..when you’re having electron microscopes take the final photos of your 3D prints.

This car is a little under 300 microns long, or just about the right size to sit inside the more fine-pitch extruder nozzle tips you can get these days for your thermoplastic printers.

“Atoms are the new Bits” is still a while off, but if you could print at scale with these kinds of surface details, you could design surfaces of varying textures, from the details of the 3D file.  A ridged surface would feel more “rubber-like” and a smooth one more “plastic-like”.  Geometry details at this scale affect much subtler qualities of an object than it’s structural appearance, such as it’s texture, luster, and a couple notches lower, color.

Iridescence would be an excellent 3D printable feature of the future.

The Smithsonian museum is undertaking a project to 3D scan its collection!  While I imagine the Smithsonian will end up creating its own collection of virtual exhibits, we would obviously be thrilled to see a broad selection of replicas of the Smithsonian’s many wonders pop up on Thingiverse!

I mean, it’s a dragon, IN A TEACUP!

It’s even a puppet!  I would gladly sacrifice a cup to get a clear path to the controls, maybe run wires to some servos or something…

Oh also this sure didn’t take long…

Not sure how fiddly the support network would be but maybe you could incorporate that into the illusion.  No fair using the camera tracker in Blender to generate a point cloud–  … actually, wait, that’d be awesome.  That’s totally fair.

All the time you say?  Well, only because it’s true.  The game of 15 puzzle frame could totally be replaced with a bas-relief of something awesome from Thingiverse.  It’d take some fiddling in OpenSCAD though…

Plenty of lovely seasonal printables, including this big gear heart!  The parts have been scaled for a larger-format printer, and assembled, well, just look at how small the hands holding it look!

Tekla Labs is having a 3D printing contest!  Tekla Labs is a group at UC Berkeley that works on making laboratory equipment more readily available through DIY, pretty much right up my alley!  I also really love the fact that the winners get to choose between an e-reader and an oscilloscope.  Tekla also made a nice mention of Thingiverse in their post on the contest and I know for a fact that there are already a lot of great designs here directly applicable to forwarding the cause of DIY laboratory science!

If you enter, remember, this isn’t affiliated with Thingiverse, so they won’t see your designs no matter how you tag them– you’ll need to check the contest web page and email your designs straight to them!

Back in 2008, I had started archiving dxf files on a domain I wasn’t using. Zach and I were hanging out a lot at NYCResistor and we started talking about a future of downloadable things. It was a Saturday in 2008 and we agreed that a free library of digital designs for actual things was a good enough idea to spend an hour on. We got the domain name and Zach started coding. I started the blog up and Thingiverse was born. Our friends started uploading things.

I decided that we needed a terms of use and so I went and looked at Blip.tv’s and Etsy’s and Youtube’s and I basically copied them and changed the names to MakerBot. This made the document sound very official. Laywers the world over are shaking their head scornfully in my direction upon hearing this, I’m sure. Thankfully, I copied the part that says that we can change the terms of use or we’d be stuck with those terms!

Thingiverse is a website that’s growing up. We’ve had DMCA takedowns, flamewars, and always more things. It’s time for Thingiverse to have a more grown-up set of policies that aren’t cut-and-pasted from around the internet.

We’ve made some changes to the secondary licenses that let you specify what other Thingiverse users can do with the files for your Things. We’re dropping the “All Rights Reserved” option, which has caused a lot of confusion in the past, and we’re replacing the Public Domain option with the Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication license, which adds legal protections for jurisdictions where there is no concept of public domain.

Dropping the “All Rights Reserved” is kinda a big deal. When people used that license on Thingiverse it made it so that you could no longer click “I Made One” on that page. This caused confusion and it just turns out that license doesn’t work with Thingiverse. RMS weighed in and told us we should take this license option down and we’re excited to make it so you can’t use traditional copyright on Thingiverse going forward. With this change, we are transitioning into being an even more powerful place to share your work. Everything on Thingiverse going forward will be under some sort of open license that gives others permission to download and copy it.

Effective immediately, we’ve updated our Terms of Use, Privacy Policy, and Intellectual Property Policies. The new docs are in serious legal language and for that I’m sorry. They were crafted by actual lawyers and a lot of conversation and consideration went into them. As much as I’m secretly proud of the days where we could just hit “ctrl + c” and get away with it, I’m glad that we’re now in a place where we’ve got the right legal language in place to support Thingiverse going forward.

When I first got all excited about the first extruder module that had a plunger-based idler, it was because it would be far more reliable than the captive idler wheel it replaced, but there was another benefit that didn’t occur to me at the time:

It became really easy to swap out filament colors.

These days of course, you can print two colors in place, together, at the same time, but these simple planetary gears really visually “pop” with just a swapped-out filament providing any of the lovely colors ABS comes in.

Okay I’ll admit it, that’s one adorable little dragon.  He’d fit right in with the Makerbot Castle Playset, particularly with some paint to bring out the details.  What’s that you say?  No dragons in the guest room?  I’m sure someone could put together a nice crystal-encrusted cavern add-on for the set…