NASA is currently taking ideas from the public for about the next week or so at http://opennasa.ideascale.com. People can submit their ideas and vote on the ideas of others.

I submitted an idea for NASA to get involved with the desktop manufacturing / 3d printing movement. It can be seen here.

Desktop manufacturing and 3D printers are beginning to emerge as a growing industry. See RepRap – http://www.reprap.org/ and Cupcake CNC – http://www.makerbot.com/ for two examples. The technology allows you to design a model and have it manufactured in a device about the size of a large inkjet / laser printer. Instead of ink it extrudes plastic onto a platform. By layering the plastic objects can be created.

NASA could work with the desktop manufacturing community to design models for use in 3D printers. There are any number of items that could be modeled – rockets, satellites, the Shuttles, the International Space Station. The designs could be released into the public domain for anyone to use.

NASA engineers could also look into helping to develop the technology behind the 3D printers to make them better.

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.

Keith moved his Extruder circuit board to the outside of his bot for better filament viewing. I am always taking the sd card out all the time so this wouldn’t work for me, but I like the idea and his wire wrap is beautiful!!!

I’d previously mounted the extruder PCB up on the highest two screws of the extruder housing, placing it above the feeder face instead of covering it, but that was pretty fragile and I was constantly worrying about bumping it and snapping it off. This weekend I moved the extruder controller to its new permanent home on the right side of the CupCake in the empty space above the motherboard. It fits nicely and shares a mounting screw with the upper Z-axis endstop.

via Relocating the MakerBot CupCake Extruder Controller « Keith’s Electronics Blog.

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!

Very Special Thanks to Skye MacLeod from http://aftered.tv for producing this video the New Blankets for organizing the event.

Nose to the Grinding Wheel

Many of our MakerBot users aren’t aware of all the hard work that goes in to producing a CupCake CNC. This is Part I of The Unsung Heros of the 3D Printing Revolution Miniseries. In this Miniseries, we will explore some of the processes that transform raw materials into your CupCakes, right here in Brooklyn, NY, USA.

CupCake’s aren’t all electronics and motors. We put a lot of hard work and elbow grease into making your robot. In this photo we see Widget, MakerBot Employee #2, preparing Z-Rods for the batch 11 shipment of your CupCakes. The Z-rod controls the height of the plastruder head during printing operations and four rods are required per CupCake. Widget carefully shapes each rod by hand, taking care afterward to inspect each one according to our rigid quality standards. Each rod is then carefully packaged, sealed and labeled. This is just one of the hundreds of labor-intensive processes we take to ship your bots.

In the next part of our Miniseries, The Unsung Hero’s of the 3D Printing Revolution, we will take a look at the people who assemble and build your CupCake CNC’s.

OMG.  Gorgeous.  3D scanning is awesome.

Make: Online : Laser-mapped subterranean passages.

Have you ever been in the situation where you’re printing the most amazing object that you downloaded from Thingiverse and the plastruder fails you? You know you’re going to have to rebuild it and it might take you a week to find the half hour it’s going to take to fix it and it’s very frustrating.

Instead of shaking your fist in the air, you can get a spare parts kit and assemble a heater barrel assembly on hand and swap it in if there are any problems.

Besides the heater barrel assembly, the MakerBot Spare Parts Kit includes an extra plastruder pulley and enough nichrome for 3 heater barrels so when you rebuild your first one and build your spare, you’ve still got enough for one more rebuild. Over time these wear down and installing a fresh one can really breathe some life back into your MakerBot. Oh and there is an insulator retainer and idler wheel so you can just slap those in if they break!

Here’s the complete list.

• 1 Extruder Pulley
• 1 Mk4 insulator retainer
• 1 Mk4 Idler wheel
• 3 100k Thermistor
• 1 Mk4 Retainer Washer
• 2 Zip ties
• 2 M3 50mm bolts
• 4 M3 nuts
• 4 M3 washers
• 1 Mk4 Heater barrel
• 1 Mk4 nozzle
• 1 Mk3 thermal barrier (PTFE)
• 2 M5 nuts
• 2 M5 14mm bolts
• 3 feet of nichrome wire. (enough for 3 re-wraps)
• 1 M6 nut
• 5 crimp on connectors
• 6 inches of thermal tape

That’s a lot of awesomeness in a small kit! Get your MakerBot Spare Parts Kit today!