If you’ve been following this blog, or have kept an eye on the DIY 3D printing world, you’ll remember the DMCA drama from last week. I’m happy to say that there is a new and interesting development: Ulrich Schwanitz has decided to drop his DMCA claims and place his design in the public domain! I am not privvy to the reasoning behind it, but perhaps he was inspired by the thousands of other open designs here on Thingiverse?

I would like to publicly re-iterate my words of encouragement to Dr. Schwanitz to post his designs to Thingiverse. I’d like to show him what an awesome community we are, and that making money is still possible while giving away your design. So if you see a thing or two by him, please be nice!

We have re-enabled both of the designs in question, so feel free to print them to your hearts desire. With this recent development, the whole “Copyright Challenge of a 3D Printable Model” chapter of 3D printing comes to a close. As my mother used to say: All’s well that ends well.

There’s been quite a bit of buzz lately about 3D Tin, a browser based, voxel modeling program. Its super simple interface combined with STL export have made it into an intriguing tool for beginners and professionals alike. We’re particularly happy with it because the STLs it generates are ready for 3D printing and of course the program itself is completely free. If you haven’t tried it already, its worth 15 minutes of your time.

We sent the creator, Jayesh Salvi a gushing email about how much we loved it, and he wrote back asking if we would be interested in integration. It was like a match made in heaven. This weekend, we hacked a simple upload API into Thingiverse. The first site to support this is 3D Tin (it’s live, so go ahead and try it!)

If you are a website owner and you would like to add you own Thingiverse implementation, its super easy. Check out the API docs and start posting to Thingiverse today! This API is just about as barebones as you can get, but it does allow you to get your stuff onto Thingiverse in a simple, painless way.

Over the weekend, someone created a Wikipedia entry for Thingiverse. We were flattered, except of course the Wikipedia team immediately flagged us as ‘speedy deletetion’. Sadface! If my wiki-memory is correct, we’re not supposed to edit our own entry. If there are any Thingiverse users out there who feel like we should have a wikipedia entry, please feel free to head over to the page and make a case for the site to page to stay up.

Thingiverse user pattywac is running a contest for uploaded objects on Thingiverse that use bearings. Here are the details:

See also: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4163

Description

New design contest. All submissions need to use bearings in some way
to enable the printable side of the submission to do something cool/
neat/funny/novel.

So the last contest that required magnets didn’t receive much
attention and was poorly timed (ended on a holiday weekend). I’m
supplying more time and money for this one so hopefully there will be
a bigger turn out. I would like to do more of these contests but will
probably lose interest if there are too few entries.

Instructions

Here are the rules:
1. Needs to be printable on a makerbot
2. Needs to use bearings in some way (They can be any size/style
bearings. Skate bearings as sold in the Makerbot store are easy to
come by since they can be bought at any sports supply store…. the
dimensions are 8mm ID, 22mm OD, and 7mm thickness)
3. Post submissions on thingiverse by 5pm cst Sunday, Oct 3
4. Post a comment to this thing with a link to your submission
5. Seriously anything that uses bearings in some way…..

The prize is $50 in the makerbot store. I will pick the winner but
will rely heavily on user feedback. Multiple submissions are allowed.

Extra points for submissions that use licenses which allow derivatives
or have no restrictions on use and for submissions that supply generic
prt or obj files along with the standard STL file.

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.

We are planning on moving Thingiverse to a newer, faster server starting at 10AM Eastern time on Monday, Feb 8th. The transition should be painless, but it will probably take an hour or so for us to move everything over. Please bear with us while we do this upgrade. Once everything is done, the site should run much faster.

Wow! It’s been way too long since I had a chance to do a Thingiverse Thursday. This one isn’t super impressive, but I got some things in that I’ve had on my list for a while:

* Thingiverse login / comment integration. We upgraded to JS-Kit Pro which means we can take advantage of their custom site login integration. That means that if you’re logged into thingiverse, then any comments show up as being from you. Awesome! Of course if you’re not logged in, you can post anonymously or use openid.

* New login screen. A while back, I saw this cool login idea called Chroma Hash. The idea is to give you visual feedback on your password as you type so you can make sure you entered it correctly. It hashes your password into three colored bars based on the text. No more wondering if you typed your password in correctly or not!

* Parts system update. Added a couple fields to the inventory system to let you keep track of the cost and the value of your stuff in inventory. Eventually you’ll be able to get a report of how much its worth and stuff. This is a feature for MakerBot so we can keep track of how much crap we have. Yay!

The advent of mobile computing has brought us many things: the sum of human knowledge at your fingertips wherever you are, instant map capabilities, and the ability to wax poetic on the go 140 characters at a time. Well, now you can carry a universe of things in your pocket. Provided your pocket has an iPhone, of course.

The iPhone site is the product of about 4 days of feverish hacking and refactoring of the existing Thingiverse code. It’s pretty much read only, but if you need to do any heavy lifting you can easily switch back to the standard HTML view. The idea is to create a site that is interesting and helpful if you want to kill some time and see whats going on in the ‘verse.

Of course, there is an ulterior motive: I wanted to be able to access the inventory system on my iphone. I’ll admit that I’m a selfish bastard, but also a thorough one. When I launched the parts and inventory systems I was really happy. Especially when I realized that I could skip the whole barcode reader step and just put QR codes with the part url on all of our parts. (Notice we auto-generate QR codes for all parts and things on thingiverse…)

Well, unfortunately I soon realized that the computer-monitor optimized Thingiverse did not make managing the inventory via iPhone very easy. So, instead of simply converting that single page into one that works well with the iPhone, I converted the whole site! Now that its done… its really awesome! All of our boxes at MakerBot are covered in QR code stickers. I just scan one of those stickers with QuickMark and it takes me to the Thingiverse page for that part. From there I can add or subtract from our inventory nice and easy. No more lugging a heavy box to the barcode scanner station just so I can add or subtract one bolt. I can just grab a bolt, scan the code and go!

Ah the joy of 4 days work to save 5 minutes work.

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.

At the early hour of 9:30AM, I was awoken by a call from from my friend at NASA. Apparently, in a nondescript patch of what was once thought to be emptiness, new features of the Thingiverse have been discovered! New information is still pouring in about the exact nature of the discovery, but apparently it has to deal with the building blocks of Things themselves. They have discovered a completely new Parts nebula that is literally swarming with parts and suppliers.

You see, the Things we deal with are typically made up of many individual Parts. For example, even a simple hairpin needs 3 parts: 2 printed ones, and a spring. As you create more and more complicated Things, the number of parts goes up dramatically. Something relatively simple like a PCB holder vise has numerous parts that must be printed or purchased in order to build it. On the extreme end of things, a complicated machine like the CupCake CNC has hundreds of parts which are all critical to its operation. The issue of how to properly catalog and specify these parts has caused engineers and hobbyists alike much frustration.

Now, with the discovery of the Parts Nebula, those days may soon be behind us. With this new data, Thingiverse citizens may now create structured part lists that can be shared and even embedded in their own websites. These part lists are designed to be as helpful as possible. They print out very easily for a trip to the hardware store. For those who prefer to shop online, suppliers can be added to parts to streamline the online part hunt. Parts themselves can be reused between Things, which saves time and effort. Last, but not least, there is an inventory system which allows you to keep track of what parts you have.

So, lets explore the new findings a bit deeper. Luckily the new ‘screenshot’ system that was installed in the Hubble has resulted in wonderfully crisp images of the new features.

Here we see a completed part list on an Opto Endstop, an electronic component used in MakerBots and RepRap machines:

Here, we see the exact same part list, but embedded in the MakerBot wiki:

The embed is a very useful thing. It contains Part IDs, names, and quantities, and many useful links. We’ve embedded it into this blog post for you to play with:

Let’s take some time to explore a few of those links. Each part name links back to its own individual page where you can find information on the part such as your inventory, suppliers, photos, and even other things that use that part:

The embed itself contains the code needed to embed it on a different site, so maybe the partlist you design will become viral and spread its wings across the net.

The nice thing about the embed being an iframe, is that only the iframe will be printed when you click the print button. Put the part list in your pocket and head to your hardware store / hackermart and pick up those last few parts for your Robotron.

Last, but not least there is the shopping cart feature. This is a nifty little bit of software we’ve been that allows you to locate suppliers where you can purchase the parts you need. Notice in the screenshot that it integrates with the inventory system:

Oh, did I mention the inventory system? Yeah… you can add any of the parts on Thingiverse to your own personal inventory system. Complete with inventory export, logging of inventory transactions and barcode scanning support. We built it because we needed it, and we’re sharing it because we love you.

Of course, you’ll actually have to use this system at some point in time, so here’s a look at the interface for adding parts to your thing: