Mark Ganter is fun-u-facturing glass beads with a play doh like concoction of glass dust and methol cellulose jelly. Check it out!
Buttons with 3 holes! Very cool!
via Fun-u-facturing (to answer a DorkBot’r question) « Open3DP (Open 3D Printing).
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!
We live in the future. The super customization side of 3D printing can change people’s lives.
For Summit, the peak of what’s possible with 3D printing may be found in the medical and prosthetic fields. Because of 3D scanners, he said, it’s possible to craft prosthetics that almost perfectly mold to a wearer’s body, unlike more standard models from the past.
Personally, he works on making 3D printouts of legs for those who have lost their own, both in plastic and metal. Summit’s 3D-printed legs are even dishwasher-safe, he said, and curbside-recyclable artifacts of the materials that can be used in the production of such items.
Because the models can be shaped based on patients’ remaining legs, Summit suggested that they are more attractive than what has been possible in the past. Indeed, he said those who have sported early models have reported regular admiring comments from kids and even girlfriends.
“For the first time in his life [as an amputee], kids on the street are jealous of him,” Summit said of one customer. “No one’s ever been jealous of him.”
And to Summit, hearing that those who have used his prosthetics find them to be a pleasant part of their lives–insofar as such an item can be pleasant–is a big part of why he’s set out to transform an industry that has been helping people for years, but with little regard to their specific individual needs.
“If the first thing you see in the morning is this by your bed,” Summit said of one of his more attractive prosthetic models, “you’re pretty psyched. That’s my goal.”
Hat tip to Greg Marra who pointed this article out to us!
via 3D printing changing prosthetics forever | Geek Gestalt – CNET News.
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!
Makerbotter Marc Cryan created this awesome game with some creative reuse of some spare Gen 2 electronics, and some old mice, apparently.
This shows you how to build an arcade style crane game out of scrap parts. The basic parts are: a motorized assembly that raises and lowers a claw, a track for the assembly to move around on, and a ctontroller with some electronics
via CRANE GAME.
Zach and his botcave made slippers
Adam and his botcave made slippers
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)
We will begin taking orders soon
Wow, Clothbot is rocking it with a new dremel attachment that he made for his MakerBot with his MakerBot. Awesome!
Dremel Flex-Shaft + MakerBot + MakerBeam + OpenSCAD = Micro CNC Mill/Drill Press. Expect future refinements, but this is the first version that works on my Batch 1 MakerBot.
via Dremel Flex-Shaft Mount for MakerBot by clothbot – Thingiverse.
Wow, check out this great MakerBottable robot with the perfect human dimensions! Nice work Jrombousky!
This is the Leonardo Robot. I based his measurements off the ideal measurements of a human to try and give him realistic proportions. Enjoy printing.
Download and print at Thingiverse!
Laser, 3D printer, and an onion, OH MY!
I found this about a year ago and then lost the link before I could blog about it. Thankfully, the gentleman Douglas Repetto sent a link today to the Thingiverse group and now I can share this project’s beauty with you!
It’s a glorious machine that runs on very old-skool early reprap technology. Zach designed and shipped those boards two years ago. If I was an art collector or MOMA, I would buy this. It’s awesome!
This system uses lasers to scan an onion plant from one of three angles. As the plant is scanned a fuse deposition modeler in real-time creates a plastic model based on the information collected. The device repeats this process every twenty-four hours scanning from a different angle. After a new model is produced the system advances a conveyor approximately 17 inches so the cycle can repeat. The result is a series of models illustrating the growth of the plant from varying angles.
Priya Ganapati wrote a great article about the spider/lego/makerbottable contraption over on the Wired blog.
Weller, a machinist and technician at the McCoy School of Engineering at Midwestern State University, combined milled plastic pieces with the basic Lego Mindstorms set to create a robotic spider that can crawl and turn.
“I wanted to open students’ minds to go beyond ‘let’s put the parts together and program the robot,’” he says. “This project is more than sticking the wheels on a Lego set.” The school uses Lego Mindstorms to introduce freshman students to robotics.
The spider robot’s legs are based on a concept called the Klann linkage. A single leg has a six-bar linkage with a frame, crank, two rockers and two couplers connected with pivot joints. This transforms rotating motion into linear motion.
Weller says he created the spider’s legs from 3/8-inch plastic sheet stock on a 3-axis CNC mill. But it can also be made by a 3-D printer such as Makerbot and RepRap.
As the video shows, the robotic spider moves with grace and turns around with flair, even on a smooth surface. Weller has posted the details of his Lego spider project and says he hopes 3-D printing enthusiasts will try it out.
via Robotic Spider Melds Legos and 3-D Printing | Gadget Lab | Wired.com.