We love 3d printing. Admit it. Bre often says he loves throwing Makerbot models on the ground, just to see them not break.

But makers can not live on ABS alone. So I’m kicking off the first Thingiverse Material Challenge by asking all of you: What materials can you kidnap in your printed designs? Sure, we’ve already used clothespin springs, and set screws. But I’m thinking that we can go bigger.

To start you all thinking, I’ve uploaded this little adapter that (theoretically) converts any bottle into a whistle. Scaling is no problem for our fabricators, so any size bottle will work. Just measure, scale, print, and start playing.

So what other ideas can grow out of this idea? What great materials out there are just missing the right 3d-printed part? Maybe they’re cheap small things at the art supply, auto part, or hardware store. Maybe they’re coat hangers, pens, or plastic forks. Maybe you want to make a part that connects two things you’ve never been able to connect before. Get out there, and use printing to hack the material world as you see it. Be sure to tag your work with materialkidnap so everyone can see it!!

There’s been a lot of activity in the made things section lately, thanks to the rapidly increasing availability of 3D printers.  It’s also fast becoming an informal rule that if you can at all manage it, you should print your design yourself before uploading it, to show it can be done.

Add to that the new users bringing new models fast and furious, and the number of parts on Thingiverse is really taking off lately!  The user base is now large enough that something beautiful, elegant and useful is virtually garanteed in any given week.

And this is still only the beginning.

At my last count, there are no fewer than NINE of these out there, probably more, printed and tweeting since its creation by the deeply awesome Thingiverse user Zaggo a mere TWO DAYS ago.  The reports are it’s plenty loud as a whistle, and the little lanyard loop is a great feature.

There is no way any company could deliver a product by post this fast.  This whistle went from Germany to New Zealand, New York and points beyond and between in electronic form to be fabricated on site.  Invented once, printed everywhere.  All but instantly.  This is big.

This super-awesome and fully functional whistle has given me just the idea for the next Thingiverse Challenge: Music!

Since it’s an open-ended challenge, I think we should have this be a two-week challenge to give everyone a chance to brainstorm for a while.  Here are some pages on constructing musical instruments to act as a jumping-off point:

Xylophone Construction

Experimental Instruments

PVC Flute Recipies (He links to this xls flute-helper!)

Making Musical Instruments

Thanks to the Parts Nebula it’s not really necessary that most or indeed any of the parts of your instruments be printable, but greater use of the automatic-accuracy of digital fabrication will make it easier for others to build and play your instruments!

Some free-floating bionics led me down a path that led from the computational framework of DNA to the cultural and social DNA of Thingiverse…

In a cell, nanoscopic repraps spin amino acids into proteins with instructions from the DNA.  Some of these proteins actually act as instructions for the DNA, creating a feedback network that acts as the cell’s computer system.  In this way, a cell selects which things it will make, how much of it, and under what circumstances to do so.

The real joy of Thingiverse is that we get to do all this with direct, explicit intent at every step of the way.  We as users are calling the shots.  The hardware is different but the goals are the same: make useful things, make as many as we need, and make them better.  And instead of having to wait for a generation as one design gradually elbows out another, we can consciously look the designs over, evaluate their faults and virtues, and move to a better design in a single step.

And just as the feedback system in your cells is infinitely more subtle and complex than a mere procedural one-step-at-a-time computer program, the interactions in Thingiverse between designers are giving rise to vastly more and more interesting kinds of creations than might come out of a single design house with a single set of goals, even if that set of goals was “make fun and useful things to print”.

Thingiverse is a lot like life itself, and we users are its DNA.

Think about how many objects you own which are directly related to storing, preparing, or eating food. It’s got to be at least 10%, right? Maybe more? Clearly, food tools are important things to get out into the Thingiverse. But there you run into the old problem of human compatibility — just because you can eat food out of it, doesn’t mean it’s a good idea. So how can we makers be sure that the materials we are using in our things are food safe? Unfortunately, like so many diy-related things, the answer is: It’s complicated.

» Continue reading “For Foodies Out There”

The SingularityU user on Thingiverse has uploaded the 1000th thing to Thingiverse! It’s a spool holder!

Thingiverse started when Zach and I were at NYCResistor and we really needed a place to upload our designs. At the time we had just come up with this idea called “Saturday Spaz” and the goal was to choose something and see if you can make it in one hour on a Saturday. After an hour of infrastructure setup, we knew we were on to something.

Now after we hit this 1000th thing milestone, Thingiverse has come a long way. The tool nebula and the parts nebula have been discovered and put into use and we regularly see folks using Thingiverse as a way to discover wonderful things in the universe!

Via the most recent Thingiverse Challenge, you can now print out a gyoza press from Thingiverse!

Mr Seeker from the Netherlands makes a workable press with some additional parts using the parts lister.  The list of useful things around the house is growing nicely!

For some time now I’ve been using Seth Godin’s blog as a window into the thinking of business types.  Here he talks of “avalanche opportunities,” those moments when effort put into a system can have huge paybacks.  Avalanche opportunites are what happens when something big is almost here.

Avalanche opportunites were everywhere during the 70’s and 80’s.  The release of the Apple II, that was an avalanche.  Once the public started to realize that computers weren’t room-filling machines that cost as much as a house anymore, the whole face of the market changed, dramatically, and really really rapidly.  And soon after that, personal computers were everywhere.  Before that, virtually nowhere, although hobby-like boxes like the Altair 8800 did exist.

The nostalgia tales of the Apple II have a really familiar ring to me.  A machine you had to know from the ground up to really use well, which was really less capable than the huge commercial machines but still capable of amazing feats the suits hadn’t figured out were enough to change the landscape, a hardcore group of dedicated hackers and nerds who got a visceral thrill from making discoveries that made everyone’s machine more useful just from some copied code– this is what the Apple II was like.

It’s also what the latest crop of 3D printers is like.

I’ve seen first hand and heard from others that 3D printing is at a point where it can do amazing things, but most people don’t know they can do amazing things.  As usability creeps up, with upgrades to slicing software and on-printer firmware, 3D printers will start to look more like plug-and-play fabricators.  And if I’m right, the next decade or so could be all about inexpensive personal fabrication, every bit as much as the ninties were all about inexpensive computers.

Now that the parts nebula has been launched, I’ve been able to get some feedback and implement some features I’ve been wanting. We are using this system as a backend for MakerBot inventory, don’t be surprised if its geared a bit towards running a large scale open source hardware company.

Anyway, the first feature is one that we will all appreciate here at the warehouse: part locations. If you add parts to your inventory, you can also specify the location of those parts. I also tweaked the UI a bit and I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. Its a bit tidier, a bit tighter, and hopefully easier to use.

Our current setup is simple. We have about 10 racks of shelves, and each rack has about 10 shelves on it. Each shelf can fix exactly 4 boxes, and each box holds only one item. Some items are stored in more than one box, but they are all clustered together. We have labeled the racks #1-#10 and each shelf is labeled A-J. Each shelf has a unique location, such as RACK 5 / SHELF F. If you wanted to get tricky, you could do RACK 5 / SHELF F / BOX 2. Since there are only 4 boxes max per shelf, we are going to stick to the shelf level. Aside from the work of printing and labeling 400 boxes, it should be pretty simple to add the location for all the parts to Thingiverse. Then the magic begins.

You see, the parts in your inventory are linked with the parts that you can add to a thing. This means that when you generate a part list for a thing, the system can automatically look up the parts in your inventory and add the location of the things for you! No more wandering the shelves like a ghost looking for that one box. Instead you can simply look over the parts list printout and know exactly where the parts are. Not only that, but if you are looking for a certain part, you can simply look it up in your inventory and will tell you exactly where it is.

Last but not least, I added the location field to the CSV export so you have that critical data wherever you want it. I also added the ability to sort by name, quantity, and location. Those should all be helpful when determining what you’re low on, what you have a bunch of, as well as getting a list of what places hold what parts.

Up next: grouped part lists with subassemblies. Should be exciting.