Thingiverse Blog

Bre recently posted this on the MakerBot blog, and it seems appropriate to repost here:

Here at MakerBot, we make open source hardware and we freely share digital designs for our products on Thingiverse.com. As a business, we strive to be a model for the bold companies of the 21st century that embrace sharing. You can download the design files for the things we sell on Thingiverse.com.

We created Thingiverse to be the digital design sharing utopia of our dreams. Thingiverse.com integrates with open licenses that encourages Thingiverse users to let others copy and change their work so that others can stand on their shoulders and create the products of tomorrow and the solutions for the next generation. Every day I look on Thingiverse and say “Wow!” when I see the new things that have been shared. People who upload designs to Thingiverse are my heroes.

Things, and digital designs for things, are very different than other types of media. Copyright doesn’t work the same way on things as it does with music, movies, and books. If you’re into exploring the intellectual property landscape of things, you need to read “It will be awesome if they don’t screw it up” by Michael Weinberg.

The Pirate Bay announcement of a new category for digital designs is interesting because it’s another place where people can share digital designs for real things. As a technology, torrents are particularly great for super mega giant files because they distribute the downloading load and I’m curious to see what kinds of things will begin to show up in that category. Because The Pirate Bay takes a bold, no-holds-barred approach to sharing, I’m sure there will be controversies as companies and people who long for the proprietary days of the 20th century come to terms with the raw power of contemporary sharing technology. Cue squeaking of the world’s tiniest violin.

In the contemporary age of sharing, those who share will be the leaders of tomorrow. The sharers will be the ones who will emerge in the 21st century as winners in the rapidly changing innovative landscape. I’ve consistently advised individuals and companies to push their comfort level and share more. If you have a company that feels threatened by the idea of someone sharing digital designs for your products, I suggest you join the sharing community and share those design files yourself on Thingiverse.com.

First and perhaps most importantly, the phrase “3D Printing Troubadours” is wonderful.

Second, this is the sort of inventive approach to available technology that changes the fundamental mechanics of the world.  How clever is it to drive around with a 3D printer, actually running in the back seat of your hybrid electric car, selling your prints and telling the story of 3D printing?  Awesomely, that’s how clever.

This is a project I can’t wait to see more of.

The picture of this outstanding build pretty much says it all.  Dual extrusion, with soluble support on one print head means you can do any overhang you please.  Water soluble PVA is actually more expensive than the plastic you print on top of it, so when designing your support network you may want to economize a bit.

The good news of course is that modern extruder designs are very sleek and can fit onto small bots, and even at that price support is less than ten cents a cubic centimeter, and the PLA itself is less than four, so “expensive” is kind of a value judgement…

Thingiverse has just been re-launched and is even more awesome! Thingiverse is a powerful sharing platform for digital designs where all the content is free and the future is bright.

Back before Thingiverse.com, people were able to download music, movies, and even books, but there was no place to share and download things. Then Thingiverse, a universe of things, was created in 2008 and digital design has never been the same.

Thingiverse users share their digital designs for real things and become superstars to the other users on Thingiverse. Every day, Thingiverse has new things community members have shared. It’s truly amazing. There are thousands of things on Thingiverse, and millions of people visit the site to be inspired by the creativity of Thingiverse users.

And today, there’s a new and improved Thingiverse!

• It’s easier than ever to share your digital designs and be a superstar
• A new front page giving top billing to the latest featured Thing
• A new look and better organization for Thing pages and User profiles
• Simplified Thing editing – it’s all in one place
• Improved search and navigation make it easier to find what you’re looking for
• On the backend, we’ve improved the architecture so everything works smoother.
• Refined features for attribution and derivatives
• A thing can now have multiple ancestors – bring on the mashups!
• “I Made a Derivative” button makes it clearer what to do when you make a derivative of another Thing
• Post those beautiful photos of your prints with the “I Made One!” button
• The backend of the site has improved to make sharing easier.

Check out the new Thingiverse now! Don’t let your creativite work suffocate with loneliness on your hardrive. Get your designs off your computer and up on Thingiverse. Share your designs today!

One feature request that we commonly see at the Thingiverse help desk is to build an improved search engine into Thingiverse. Our first search feature was powered by Google and – while this was easy to implement, and could turn up all kinds of content on Thingiverse – it was very clunky to use.

Our new and improved search will help you find any Thing on Thingiverse! We take your search terms and scour the names, descriptions, instructions, tags, and even creator names for every Thing, and serve up the Things that best match.

Looking for “upgrades“? Or maybe you only want “Thing-O-Matic upgrades“? Our search is designed to help you narrow in on the thing you want, fast.

We’re pretty excited about this new feature, so please give it a try!

Okay, okay, PLA is an amorphous solid polymer, but zoomed in (and with the really boss photography here) it looks very crystaline.  Printer operators the world over are diving towards the tiny, and we’ve seen miniaturization do amazing things before.  There is, after all, plenty of room at the bottom…

The distance between awesome animatronics projects is shrinking, and the quality is improving.  Soon, I suspect, they’ll be just another one of the streams of stunning work in Thingiverse.  But I think this one is from some time in the future, because it’s more amazing than I was really expecting.

Vogal the Dragon is a shoulder-mounted animatronic dragon with wings that fold and a head that moves.  Eventually he will be autonomous, riding his owner through the conventions, etcetera… and not long after, I think, sights like him will be common.  Wow.

I love a good earring project, and these are pretty elegant-looking.  Things with thin walls like these tend to print pretty well without a raft, too, since there’s not a lot of infill to potentially scrape up during that all-important lowest layer.

I had some questions in comments on my peg placement, so here’s a snapshot of the model with the pegs in.  When it printed, they snapped off easily and the head turned out pretty well considering how small I printed it!

I didn’t try supports for the belly and tail, and the underside of both came out a little scraggly as a result, but at this scale (less than 8cm long) those details ended up being less important than keeping the head from falling over during printing.

On more complex models I’ve found you can get away with surprisingly little support, but the cost of going too far with this can be anything from a ponytail that twists off before it reaches the connection point up top to total build failure.  Like with all home 3D printing, you get a “sense” for what will work and what won’t over time…

Skeinforge has the ability to automatically create support meshing that comes away comparatively easily with a pen knife, but at some point it starts to feel less like printing and more like whittling, and while soluble support structures are less far off than they once were, if you’re like me you’ll still find yourself looking around for a more elegant solution.

Enter the support peg.

The idea is to basically extend a vertical support peg through your model, allowing the fairly common practice of bending or breaking the “45 degree rule” to stretch a little farther than it usually does.  For my example I’m going to use this adorable but tough-to-print stegosaurus model:

» Continue reading “OpenSCAD Quick Tip: Support Pegs”