Tag Archives: MakerBot
Top 3D Printing Headlines from Last Week: SketchUp, Medical, Toys, Jobs
A roundup of the top news On 3D Printing brought you from April 30 to May 6.
Monday, April 30
- Why Google Sold SketchUp and What It Means for 3D Printing
- 3D Printing Companies Exhibiting at Maker Faire 2012
Tuesday, May 1
- Top 10 Countdown: Most Popular 3D Printing Stories in April
- Futuristic Medicine: 3D Printed Jaw Implant Rescues 83-Year-Old Woman
Wednesday, May 2
- 3D Printing the Rosetta Stone for Kids Toys: Nerd Dad Triumph
- Inspiring High School Students to be Tomorrow’s Designers: 3D Printing [Video]
Thursday, May 3
- Shapeways Feed is a Pinterest for 3D Printing Designs
- Stable Design: 3D Printing with Autodesk 123D and MakerBot [Video]
Friday, May 4
Stable Design: 3D Printing with Autodesk 123D and MakerBot [Video]
The video below shows an expert tutorial on how to create a flat surface foundation on the bottom of your design in Autodesk 123D before sending it to your MakerBot for 3D printing. This is important so that your model can stand up as it’s being printed and will continue to be stable once it leaves the printer and is used in the real world.
3D Printing the Rosetta Stone for Kids Toys: Nerd Dad Triumph
Carnegie Mellon Professor Golan Levin has built the Rosetta Stone for kids toys. His Free Universal Construction Kit is a design for parts that enable interoperability between Legos, Tinkertoys, Lincoln Logs and several more popular toy brands. The catch? If you want these parts, you have to 3D print them yourself!
In what Forbes calls the “ultimate nerd dad triumph”, Levin and his former student Shawn Sims made sure these parts will fit:
Levin and Sims didn’t just make near replicas of the commercial toys, they used a measurement tool called an optical comparator to copy the toys’ dimensions to within 3 microns. And then they published those models on the Web. “Our lawyers were a bit concerned,” admits Levin, so much so that the pair initially planned to release the project anonymously.
Back in April, we highlighted the potential disruptive impact 3D printing could have on the toy industry.
With the price of toys so marked up, it’s within reason to think that kids will turn to generics or pirated designs to fill out their toy chest after parents tap out the budget at retail.
Look back at the music industry. The only way to buy music in the late 90s was to purchase the full album at retail. Then Napster and other P2P sharing software came along and allowed consumers to download individual mp3 songs, albeit pirated. When iTunes launched with individual song pricing and a more reliable service than the P2P networks, consumers flocked to the legal alternative. The retail music industry died but the digital music industry was born.
Perhaps in the next 5 years we’ll see the retail toy industry collapse and be replaced by a digital successor. The question is whether we will see a digital toy black market in the interim. In our view, that will be up to the toymakers and their willingness to disrupt their current model.
Has Levin truly liberated construction toys from working only with their own kind? Will this type of innovation improve or hurt sales and prices of popular toy brands?
See the full poster of toy compatibility at Slideshare.
The video below shows how the Free Universal Construction Kit works. Notice how the voiceover makes it feel like a proper 1980s advertisement.
Read the full story about Levin’s project at Forbes.
Top 10 Countdown: Most Popular 3D Printing Stories in April
Here are the top 10 most popular stories On 3D Printing brought you in April 2012.
10. We explored innovative and strange 3D printing concepts, from chocolate to stone to candy to organs!
9. Former MakerBot COO is launching a new 3D printer called Solidoodle, with a $500 price tag.
8. The Forbidden City is cloned with 3D printing (photo above).
7. Hollywood’s storytellers turn to 3D printing, including Iron Man.
6. The lucrative toy industry is challenged by 3D printed generics.
5. The Economist publishes a special report on 3D printing, called “The Third Industrial Revolution“.
4. Google sold 3D modeling software SketchUp to Trimble.
3. We analyzed the market size of 3D printing creators and consumers.
2. Stratasys merged with Objet, and we captured the key deal points.
1. Leapfrog launches a new 3D printer line in Europe.
Thanks for reading in April!
3D Printing Companies Exhibiting at Maker Faire 2012
Maker Faire is a two-day, family-friendly festival of invention, creativity and resourcefulness, and a celebration of the Maker movement. Maker Faire Bay Area will be held May 19-20.
With 3D printing hitting an inflection point in awareness, it’s not surprising that there are over 20 companies exhibiting at Maker Faire with a 3D printing leaning. From MakerBot to Fab@School, check out the exhibitors below.
3D Scanning (Structured Light & Laser) Zip-Bit, Inc.
Taking Your Project into the 3rd Dimension with Zip-Bit, Inc. Zip-Bit, Inc. provides 3D Scanning, 3D Modeling, 3D Printing, and 3D Engineering services for all areas of industry/manufacturing, science, education, arts, and more…
3x3x3 LED Cube Arduino Shield Kit Look What Joey’s Making
3x3x3 LED Cube Arduino Shield Kit is a beginner kit. With this kit you will solder pieces together making the shield. You will then hook it to an Arduino (sold separately) and learn to program it making the leds go on and off in whatever pattern you wish.
Creating a Middle School 3d prototyping lab
Riley & Vernon are ardent CAD designers, 3D Printer users and above all Makers. Come see how they managed to set up a lab on a shoestring and make 3D work a part of everyday school life at a public school.
Ecological 3D Printing-Research
A research team from the College of Environmental Design at UC Berkeley, led by Assistant Professor of Architecture Ronald Real, has developed a process for the creation of 3D printed buildings, building components, and interior accessories.
Extreme Marshmallow Cannon uses PVC to hold air pressure, a sprinkler valve to release air & a bike pump. Marshmallows go in the end of the cannon. Pump it using a bike pump to 30psi & fire. The marshmallow will travel about 176 feet.
Math Sculptures & Hyperbolic Jewelry
The models were created through authentic computational design based on algorithms aimed to generate objects according to the mathematical laws. The 3D printing machine composes the piece from steel powder and infiltrates it with molten bronze.
QU-BD 3D Printer & Milling Machine
We are excited to announce world’s first desktop manufacturing machine with the capability to do additive AND subtractive manufacturing will be introduced at Makerfaire! We will see you there!
Applied Science Research and Robotics
Students from AS&E at Menlo School present the robotic arm, a sensing Teddy bear, superconducting MagLev train, Sumo wrestling robots, self-directing car, cloud chamber, hover craft, motorcycle conversion projects, and many more!
Public users group for the promotion, development, and understanding of RepRap and RepStrap 3D printer projects in the Bay Area.
Fab@Home and Fab@School Project
Fab@Home is a platform of printers and programs which can produce functional 3D objects. It is designed to fit on your desktop and within your budget. Fab@Home is innovating tomorrow, today. Join us, and Make Anything.
The Hacker Dojo is a place for makers and hackers to gather and share ideas, collaborate on projects, and build community. We provide facilities and instruction for both software and hardware, open to anyone.
Klein Bottles, topless teapots, siphon-glasses, and a homebrew forklift
How do you make a glass Klein Bottle? How about knitting a woolen Mobius Scarf? Perhaps a self-syphoning wine-glass? Or a robotic mini-forklift? Cliff will give away a glass Klein Bottle; maybe two if there’s enough questions.
Knightqueen is a novelty chess piece that is a hybrid of a queen and a knight. You can write funny words onto the box and give Knightqueen to your friend. Examples: “Garry Kasparov’s worst nightmare” or “Use if you want to beat ME.”
Seikowave’s 3D scanner captures images in under 0.5sec with a resolution of 300 microns. Those images, saved as an .STL file, are ready to be exported to a 3D printer or CAM for fabrication. Seikowave will be offering free scans in its booth.
The MakerBot Replicator is an affordable, open source 3D printer, with 2-color printing and a bigger printing footprint, giving you the superpower to print things BIG!
Mike’s ORDish Bot 3D Printer
The ORD Bot is a RepRap style 3D printer using MakerSlide for linear movement.
Printrbot
Printrbot: Your First 3D Printer
Expandable 3D printer kits
QU-BD 3D Printer & Milling Machine
We are excited to announce world’s first desktop manufacturing machine with the capability to do additive AND subtractive manufacturing will be introduced at Makerfaire! We will see you there!
SparkLab: an educational build-mobile!
SparkLab is a big red truck filled with cutting-edge maker tools that goes from school to school, bringing the joy of making back to kids.
TechZoneCommunications
We stumbled upon the Open Source Rep Rap Project a few years ago.. We became very interested in building our own and could not source all the parts. So we began assembling and selling electronics and eventually moved into selling complete kits.
Tjiko Snap! 3D Printer
The Tjiko 3D printer uses no screws or nuts, just lasercut mortise & tenon joints to go together. This means that the only tools you need to get started building are your hands, and a brain or two.
A San Francisco startup, building 3D printers! All about open source hardware and cool design.
Maker Faire photo by twelves via Creative Commons.
