Announcing Thingiverse.com or, “Why you need a RepRap machine”

One of the most frequent questions I get after people understand what a RepRap does, is a variant of either ‘Why do you need a machine like this?’ or ‘What do you make once you have one?’. Well, Thingiverse.com is an answer to that. This is no ordinary object sharing website. Thingiverse.com is a home for all your digital designs. If you can represent a physical object digitally, then we want it on Thingiverse. You can upload 3D files for a RepRap machine, vector files for a lasercutter, or even a PDF of instructions on how to buildh a sock puppet.

One of the tricky things with digital designs for things is that your average web browser doesn’t know an STL from a dodo, which is why we support automatic renderings of common digital design formats. If you give us a file, we’ll try our best to generate a rendering of it so that when people come to look at it or download it, they will be able to know what it is. We support STL, DXF, SVG, AI, and many other formats including Eagle PCB design files. Even if we don’t support rendering it, we’ll still put it up for other people to download. Not only that, but once we add support for your file, we’ll render the previously uploaded files of that type too. Yay!

The dream behind Thingiverse is that someday in the not so distant future, when everyone has a RepRap machine, they will be able to go to Thingiverse.com, find a useful/interesting/cool thing, download it, print it, and 15 minutes later be able to hold the actual thing in their hands. This is the coming revolution of digital fabrication and we want to help you make it happen. If you want to be involved, now is the time to step up and get involved.