It’s pretty hard to argue that that isn’t totally awesome.

Download, print, assemble. Get a little heat shrink tubing for an interface and you could build a nice fountain. I don’t know what the maximum pressure differential is in air, but something similar to this might even drive a paste extruder one day soon. Little widgets. Little proofs of concept. They’re adding up. Every now and then someone puts two or three of them together and proves something else is possible. With the user base growing the way it is lately (and with more players diving into the consumer 3D printing market segment to grasp at this newly invented market share) this hobbyist market is starting to grow up a little. Once again, exciting times.

As I’ve said, Blender is often a lot better suited to more organic forms, but I think it’s even more fair to say, the problem’s with holes. Punching a hole in a mesh requires by nature altering its topology, and Blender works best when you’re only mildly altering the topology of the mesh at any given step. For example, in this timelapse I generated using the awesome Cinematic Timelapse Technique, I never punch any holes in the mesh: it’s always topologically equivalent to a sphere.

I think this model might not be the easiest print in the world, but at a modest size I think the droop on the overhanging bits wouldn’t be so great. Much love for this timelapse technique: you get some insight into how more complex modeling with Blender works, and it’s much more visually appealing than a traditional timelapse, which can honestly be kind of disorienting…

Printed on low-cost 3D printing, uploaded to Thingiverse.

Amazing, wonderful times we live in.

We have this awesome Rubber-Band Pencil Bow. This is totally awesome and obviously too dangerous to let anyone but responsible children and VERY responsible adults use, because anyone else is gonna shoot someone’s eye out.

I totally want to print one, but if I had kids I’d make VERY sure they didn’t bring it to school…

This poll generated a lot of “other” responses, which is just fine by me, especially in the tools department!

Interesting results: Rhino3D was a big choice that didn’t occur to me at the time, but makes perfect sense after the fact. There were a lot of other CAD choices, popular among them pro/Engineer which I’d never heard of until now. Also got introduced to FreeCAD, which looks pretty shiny!

I was heartened to see a few animators are reading, hopefully we’ll get more CG characters on Thingiverse soon!

By sheer luck of the draw, one of my EE students happens to be building a MakerBot here at the University of Washington campus! Their teacher is one of the winners from the MakerBot educational contest, part of the Human Centered Design and Engineering department. I flagged him and his team down for an interview this week!

Thingiverse: What is the Human Centered Design Program?

The Human Centered Design Engineering program is in the University of Washington’s school of engineering that teaches students how to study and relate human needs to engineering problems.

T: How did you find out about the Human Centered Design program, and what got you interested in it?

Nathan: I found out about the HCDE department through some of the HCDE classes I took as pre-requisites for the school of engineering and after taking them I realized that I was very interested in HCDE so that’s where I ended up

Steven: I actually did the same thing. Took the classes and really liked them so now I’m in HCDE.

Alex: I too found out about HCDE through a technical writing class that I was taking and I also really liked the class.

T: What was your introduction to 3D printing?

Nathan: Through my cad coursework through my high school and through the Mechanical engineering Engineering fair. I actually knew about the MakerBot in high school and actually thought about buying one.

Steven: This project was my introduction.

Alex: I had heard about 3d printing before through the use of dust like material but never like the MakerBot, but this stuff is really cool. All three of us are very excited for the end result.

T: Describe some of your projects. Will 3D printing be a factor in what you plan?

The main reason we are building the MakerBot is to learn and record how people learn new technologies. Our goal is to build the MakerBot and that is really it. The actual MakerBot doesn’t relate to our coursework.

T: How does human centered design relate to ubiquitous computing and ubiquitous manufacture? Do you have any particular predictions or ambitions for the future of Human Centered Design?

HCDE’s goal is to simplify ubicomp so that it is as simple and integrated into everyone’s life as it can be. We want to make the interaction between humans and technology as simple as possible. We believe HCDE will have a much greater demand in the future, especially as technology begins to creep into more and more facets of human life. The ability to know how to best design technology for our population today is something that will be greatly needed.

T: How do you feel about the design sharing that’s taking place on sites like Thingiverse? Any ideas on how this will affect your design education?

We are all big fans of the open source design that is part of thingiverse and the MakerBot community. This not only allows people to share ideas and build off those ideas but you can also learn from other people’s examples. In general it supports meritocracy which we are all fans of. This type of community is only beneficial to our design learning. We not only have the opportunity to learn from our professors and our peers but now we have this entire online community to learn from and we don’t have to pay tuition.

T: If you could design and build with complete freedom, in any material and at any scale, what would you make?

Nathan: I probably would want to go with a scale of 3feet by 3 feet by 3 feet. Im not sure what I would make but I would want to be able to extrude with metal and plastic. I would make tools I think, that way I would never have to go to a store for tools again.

Steven: I would want a scale of 3’v3’v3’ so you could make different parts, like for a bike or maybe a desk. I would definitely use metal or plastic. Maybe even carbon fiber?

Alex: For scale I would most likely want to go with 3’v3’v3’ or larger, dependent upon what I wanted to make. I think if I had the resources I would go with 6 feet by 6 feet by 6 feet and then I would definitely want an extruder that could put out multiple types of materials, like metal, plastic, and other materials. I would try to make anything and everything, a bike, maybe car parts. Anything and everything.

One interesting note that doesn’t show up in the final results: a lot of users only selected artist.  There were a very large number of Engineer-Artists, but I expected that, since this is a “new art field” where you get a lot of omnidirectional creative types.  But pure artists had a strong showing as well.  It’s exciting to think of all the collaboration between the arts and engineering that’s going on here at Thingiverse!