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!
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!
Nothing can stop us! Soo what!!! there is some wicked slush outside that completely gets into what ever footwear you have on- here at the botcave we have an invention for everything.
Introducing: The Botcave Slippers v1.0 & v1.1
v1.0 Includes: 2 pieces of 14″ stylish Salmon colored foam (Zach is modeling this lovely version)
v1.1 Includes: The same as v1.0 but also adds a bit more support to the foot with 4 12″ x 12″ x 12″ pieces of bubble wrap (Adam is modeling this lovely version)
Dominic Muren is an occassional contributor to the Thingiverse blog and he gave a great presentation on personal manufacturing at the Seattle Dorkbot! This is very much worth the watch! Check it!
Joris over at Shapeways is on an interviewing spree! He interviewed Bre and has now interviewed Clothbot!
How do you like your Makerbot?
Loving it! I had been tracking Fab@Home and RepRap projects for a while but the barriers to entry (sourcing materials, tools and availability of my time) were such that I didn’t jump into them right from the start. When MakerBot Industries appeared with all the pieces in a convenient kit form, I pounced and landed up with MakerBot Number Nine (see http://clothbot.com/wiki/MakerBotNumberNine) from the first batch. It’s been particularly fun being involved in bootstrapping the community from the beginning. As each new batch has come online the former-newbies have been pitching in answers to the more common FAQs and taking on wiki editing roles, leaving those of us early-batchers with more time to take deep dives into the larger set of reprap development activities. In the larger ecosystem of rapid prototyping technologies, I think of my Cupcake as a “bone maker”. It’s great for prototyping ideas and making the scaffolding around which to wrap skins with more finish. Being able to take a design from drawing to prototype in less than a day is awesome! When the raw material costs are so low though, being able to tweak and reprint a design ad infinitum can be a bit of a curse. It takes time to learn when good is good enough. Using Shapeways has helped impose some discipline on my own design process.
First, I rip the cables out of the bubblepack. One USB2TTL cable to talk to all my new machinery. Various cat5e cables to wire the fabricator system, and to enable me to screen a galaxy of global video entertainment through poorly-policed peer-to-peer sharing services.
One standard ATX power supply, made in China; its lavish carbon-footprint will also serve me as my hotplate.
A toolkit with a glittering host of aluminium tongs, tweezers, spanners, hex keys, and Ikea-knockoff assembly tools. These items will double as my cutlery, since I’ll be living mostly off ramen noodles from the local Korean grocery, when not grabbing a tasty plate of feijao maravilma over at the “Favela Chic” Franco-Brazilian bar and techno niteclub.
I also possess three NEMA 17 stepper-motors to drive my fabricator. This nifty Tyvek bag contains all the nuts, bolts, belts, pulleys and bearings. These gleaming rods are high-quality precision-ground steel shafts for the X and Y axes.
This device also boasts pre-assembled 3rd-generation electronics from the vengeful wreckage of the Ivrea interaction-design school. These bearded techno-intelligentsia were once harmless left-wing Italian academics, but now they are fully prepared to crush the planet’s entire industrial order through methods even the Chinese can’t comprehend.I have a pinch-wheel plastruder to melt my giant reel of plastic cable. It extrudes that molten plastic as solid, durable, slightly warped and drippy consumer objects. I mean fruit bowls. Forks. Lampshades and hat racks. Most anything Deirdre might have found while leafing through her overpriced shelter magazines.
These pale, gormless extrusions of the formless will have no copyrights, no branding, no consumer cachet, and no Walter Benjamin “aura”. They will just work, they will function practically. They will function in the same mute, ugly way that a prison shiv will work for some east London hoodlum locked up half his lifetime for knife-crime. You may imagine there’s some vast class chasm between this old-school knife-waving wide-boy and me, a bespectacled, hypermodern Web geek – but let me confide this to you: he’s my landlord.
At MakerBot, we celebrate whenever someone orders a machine. When a group of friends gets a machine, we get even more excited because we know the possibilities for awesomeness are directly related to collaboration. When a hackerspace gets a machine, the excitement level goes off the charts!
Ghent is awesome-town, we all know that, but without a Hackerspace it isn’t complete. This workshop was the first meeting of people that are interested in founding a Hackerspace in Ghent. A lot of tech people and artists joined the party and gave the Hackerspace@Ghent idea a boost. As from January we will meet on regular basis. First at TimeLab, later at our own space.
These past two weeks, I’ve been honored to run an intensive MakerBot workshop in lovely Lisbon, Portugal. The goal was simple: build two MakerBots, and print print print print print. We achieved goal #1 over the course of two evenings. Grand total of about 8 hours for 10 people to build 2 makerbots. It was really awesome.
Of course that left us with 12 days in which to design, print, and learn all there is to learn about how to do 3D printing on a MakerBot. Many wonderful things were designed, printed, and shared with the world. In no particular order, I’d like to present some of the interesting results of the workshop
Radiohead’s Thom York
This one was done by Tiago Serra and turned out great. He also managed to get reblogged on a bunch of other sites too. Click the image to view the model on Thingiverse.
Experience
This piece, entitled ‘Experience’ by Sónia Moreira was a great bit of art and very interesting to hold in your hands. I believe this was her first time using 3D modeling tools and was made using Wings3D and Blender. Click the image to view the model on Thingiverse.
Servo Suspension System
This design was very cool and very practical. Created by Guilherme Martins, it is a servo mount with integrated suspension system intended for use in a robot. Very cool! Click the image to view the model on Thingiverse.
PS3 Eye Support
Another really nice, really practical item was this custom support for a camera. It was designed by Sergio Ferreira for use in an art installation involving ants (also really cool!) Click the image to view the model on Thingiverse.
Pink Panther Woman
Last, but not least, we have this provocative model by Pedro Januário who is a very talented 3D modeler. He did many interesting models, but this was by far the most impressive. While printing this piece, he shattered many records, most notably the Longest Print, clocking in at 4+ hours. Click the image to view the model on Thingiverse.
Of course there were many, many other things designed and printed during the course of the workshop, and these are just a sample of the cool stuff that was done. Congratulations to all the participants and keep on rocking the 3D world.
