2-Dominic-Muren-Part-1 – Dorkbot Seattle Feb 3, 2010 from christopher prosser on Vimeo.

3-Dominic-Part-2 Dorkbot Seattle Feb 3, 2010 from christopher prosser on Vimeo.

Dominic Muren is an occassional contributor to the Thingiverse blog and he gave a great presentation on personal manufacturing at the Seattle Dorkbot! This is very much worth the watch! Check it!

I.materialise has launched. If you’ve seen 3D printed artistic objects in art galleries, these folks very likely printed them. Arriving on the scene, they appear to be a direct competitor with Shapeways. Materialise does really high end work and they’ve just opened up a business that lets you upload your own designs. Also, they’ve joined thingiverse and have promised to upload and share some of their of their own designs! I love that Thingiverse is the place to share designs, but if you want to get them made and don’t have a printer yet, i.materialise offers another option for turning your designs into beautiful objects. Cool!

Recently, there have been some discussion of “derivative works” questions on the Thingiverse Google group. Specifically, makers have been wondering if they might get into trouble for uploading designs that were based on real-world objects or logos. This is an interesting question, and just as when Xerox copying machines first made “copying” something that could be done quickly and cheaply, the answer is complicated, and will probably get more so, as companies move to strengthen the laws that exist, or introduce new forms of protection. So, brave makers, the best we can do is know how things stand.
» Continue reading “Toe Stepping: Thingiverse and IP law”

Thingiverse is full of objects that users can download, print, and even remix and manipulate into new things.  But what about things that are already designed, but which are pre-designed for particular sets of manipulations?  Something like a measruing spoon is handy, but what if you could ask a program for a particular measuring spoon and have it engrave the exact volume on the model as well?  What if you could request a compact xylophone with exactly the notes you want?  This is the world of parametric objects, and tomorrow and Wednesday we’re going to look at two approaches to this field that have their own advantages, complete with links to great starting points for each!

Tomorrow, we’ll look at direct object scripting, which lets you apply your inner math geek directly to solid modeling and getting 3D prints.  On Wednesday we’ll look at solid constructive geometry and how advances in the state of open-source CSG are making it possible to add control variables to the benefits of CSG for high-custom but pre-designed solutions!

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.

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.

This Week’s challenge is torn from the pages of Evil Mad Scientist Labs: with their recent keen post on making ice cream Gyoza, they´ve got me thinking that a great task for 3D printing would be a Gyoza press!

It doesn’t have to be the exact shape of press as shown here, just a gadget for folding and pressing pastry pockets– in fact I’m kind of hoping there will be at least one entry with a really neat design twist on this one!  As with last week’s challenge, I’ll announce the winner next week!

The winner of this ReMake Challenge is the last entry, a sleek one-part print that hugs the iPhone like a glove.  Its maker, Aylr, is promising a maker-splosion when his Cupcake CNC arrives.  We’re looking forward to it!

I was really excited that I got multiple responses in Thingiverse from the first ReMake challenge!  All three are excellent for their own reasons.  One was done hardly any time at all after the posting, which proves Thingiverse users are quick.  One was a gloriously intricate clamp-mount that could take any smart phone at all or indeed anything one might want to put on a tripod of a certain size category, which proves Thingiverse users are clever.

The winner is a single-print module that required only a hex nut to complete its design, which proves that Thingiverse users totally totally get what personal fabrication means.  It means that you can have the perfect part for the job.  It means you can have something designed for your circumstances rather than what everyone else is having.  This tripod mount wins in part because of its elegance, and in part because of how obviously molded to the application it is.

Mad props to all three of our excellent entries!

In the previous GCode tutorial, we covered the creation of GCodes using Python, and introduced the basic structure of a script that uses GCode objects as a tool for creating GCode files.  In this tutorial, we’ll move from Para01.py to Para02.py in the first GCode Script Pack. In this file, we’ll start using the math library to create circles from straight GCodes.

First, a bit of bookkeeping.  Using trigonometric functions means getting back floating-point values with lots of decimal places of precision, but in a GCode file it’s usually a bad idea to have more than a few decimal places of precision, since it bloats serial operations and finer than 10um precision isn’t attainable on most current hardware anyway.  So we need a rounding function to truncate these floating-point numbers. My friend Ryan Vilbrandt was kind enough to lend me his:

This is called from the GCode string output function later to make sure that the GCodes sent to the file are tidy.

In the next step, we’ll use the parametric formula of a circle:
X = cos (T)
Y = sin (T)

Inside the Zsteps loop from the previous example, we put a loop for Tsteps equal to two pi radians (360 degrees) minus a little bit.  Here we do 62 steps of 0.1 radian each:

Smaller steps will make for shorter GCodes and a more perfectly circular curve, and larger ones will even produce visibly flat sides to the cylinder.  This script can be used to make shapes like octagons and pentagons by reducing the number of steps to the number of desired sides.  Additionally, by entering an integer multiplier into one or both of the trigonometric function arguments, this script can generate lisajous patterns.

There are a lot of shapes that can be build based off even this simple example– scripting GCodes directly isn’t going to work for every application, but it’s a great way to build certain classes of objects, and doesn’t require learning how to use a 3D modeling tool.

There’s a really great article in this month’s Wired on the “Lo-fi revolution” sweeping the tech world one industry at a time lately, and my thoughts immediately turned to the MakerBot and the RepRap, which deliver a lower resolution than commercial 3D printers, but at such a tiny fraction of the cost that they utterly change the game.

This is, according to the Wired article, just what the mp3, Hulu, and the Flip video recorder have done: provide a known benefit at a lower resolution or fidelity or precision, but using the other side of that trade-off to arrive at something unprescedented: in the case of the MakerBot and Flip video recorder, it’s a price so low the market potential hadn’t even been considered previously.  In the case of mp3, it’s a file size so much lower than uncompressed audio that amounts of music can be stored that’d be unheard of without compression.

In the above photo, there’s an example of this: parts for 3D printers, whether for replacement, upgrade, or decoration (what is referred to in more colloquial circles as “bling”) can be printed ON a low-cost, low-fidelity 3D printer at a cost which is transformitively low.  The lower fidelity of thermoplastic extrusion on 500um print heads with no support material or build chamber temperature control compared with the big dogs is exchanged for a super-low cost and an open-source architecture which makes repairs cheap.  The result has, so far, been a newborn but rapidly-growing Cheap 3D Print sector, as well as a whole lot of traffic and design passing through Thingiverse.

I think the next big thing to happen in the personal automated fabrication market could learn something from this: the secret to success might be in finding a tradeoff that can be exploited rather than in better precision or higher detail or a merely larger build area.  Perhaps a powder-based system could sacrifice the durability of thermoplastic parts for the high resolution offered by using pre-existing ink cartridges to bind a cheap powder substrate.  Maybe this MakerBot as Case Mod project will turn into a computer that also prints 3D parts, transformative because if you think of the MakerBot as a PC case, the printer itself doesn’t have much of a footprint at all.

The enabling aspect of technology is a force to be reconed with, and it often trumps traditional values like precision and feature richness, especially when a new approach to a problem like fabrication earns as much for a tradeoff as the low-cost 3D printing sector has.