Archive for August, 2010

Marty’s Thingiverse WordPress Plugin is AWESOME!

Marty has created an awesome Thingiverse Plugin!

For awhile now, I’ve wanted to embed an RSS feed of the latest stuff I’ve printed from Thingiverse on MakerBot 131′s page. To kick things off, I asked Zach to implement an RSS feed of the Thing’s I’ve Made page on Thingiverse. It’s been awhile, but I’ve finally gotten around to creating a WordPress plugin that I’m calling Thingiverse Embed.

Better Living with MakerBot, Episode 2 You probably all know this situation: You're supposed to ref a soccer game in less than 1/2 an hour and you cannot find your whistle. You're screwed! But from now on you're out of trouble: Fire up your trusty MakerBot and print a new whistle in 26 minutes! This object prints the pea right inside the whistle. Since the pea is connected to the rest of the object only at one tiny point, it's quite easy to break it loose after printing with a small screw driver or tweezers. I probably pushing luck a little bit with bridging the top layer. So far I printed the whistle twice without problems. As always, I added the object as .obj file (wavefront), which can be imported into AOI and Blender. The gcode file is the one I used to print the whistle on the image. The gcode file contains an experimental raft with additional "blobs" on the second (interface) layer. You might want to generate your own gcode file with skeinforge settings, tested with your MakerBot. Be sure to setup Skeinforge to create an (almost) watertight object, since the whistle won't whistle if it's full of holes... [Update] I added a second version of the whistle. "Whistle_v2" is an attempt to fine tune the object a little bit. My brother (he's a pipe organ builder) gave me some tips how to optimize the whistles mouth. Whistle v2 should start whistle with less airflow than v1 and thus be (somewhat) less loud. I also downsized the pea a little bit and changed the shape of the lanyard loop. Whistle v1 is still available for reference and also since it's more "tested"...Since you blow the whistle with your mouth, be aware of possible problems concerning "food safety" of printed plastic. See the blog post "For foodies out there" ( blog.thingiverse.com/2009/09/13/for-foodies-out-there/ ) for more information.
This thing brought to you by Thingiverse.com

Check it out! you can embed snippets from Thingiverse and make a cool sidebar widget! You can see this example on the page for MakerBot 131.

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MultiMaterial Beginnings

Yeah, those are tweezers with silicone grips printed on a RepRap in one go.

It will probably be quite a while before we really start to see routine multimaterial posts to Thingiverse for a number of reasons: multiple materials are much more difficult to manage, new tech has to spread and get set up, and that’s not even counting slicing and design software, but this is the future, man.

OpenSCAD and other boolean-friendly tools will make designing for multimaterial fairly easy: just cleave off the parts you want in material A, flip the cleave operation and write out again.  Easy.  In the long term I think this will actually drive some genuinely NEW kinds of CAD, because since when have designers designed with the intent that the rubber grips would be built in place with the rest of the object?

Very exciting stuff.

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MakerBot is Hiring: Web Warrior Wanted

warrior

The botswarm is expanding. We’re looking to hire on a new person for our team, and this time we’re looking for someone to help us on the virtual side of things. Besides making Thingiverse an awesome place for the 3D printing community, there is a lot of backend software needed to run a hardware company. We’re looking for a talented and brave soul to help us continue rocking the free by democratizing manufacturing.

Is this you? Is this someone you know? If so, check out our job posting for the job requirements.

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