Calling all NYC MakerBot operators! We’re building a bot farm and we need your help! Today (Thursday, September 2nd) at NYC Resistor (map) we are throwing a build party. The goal: assemble three MakerBots in four hours. Drinks and snacks will be provided.
A bot farm is a group of MakerBots available to a group of people ready to print whatever is wished. We would love to print more of the great things popping up on Thingiverse, but here at the bot cave our machines are mostly used for developing future hardware and software. To increase the awesome we need to increase the number of bot hours available for printing. We need more bots and we need your help building them.
Everyone is encouraged to attend. There will be three or more kits for assembly. Just let us know you came for the build party and we’ll get you started on a task. If you’re thinking about buying a Cupcake CNC, this is a great opportunity to experience the build process. Feel free to bring your own MakerBot and work along with us. Several MakerBot employees will be in attendance, building bots and ready to help. We’re looking forward to seeing you there.
I’m from Seattle and so it makes me particularly happy to hear that the fantastic music scene there now includes MakerBots as musical instruments!
this is a excerpt from the first performance of object Object, an experimental music project staffed by EFFALO collaborator mogden (drums) and principal mfelix (3dprinter management). performed live on 7/11/2010 @ chop suey in seattle.
the sounds of the makerbot are captured with contact microphones and paired with live drums. as an object (in this case a pyramid) is printed, layer-by-layer, its inherent form is recontextualized into an interpretive sound-geometry.
I learn a lot from the internet, but sometimes it’s great to meet up in real life and swap stories! Check the Regional Groups page and if there isn’t one in your area, start a mailing list and post the url on the wiki!
Erik is an innovative force in the world of open source and is doing amazing things in the RepRap community. He visited MakerBot HQ earlier this year and it was great to hang out with him and get to know him IRL. Now he’s designed and 3D printed something very special! A wedding topper!
I’m getting married!!! Our guests get a piece of cake. But on every decent cake, there should be a cake topper! I wanted a personal cake topper. While looking on the Google 3D warehouse I found several, but none were satisfactory. I wanted a simpler model that was solid and which had a personal touch. The result is this (parametric) model with the following modules: bride, groom, arm, leg and hat.
The Crashspace MakerBot crew out of LA put on an amazing performance at the handmade music night there.
From the MakerBot Music Google Group:
We had a Handmade Music event at CRASHSpace in Los Angeles. We currently have three MakerBots and had a performance of a piece written specifically for them by Frank Capodieci.
One thing that I discovered while processing the MIDI files into gcode – mid2cnc.py does not seem to handle rests/silences. The three MIDI files play back on the computer the same duration. The three gcode files had vastly different build times. The ppi setting did not affect the overall playback time, just the pitch of the individual notes.
This is a fantastic off-label use of a MakerBot! We designed the MakerBot with hackability as our top priority because we knew that if we made it so that people could hack it that they would do things with it way beyond what we could imagine. This is an amazing example of hacked excellence… the hacking just sounds so good!
Waag Society (waag.org), Premsela (premsela.org), Creative Commons (creativecommons.org) and Fablab ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fab_lab) have created the (Un)limited Design Contest, putting open design into practice, using digital fabrication as a starting point. At MakerBot and Thingiverse, we’re big fans of getting more digital designs into the world and this contest is designed to do just that. You can download and modify any of the designs entered into the contest. Plus, they are offering MakerBot kits for the winners! Great!
The (Un)limited Design Contest invites anybody — designers, makers, amateurs — to submit their own designs in the area of form, fashion, food and fusion. The contest winners will be revealed at a festive awards ceremony at the international PICNIC festival (picnicnetwork.com) on the 24th of September. The best design in each category wins a Makerbot 3D printer.
Unique about the (Un)limited Design Contest is that all designs are open for anybody to be used, reinterpreted and redesigned. These derivative designs are also entitled to take part in the contest — even more: copying and improving designs is strongly encouraged. It’s all about sharing creativity and expertise, all in the spirit of open design. Each entry’s instructions and blueprint will be made available on the contest website under a Creative Commons license.
Visit one of the Fablabs, or any other prototyping facility, before the 9th of September and enter the (Un)limited Design Contest with your digitally fabricated product.
MAKE’s Gadget Freak Design Contest started on April 21 and runs till July 13. So go ahead and get your entries in. Create a gadget and document your build. The Contest winner gets $1000 and a chance to sell their gadget in kit form in the Makers Market (plus setup and monthly fees waived for 6 months). Good Luck!
Calling all Thingiverse Citizens, MakerBot Operators, and Engineers around the world!
Fact: The Deepwater Horizon Unified Command (DHUC) is inviting alternative technology responses to stop the spill either at the spill or the source level.
Fact: The current oil spill in the Mexican Gulf is threatening or killing thousands of wildlife everyday.
Fact: Many Thingiverse citizens think of creative solutions to problems on a daily basis.
Junior Tan contacted me this last week. He had put together an idea for plugging up the oil flowing into the Gulf and he had submitted it to BP and didn’t get a response. He emailed me willing to give $100 the person who could design something that might get a response with the hope that an idea from the Engineers of the world might just be the right thing to solve the problem. I told him that MakerBot would put in $100 as well and so the total is now $200 for someone who can get a response and, not even joking here, save the world.
This is a two week all-hands-on-deck-ideas-fest call to action! Let us instead focus our minds on saving the world.
We are offering a bounty of US$200 to the following:
1. The first person who actually gets a response from DHUC specifying interest and/or requesting more information, or
2. Even if there is no response from DHUC, we will hold a judging exercise on June 20th when the two weeks are up based on the following criteria:
- simplicity of solution (is it easy to build, deploy and maintain?)
- viability of solution (can the solution be feasible considering the high fluidic pressures, depth of the water column and the extreme low temperatures at depth?)
Call for volunteer judges:
While some of us here are comfortable working with ABS, PLA and M3 socket bolts, we may not be totally familiar with fluid dynamics or Young’s modulus. We would like to open a call for volunteer judges. Catch is, as a judge, you cannot qualify for the bounty even if you win. Please contact MakerBot should you wish to help verify the first response from BP or figure out who to paypal the money to if BP doesn’t respond.
Call for bounty pledges:
The bounty here is a mix of volunteer pledges from Thingiverse citizens as well as Makerbot Industries. So even if you don’t solve the problem of fixing the oil leak, you can throw down and pledge to throw more moolah in the pot to make things more interesting, drop a note in the comments and when it’s all over, we’ll send you the winner’s paypal address and those pledges can be paypalled. Yes, you can still join the Call To Action, and qualify for the same bounty! We can’t be sure everyone who pledges will pony up, but the $200 is real money!
We’ll have the teeny tiniest booth at this trade show. #2812. Come visit us at the Javits Center for the Atlantic Design and Manufacturing show from June 8 – June 10.
We’ll have MakerBots MakerBotting! It’s free to go to this event if you register. We’ve never been to this event but we hear it the place to check out machinery!
Effalo has a great idea for MakerBot Operators! Effalo is experimenting distributed manufacturing and wants to receive prints from all over the world.
HELP US TEST THIS DESIGN with DISTRIBUTED MANUFACTURING! we’re willing to pay a maximum of $2 per connector to print and ship us a copy, with an award to whomever can deliver the first one! put your machine to work! more details here:
To participate, print a geometric hub and follow the instructions here!
