Daniel Grippi, Maxwell Salzberg, Raphael Sofaer, and Ilya Zhitomirskiy are four NYU computer science students who bonded over many late nights building a Makerbot at ACM meetings. After being inspired by a talk by Eben Moglen about freedom and ownership online, they started discussing what a distributed social network would look like and started building it.
These guys are building something the internet has needed for years. Check out their kickstarter page and consider supporting their project! These guys show you that when you get a MakerBot, you might just make some good friends and make wonderful things happen!
The folks in Washington state are rocking it these days. Kevin, who is in the Learn Make Cupcake group at the University of Washington has been printing Mendel parts like mad and added a nice hack to his extruder to stop busting out PTFE barriers.
One of the MakerBots over at the University of Washington is getting a workout!
This weekend our MakerBot got a big work out as we had the College of Engineering Open House (now called Discovery Days). Belinda — one of the team members designed a “give away part” which was a little W. Belinda started making hundreds of the little W’s. The MakerBot ran almost non-stop for three days. All-in-all, it was a great performance.
According to the MakerBot map, where MakerBot Operators can share their approximate location of their MakerBot, there are more MakerBots clustered in Seattle than any other place on earth. It’s arguable that the greater San Francisco area has more, but you have to go pretty far and include Sacramento. There are lots of MakerBots out there that aren’t on the map, but this is what we have to go by right now! Is your MakerBot on the map?
Will Langford, who runs the Tufts Robotics Club, had a nice article about robots, people, engineering, and MakerBot on his school’s blog. Cool!
Looking at engineering on a broader level, Langford says it’s the responsibility of engineers and product designers to “to situate their solutions within the context that it’s needed for.” He’s getting some of that real-world experience through an internship with MakerBot Industries, a Brooklyn-based start-up that uses computer-aided design software to produce 3-D pieces like his dorm room coat hook.
The way the printer works is both simple, and slightly magical. Using a small, heated platform, plastic tubing is fed through the top of the printer and slowly melted and cooled. Currently limited by the platform size, which is between four and six inches in diameter, the printer is great for building smaller scaled pieces, from salt shakers to earrings.
“Their whole aim is to make these 3-D printing machines that usually only universities and research institutions have, because they cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and make them available to a lot more people for a thousand dollars,” he says.
Having purchased a MakerBot printer himself, Langford says he is excited by the ease of assembly, which will make it more accessible to not just DIY-ers, but also the average consumer.
“It’s Ikea,” Langford says with a laugh. “A lot of people just want to be able to design their own things and have them now and not have to just accept whatever design Sony or whatever huge corporation determines is best.”
And Langford continues to make more things: glasses to share on the digital design site Thingiverse.com, or 3-D printed jewelry to sell on Etsy, an online storefront.
“I’m pretty sure I don’t want to be stuck in the normal engineering setting, designing normal things,” he says. “I want to be testing assumptions. I want to fully physically realize my ideas as much as possible.”