn’t seem impossible. In the meantime, the early adopters are sharing their modeling data; there is a growing library on the Internet of designs for MakerBot objects. These libraries are an inevitable step along the way to widespread use, just as they were in the programming world. (Think of the journey from assembly language to scripting.) Others gradually come up with improvements, which are shared as well. The result is hardware upgrades via e-mail. Eventually, there will come a time when there is little point in crafting your own object models. Someone out there will have already done whatever it is you need.
All this in itself is startling, but looking to the future, there are some fantastic possibilities.
The first possibility is recursion. It is a word that we apply in mathematics and programming, but couldn’t it describe a property of hardware? In other words, couldn’t a MakerBot make a MakerBot? Obviously, we can’t yet render the motors and electronics, but the physical structures of the MakerBot could be made by the MakerBot itself. So you buy one for yourself, and then give duplicates to your friends, who could then make more duplicates for their friends until it becomes a viral MakerBot infection. (Of course, commercial versions of the MakerBot will probably come with industrial-strength copy protection.)
Let’s let our imaginations run even wilder. With modular construction, we could use a MakerBot to make a bigger MakerBot, which in turn could make a bigger MakerBot. The electronics could, of course, stay the same while the physical world grows—or shrinks, for that matter.
As MakerBots proliferate, will they evolve? I imagine they will—not just planned mutations but random ones as well. We might see survival of the fittest, whatever ”fittest” means in a MakerBot world. The possibilities are endless.
But enough dreaming—reality is exciting enough. Beam me up, Scotty! Or if not me, at least a plastic doll.
This article originally appeared in print as “Almost Teleportation.”
via IEEE Spectrum: Teleportation: Finally, a Little Science Behind the Science Fiction.