Monthly Archives: August 2015

Improved search, 3DHubs for all files and bug quashing

We’ve integrated 3D Hubs into YouMagine. If you don’t have a 3D printer you can now print any file on YouMagine. We’re interested to see how many people will use this feature and are interested in the designs on the site but don’t own a printer.

The 3D Hubs button can be found to the right of all design images.

We’ve switched our search to Apache Solr, redesigned the search results page and improved the search results themselves. The results can now be sorted by relevancy, recency and popularity. We’ve added more synonyms as well. Search has been one of our biggest issues and we hope to have made significant steps forward with this.

Search results page

There was a bug saving the email notification preferences, this has been quashed with extreme vengeance. Another bug appeared whereby a community member got multiple notifications for the same event, this has also been solved. We hope you’re happy with the improvements and please do email joris (at) youmagine with ideas, feedback and bugs.

3D Printed Musical Instruments on YouMagine

People make a wide range of things with 3D printing and share them on YouMagine. A category that is perhaps a bit unexpected is 3D printed musical instruments. Below are some fun things to be found on the site that you can print.

This 3D printed mouth harp is a modern take on a very ancient musical instrument. Also called a Gogona, Dan Moi or a Kouxian.

Jeff Hertzberg who is a violinist made this violin mute that can also be used for other stringed instruments. His mute design comes complete with an OpenSCAD file so you can adapt it easily for other instruments.

Stringed instrument mute.

Cymon has made a number of playable recorders, including a tree recorder.

Michael Bourque made a 3D Printed Güiro, which is a Mexican percussion instrument.

Ed made a base drum pedal stopper showing us that you can repair musical instruments as well using 3D printing. He also made holders for drumsticks.

I really love Caitlin‘s Trumpet adaptive device that lets kids with a missing hand play the trumpet.

Prosthetic hand to let one play the trumpet.

David Perry at OpenFabPDX made the F F F Fiddle an electric playable fiddle.

Shapespear made a really nice looking playable electric guitar.

3Dhubs integration with YouMagine

3D Hubs

As of today we’ve added a “Print on 3DHubs” button to the site. This will let people who don’t have a 3D printer order the wonderful objects we have at YouMagine. They can use 3DHubs to print out lamps, vases, boxes, covers, toys and other lovely things. We hope that this lets people who do not have a 3D printer touch and use their first 3D printed objects. We are curious to see how many people will use this opportunity to get a 3D print in their hands.

If this feature is used often then we may look at adding margin to the 3DHubs order so that the designer can make money on the 3D prints of the objects. At this time, neither we nor the designer makes money off of the 3D print. We believe in keeping the files on YouMagine free to promote remixing and sharing. But, we think that people will not mind paying the designer a fee per print. People are used to paying for physical objects whereas to many the digital is most often free. We will be watching the 3DHubs button closely to see what is being printed and what people are interested in. We’ve known the 3Dhubs people for a years now and its wonderful to see them grow and do so well. Due to this we’re very happy to work with them!