Makerbot

At the start of the year, I got involved in a pretty interesting group purchase: a MakerBot. Makerbot essentially is an affordable 3D printer. It's clearly not a fancy and expensive ZCorp, but it is a solution for 3D prototyping.

The group is formed of very talented people from design, development, animation and architecture backgrounds and this was the initiative of Fiddian Warman. I wasn't sure why Soda sounded so familiar, then I remembered we learned about SodaPlay in the Digital Media course I was doing back in Canterbury a few years go, so it's pretty damn cool to work with great people you study about :)

I feel a lot of interesting projects will emerge from this group known as 3DQuorum.

Here are a few materials documenting our progress with building the Makerbot:

Image 'kindly borrowed' from Kirsten Campbell



Here's a short video of the Makerbot running:

Makerbot thing-0-matic first moves from fiddian on Vimeo.

To be honest, I didn't expect it to run from the first go, but tests went surprisingly well so far.

Looking forward to get some of my weird geometries print ready and out in the real world.
Luckily there are a couple of useful Processing libraries out there, like codethread by diatom studio and Marius Watz's(Makerbot artist in residence) ModelBuilder.

Speaking of diatom studio, they have a very cool project called SketchChair which allows everybody to easily sketch, test/simulate and physically create a chair. Pretty impressive!





If you find this project interesting, you can get involved and help out on kickstarter.