Zornik has created the Reddit Alien and uploaded it on Thingiverse. Isn’t it adorable? Now create you own little mascot of the Reddit community!

We don’t see a lot of animal designs on Thingiverse but now we have some cool frog designs by owenscenic. He made the frog for his daughter and now we can all have our own sets of little frogs.

If you have a 3D model for an animal, upload it to Thingiverse so everyone can make it!

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!

You can start at the DeepWater Horizon response page and you can submit your designs to BP here. Remember to upload them to Thingiverse too! (Tag: deepwaterhorizon). If you want to contribute to the bounty, just drop a note in the comments and we’ll shoot you an email shortly after June 20th.

Update: According to the comments, the bounty is up to $1100!

$100 Junior Tan
$100 MakerBot
$100 Gl33p
$200 Ponoko
$100 Jerri Chou
$200 ifixit
$100 David Ten Have
$100 Frank of Monochrom. (Pledged via twitter)
$100 Matt O’Rourke Pledged via Twitter

Inspired by this cover of the book Godel, Escher, Bach, tshannon has created MIT Shadow Sculpture using three orthogonal shadows in the shapes of the letters: M.I.T. Now choose your favorite three letters to do the same! Wanna represent your college, school, or university? Upload your school pride in the form of clever things to Thingiverse!

Candy machine made on a MakerBot + Candies = Total Win

Candy Dispenser by Matthew LaBerge.

via Candy Dispenser on Flickr – Photo Sharing!.

While capturing media for a new “Meet the MakerBot Operators” profiles series, I have been microphoning MakerBots in the BotCave while printing objects. As an unexpected fruit of my labor: I am  issuing “MakerBot Sound Library 001: The Pulley” @ Thingiverse to encourage attention to the bots’ sound/music-related properties. This #001 edition focuses on the sounds associated with printing the pulley object.

What does your print sound like? Does your bot have a voice, a lisp, a rattle that you want to share with the world?

• Pulley part 7.
• Y-axis shift.
• Z-axis shift.
• Finished printing “bark.”

The community is encouraged to make use of these sounds in video/sound/music/etc projects associated with their print projects — and share back by issuing compositions, shaping sounds and beats, creating beat loops/battle breaks and instruments, etc, as derivatives of the pertinent Sound Library edition. Or how about sharing your MakerBot recordings as a Sound Library of your own so that others can take a listen? (Grab the next consecutive Sound Library edition number and go for it.)

Over Memorial Day weekend, MakerBot MakerBot staffer Isaac has been evangelizing the MakerBot as tool for sound at Movement: Detroit’s Electronic Music Festival, and I am exciting about the possibilities. I simply have no idea yet what need or use exists for MakerBot sounds, and I count on you to grab the samples and go for it — create Ableton Live instruments, chiptunes-friendly encodings, ringtones, startup-tones, pbx voicemail menu trees …

• X-axis long cross.
• Tweezers.
• The Raft.
• ABS filament extrusion.

The original recordings are largely mono, 48k, 24bit .wav files using a boom microphone, contact microphone and Marantz handheld recorder. This edition being the first audio-only thing @ Thingiverse, please share feedback about what sounds and media format (bit rate/sample rate/format/codec) you need with me.

Modular Dungeon Walls                                                       Dungeon Tiles for Miniatures Gaming

Remember the first time when you became fascinated with dungeons and dragons? Plenty of designs have been uploaded in Thingiverse keeping dungeons and dragons still cool and exciting. Check out the Modular Dungeon Walls by TheRooster or Dungeon Tiles for Miniatures Gaming by Telvin_3d.  The Modular Dungeon Walls’s grid is 30mm made with 4mm thick walls and 26mm squares. The Dungeon Tiles for Miniature Gaming uses 21 scale dungeon tiles based on 25mm squares in 2×2 grids. Receive more instructions and details by visiting their pages.

I finished printing and assembling the MakerBot Transformer this weekend. The main body part took around 4 hours and each of the small parts took between 14-25 minutes each. I did it with a 10% infill and two layers shell. All in all I probably spent about 12 hours of MakerBotting over a few days.

This is the most satisfying print I’ve ever done. The transformer transforms easily from robot to MakerBot and back again! The nuts and bolts loosen up a bit after a couple transformations and need tightening every once in a while.

This orange is a fancy custom color we are trying out. Like it?

Cathal Garvey has been testing the traps submitted for his mousetrap challenge!

Regarding the Merry-Go-Round trap, I printed it and set it near the home of the “culprit” for the duration of the Easter weekend. It was baited with a blueberry and some crushed pine nuts, the latter were as close to peanut butter as I could find.

It was my intention to leave it there for several days, then leave it outdoors if no action was seen, then leave it in the lab if no results after the outdoors site.

As it turns out, there was a visitor to the trap; the nut bits were all gone, the blueberry was..soiled, and there was evidence of mouse pee on the plastic (ew). Unfortunately, the trap didn’t work; the wall didn’t seem to have moved, and I think the mouse just shouldered under it to get in and out.

My take on the trap design; it’s a really clever concept, and I think it really could work! But, the interior wall needs to be braced from both above and below, because in the print I made the interior wall just flops over in its seating. Ideally it’d also rotate really freely, so perhaps seating it in a bearing would help, too. As mentioned, it’d be nice if the design were circular with a side-hole for entry also to simplify things.

Overall, I love the concept and I think this trap could work with some design revisions. Unfortunately it didn’t work for this competition, so on to the next trap, ClapTrap!