This is seriously my favorite day of the week lately. I sit down, hack on my favorite website and make it do new and cool things. Here’s what I did today:

* Fixed a bug that showed the delete icon on derivatives that aren’t yours. (thanks syvwlch)
* Added ‘Publish’ functionality so your blank thing doesnt get shown to the world until you’re ready
* Added a Derivatives listing and an Instances listing which show you the things other people have made

New Feature: Publish Thing

I’ve noticed that it generally takes 5-10 minutes from uploading your file to finishing the description and metadata so that it is a fully filled out thing. Well, now I’ve added a feature so that your thing does not show up publicly until you actually click Publish. It should be pretty in-your-face about it, so don’t forget to publish your things.

New Feature: Derivatives and Instances

Since I fixed the derivatives system last week, there have been a good number of derivative things, and people have been hitting the ‘i made one’ link pretty hard. This is awesome, but we haven’t really had a good way to see what things people are making. Well, now we do. I’ve added a list of derivatives and a list of things people have made to the homepage, as well as created listing pages so you can look over all the previous ones as well.

Oh, and you can get rss feeds of derivatives and things people have made as well.

You can now download a flashlight on Thingiverse, courtesy Will Langford.

More accurately, a flashlight case, but with a few components from the old parts bench, this is a download that gives the builder something neat, working, and mechanically sound.  This is the sort of project that a hobbyist who has just put together a MakerBot would consider a trivial soldering task, and the reward is a sweet-looking, compact flashlight that will serve as a pocketable reminder that its owner was 3D printing before everyone was doing it.

Much applause for Will Langford’s excellent design work!

I was checking out Oceaneer99‘s photos of models of submarines (seen above) and clicked through to some plans and found Solid Model Memories. There are some amazing plans here that seem to me like they could be turned into great 3D models.

So I clicked around and found this! I love the style of these plans which seem to be a combo of popular science and buck rogers! It seems like the specs are basically all there for someone to make a digital model of this… and then upload it to thingiverse!

Check out Syvwlch awesome youtube tutorial. He took Zach’s bracelet and redid it in sketchup in no time flat! I have to say, I’m impressed with the way that sketchup has improved since I used it 3 years ago!

Oscar Wilde once said, “There are two great tragedies in life.  One is not getting what you want.  The other is getting it.”

Another paradox of this variety is that there are two things that make engineering a pain.  One is standards, and the other is not having one.  Having a standard means changing the rules isn’t allowed.  Having a standard means if you want to do something new, you may be out of luck.  But not having a standard means having to do nearly everything from scratch.

One of the great benefits of digital fabrication will be that the tension between standards and creativity will be relaxed dramatically.  If standards can be implemented with software, they cost less to change.  If the plastic objects we use can be replaced with new versions by downloading a file and hitting a button, the cost of changing a standard drops dramatically.  Switching from English to Metric units becomes a matter of downloading a different version of a file, or, worst case, writing a new one.

It will still be an annoyance to switch between standards for screw caps and snap-together joints, but with digital fabrication, it’s practically a software upgrade.

As of this writing, there are four free, motile robots (and two robot arms) on Thingiverse, free to download and fabricate, all based on simple, standard technology.  Anyone can download the plans, and with access to either a 3D printer or a laser cutter, build them pretty cheaply.

At the moment, this is something of a curiosity for hobbyists.  Those of us who “know a place that’s got a machine” can get these designs made, but for most people, right now, the cost of any one of these designs is actually higher than a kit, since it would either take time (tracking down a trophy shop that will let them use the laser, for example) or money (it’s the first print on the MakerBot that’s expensive– they get a lot cheaper after that!) to get started.

But digital fabrication is spreading, and fast.  I wasn’t following the development, but I kind of doubt Bre’s statement that “your local trophy shop might have a laser cutter” would have been true even a few years ago.  With open source 3D printers beginning to mature, the hobby shops where one might buy robot kits may increasingly have a 3D printer behind the counter running at prices below fifteen dollars a pound.  (That would be about a 200% markup, incidentally, giving our hobby shop a healthy profit margin without models being anything like prohibitively expensive.)  Even a development as modest as this would mean that 3D printed robots would be cheap, plentiful, and with some friendly competition between robot creators, well-designed.

The additional components will get cheaper, too.  Many robot kits rely on gearmotors or servos for actuation.  These standardized, bundled packages include motors, tiny gears, and in the case of servos, electric control systems to maintain position.  The advantages of this pre-packaged solution are great: the tiny, precision gears provide excellent drive characteristics and exhibit only tiny amounts of “backlash,” and because they have such a broad set of uses, the market supports enough competition to keep the price fairly low.

(As I’ve said before, the primary arena where personal fabrication will defeat factory fabrication is the “long tail” of demand, where very few people need a specific item.)

However, the tradeoff that a 3D printer can bring to the gearbox arena is: low cost and high customization, in exchange for bulkier, heavier, more backlash-prone gears.  As improving technology puts the squeeze on these disadvantages, and as greater availability of 3D printing pushes the cost even lower, I think we’ll see creative commons gearboxes come into the hobby market in a very big way.

The cost break of a 3D printed gearbox is already pretty close to becoming fact.  A gearmotor kit from Tamiya generally costs about $10.  An equivalent 3D printed gearmotor might be put together for as little as $2, given that basic electric motors are so cheap.  Building this into a printable robot would create a very inexpensive machine indeed.  Using off-the-shelf electronics, I compute that a simple printed robot could cost as little as $10, at which point a hobbyist who might have built a single robot from a kit or custom-designed and built one might just download and digitally fabricate a dozen or more for comparable cost and have a robot swarm.  Many of the robotics experiments we see universities performing lately are with swarm robots.  3D printing just might let hobbyists start to do the same thing.

And that would be a very big robot party indeed.

A PLA object printed by Bre Pettis

In recent years, neurological interfaces of various kinds have been making a lot of news.  They’re making the deaf hear, the blind see, and replacing limbs.  So far, none of these replacements exceed the capabilities of the biological systems they replace.

Well.  Except possibly for those runner legs that caused that flap in the Olympics recently.

But these interfaces and machine mechanisms have applications for people without injuries or impairments.  Increasingly, body modifiers, people who go beyond mere tattoos to dying the whites of their eyes, constructing metal fins for themselves, and prosthetically altering their facial geometry, are looking to information technology to add kick to their threshold-chasing existences.

And the more things they implant in themselves, the more interest they’ll have in biocompatible plastics.

A sheath of biocompatible plastic can allow any piece of electronics to be implanted.  You could put a bluetooth transciever in your arm, LEDs inside your eyebrow, tiny speakers under the skin behind your ear, charged up by inductive loops and kept running by supercapacitors, without any significant ill effects.  (I’d still want them to be RoHS compliant though!)

Poly-lactic Acid (PLA) is one such plastic, and moreover, it’s a low-temperature thermoplastic.  You can print it.

Now, the outer details of such an implant aren’t especially important, unless you want the obvious bulge under the skin to look like something.  What’s important, is getting a good seal.  And concievably, a 3D printer could start a job, then print over a component so the plastic sealed and became stuck to the component.

A system that could watertight-encase electronics in biocompatible plastic, such as the described 3D print system, would allow cyborgs to add components to their electronic peripherals with comparative ease and safety.  Improvements in battery survivability (supercaps), increasing integration, and widespread availability of arbitrary-form-encasement technology just might be a combination that gets a lot of people, if not the mainstream, using implantable technology.

The term “cyborg” is probably nearing the tipping point from science-fiction terminology to social epithet, so I probably shouldn’t be brandishing it around anymore.  Barely more than a decade ago, one wouldn’t have hesitated to use the term to describe someone with cochliar implants, or motorized and neuro-electrically controlled prosthetic limbs, because such people were obviously characters in a science fiction story.  Now such people are people we know.  We might call those who are intentionally adding components to themselves “voluntary” cyborgs, but just as long hair on men became normal around the office, eventually these people won’t be so marginal.

And they might be making use of a lot of PLA.

To print out an object you need an STL file. You can create your own or download one from Thingiverse, or even scan one if you have a 3D scanner (WANT!)

Once you’ve got an STL file, you’ll need to get it to the right size. Watch the video to learn how. To do this you’ll need Blender, the open source 3D creative software. It’s great and it’s free!

I’ll be making more videos like this to walk you through the process of slicing the STL file with Skeinforge and sending the gcode from ReplicatorG to the MakerBot.

So I was printing some tweezers I downloaded the other day, and they turned out really nicely because it was basically one big outline with very few starts/stops of the extruder. Playing with them, seeing how strong they were, and also looking at the cool profile they made got me thinking: Wow, this sort of looks like the profile of a wing! That idea got into my head, and I decided that I absolutely needed to try and 3D print wings of some sort.

Unfortunately I’m barely a n00b at 3D modeling, and I don’t know the first thing about wing design, so I hit up the Thingiverse Community to see if anyone had any models or experience. It turns out that a few of our members are avid RC plane hobbyists and were quick to post a few wing designs here and here. Their passion about this technology was really refreshing, and it was cool to collaborate digitally on a physical object.

The wings themselves turned out really nice. The grains are all in the direction of flow, and they are really smooth. If they don’t outright work, it would be a very simple 5 minute sanding job to get them absolutely perfect. I havent weighted them, but they are strong and light-weight. They are 70mm long, but I’m going to try and print ones that are 120-130mm next (current max build height) The only problem I have is that I don’t have access to any sort of wind-tunnel or RC plane to test them on. Does anyone want samples to play with?

(reposted from the MakerBot Blog)

4volt Jansen Walker Beta 1 from a3o Studios on Vimeo.

Zach Hoeken and I started Thingiverse 6 months ago because we needed a place to share digital designs. There were other websites that did this, but they all did it wrong. We wanted to get it right with licensing, comments, and that made it easy to share digital designs. We also wanted to support a future where you can download physical object design files and make them real in your living room.

Today 4Volt uploaded a Jansen Walker creature that runs on an arduino. This is basically the coolest thing in the world to me and I’m super exciter excited that it’s shared on Thingiverse.