Having recently been contacted by someone interested in testing a few samples of makerbot-made braille, I polished up my previous design and shipped a few pieces off earlier this week. Now, the results are in…. and it seems to be a resounding YES!
He writes: “I am enormously impressed. With my fingernail I can feel where the filaments laid down. With my fingertips though, the dots are correct sized, smooth feeling and comfortable to read. I really think this is professional quality stuff.”
I’ll be talking with him about where to take it from here and about what implications/possibilities this may have (and I’ll be sure to keep you in the loop).
Check it out on Thingiverse for the details.
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.
We had a few people over on Friday to celebrate the move into our factory and we set a MakerBot to print out Walt Disney’s head. I wasn’t watching it, so I don’t know if someone messed with it or what happened, but the printer’s Y stage got backed up a few centimeters and yet kept printing. Looks pretty cool huh? Sometimes, mistakes are awesome!
Photo Credit Jason Scott
Will Langford is one of the excellent MakerBot interns and also an excellent digital designer. He came up with a design for glasses and printed them! I’m very proud of both Will and the MakerBot for making such an awesome object. Will’s going to chat with an optician and figure out what the glasses need to be able to be fitted with lenses. I can’t wait to print out a pair and sport these!
I’ve been on a kick lately of finding cool, useful things to print with my MakerBot. The current way of running a print is to tape on a square of foamcore. Well, that can get tedious and it sucks to have to use another consumable in addition to the foamcore. Well, I dreamed up a design for a clip to hold the foamcore down so you can print. It turned out pretty nice, and I’ve been using it to do prints.
There are a few catches though:
1. You can’t print large objects (>80mm) as the head will hit the clips. Use tape for those jobs
2. They don’t play well with endstops on the Y axis. I don’t use endstops because I’m tough, but if you use them just beware.
It’s really trivial to print off 4 of them using Skeinforge’s multiply feature. If you lose them, you can just print out more. Awesome!
So I was printing some tweezers I downloaded from Thingiverse the other day, and they turned out really nicely because it was basically one big outline with very few starts/stops of the extruder. Playing with them, seeing how strong they were, and also looking at the cool profile they made got me thinking: Wow, this sort of looks like the profile of a wing! That idea got into my head, and I decided that I absolutely needed to try and 3D print wings of some sort.
Unfortunately I’m barely a n00b at 3D modeling, and I don’t know the first thing about wing design, so I hit up the Thingiverse Community to see if anyone had any models or experience. It turns out that a few of our members are avid RC plane hobbyists and were quick to post a few wing designs here and here. Their passion about this technology was really refreshing, and it was cool to collaborate digitally on a physical object.
The wings themselves turned out really nice. The grains are all in the direction of flow, and they are really smooth. If they don’t outright work, it would be a very simple 5 minute sanding job to get them absolutely perfect. I havent weighted them, but they are strong and light-weight. They are 70mm long, but I’m going to try and print ones that are 120-130mm next (current max build height) The only problem I have is that I don’t have access to any sort of wind-tunnel or RC plane to test them on. Does anyone want samples to play with?
