Nathan brought in a design for a car. We made a quick vector version in Illustrator and cut it out of thick paper. We had to glue the wheels on. The next time we’ll make slots instead of holes for the axles!

Next Nathan wanted to make a mask with Phineas, his current favorite cartoon character. We found a picture online and traced it in AI, then cut it out of the same thick paper. Later Nathan took it home and colored it in. It turns out that Phineas is always drawn in profile, making him a somewhat difficult mask subject!

Hi-tech paper towel cutting by Team TacoTruck! The laxxxor is all cleaned up and ready to go. Rails cleaned and lubed, mirrors polished, aluminum honeycomb lightly dusted with alcohol in a half-hearted attempt to remove the soot. First project: a 3D polio virus!

Team TacoTruck is in the house. The laxxxor is a bit grungy, so I’m going to give it a good clean before firing it up. Just bought two gallons of distilled water for the water cooling system. Need more hands to do the water swap, rest of TTT is still in bed dreaming in vectors, no doubt…

GOGOGO!

Not content to wait until the lazzzor battle tomorrow, there have been preemptive strikes made and posted to the Thingiverse. We salute the bold who dare to go first! Check out these awesome 12×12 designs!

If you like a thing click on the “like it” button on the thing and rate it with as many stars as you think it’s worth.

Photo above is NYC Taxi and Skyline Letter holder by Spikenzie

Zach just enabled ratings of things. Now if you like something you can give it 5 stars! This will be usefull during the LAZZZOR BATTLE. Now, go forth and rate things! Click the stars!

On November 22nd, designers from around the world will participate in the first annual Lazzzor Battle. Each participant will create designs for a laser cutter that will fit on a 12″x12″ sheet of acrylic, wood, leather, cardboard, paper, or whatever else you can slap onto a laser cutter that is 12″ by 12″!

All you have to do to compete is upload a design file to the Thingiverse that will fit on a 12″x12″ of something and tag your design lazzzorbattle2008. You don’t even need to have a laser to compete, you can just upload your designs under a license that allows others to lasercut them! Some of the best designs ever come from having constraints. What the designers of the world design that will fit on one square foot of material?

When is this happening? We’ll be liveblogging the entries from 12pm Saturday November 22 to 11PM Sunday November 23rd. Yes, that’s right. 24 HOURS (12+12) of live lazzzoring goodness!

When it’s all over, a group of judges will meet to choose the champions of the lazzzor battle and they’ll showcase their favorite designs at NYCResistor on 12/12/08 at 8PM. (12/12 get it?) Because these are all virtual objects that can be created by anyone with a lasercutter, we’re inviting folks who have lasercutters to have showings in their neighborhood on 12/12. Together we can have a laser art exhibit to cover the world! Zach will be in charge of getting the NYCResistor show set up because I’ll be in Europe trying to set an exhibit up on the continent!

Who’s in?
Douglas Repetto – Dorkbot (Douglass instigated this with a facebook laser challenge!)
Zach Hoeken – Reprap Research Foundation and Thingiverse
Bre Pettis – I Make Things and Thingiverse
Phillip Torrone – Adafruit and Make: Magazine
Matt Joyce – NYCResistor
Adam Mayer – NYCResistor

MORE PARTICIPANTS:

John Baichtal – Geekdad
Mathieu Glachant
Jen Dunlap
Windell Oskay
Team TacoTruck

Want to be added to this list of lazzzor battle contenders? Drop a note in the comments or just join us on

I downloaded and resized dino-girl’s butterfly and lazzzored it and it’s sitting right in front of me. That’s the magic of the thingiverse!

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.

For the last two weeks we’ve been in stealth mode. Now we’re not! Invite your friends to the thingiverse and share the universe of things with folks you know!

Fred over at Creative Commons wrote up a very nice article about Thingiverse!

Thingiverse is an “object sharing” site that enables anyone to upload the schematics, designs, and images for their projects. Users can then download and reuse the work in their projects using their own laser cutters, 3D printers, and analog tools. Think of it as a Flickr for the Maker set.

Besides implementing our licenses, Bre and Zach have also gone the distance and allowed users to license works under the GNU GPL, LGPL, and BSD licenses, as well as allowing them to release works into the public domain. Thingiverse uses our license wrappers for each of these licenses thereby enabling automatic indexing by machines like search engines.

Pushing the envelope even further, Thingiverse also fully implements our RDFa specification (just take a look at the source of any page with a CC license to see RDFa in action) for expressing licensing and authorship information on the semantic web. This means that aside from telling machines that a work is licensed under CC, Thingiverse also tells machines the title of a work, its author, and other interesting semantic information.

If you’re looking for a fantastic example of how to implement the commons on a platform designed for sharing creativity, look no further than Thingiverse.

Thanks Fred! We’ll keep doing our best to make this a great place to share things!

For lasercutting, I create a design in inkscape and then import into corel draw and print to an Epilog 35watt laser. I make sure to include a ruler in my design so that when I import into corel draw the scale is the same.

What’s your workflow/creation software of choice?