The Intro Post

When Bre asked me to guest blog for Thingiverse, I was pretty much explosively elated, and not just because certain robotic fabrication technologies were about to change hands.  (Although I did admittedly spend about an hour text-messaging long repeated strings of the letters “omgmakerbot” in various degrees of capitalization at my various online acquaintances.)

I’m a huge fan of Thingiverse because it combines two of my all-time favorite things: open-source and automated fabrication.  I have been an open-source lover pretty much since I discovered POV-ray back in the nineties, and although I do not only use open-source software, I have always believed in its power to exert downward pressure on the cost of goods and services, and to create escape valves when companies ignore the needs of their customers.  I’ve been a fan of automated fabrication ever since I saw that room full of industrial robots building other industrial robots– I don’t know how young I was, but I know I thought, “THIS is the future.”  Since that time I’ve always had an eye on 3D printing and self-assembling systems;  as a kid I devoured articles on those first resin-and-laser print machines thinking “someday I’m going to have one of those, and I’ll be able to make ANYTHING”.

In my time on Thingiverse, I will be bringing my thoughts on automated fabrication, open-source hardware (ranging in complexity from supercomputers to paperweights), and the future of these things to this space.  In addition, I will be covering a lot about the nuts and bolts of the present of 3D printing, from my vantage point of a user with a MakerBot and Blender3D, two open-source tools that go great together.

In the near term, look for some broad topics and Blender tutorials.  Once I get my MakerBot running, I’ll shift gears into more gritty work on things like getting from STL file to gcode, and the detail work necessary to get complex mechanical systems printed.  (I’m no mechanical engineer, so we’ll ALL be learning.)

I’m very convinced we’re at the ground floor of something VERY big with Thingiverse, and I could not be happier to be sharing my thoughts with the awesome people who are already making this into a technologically significant development.

–Allan C. Ecker