Author Archives: Joris Peels

About Joris Peels

Joris is the YouMagine community manager. He's obsessed with 3D printing and wants to do what he can to let anyone make anything. Joris writes for Inside3DP, Wohlers Report & TCTMagazine. He also does strategy consulting for 3D printing companies.

Improvements to YouMagine

We’ve been working on improving YouMagine for you. The most obvious improvement is the changes made to the design details page. We made the page easier on the eye and easier to scan through if you’re looking at a design quickly.

You can now also embed YouMagine designs on forums and blogs easily.

We also briefly summarize the licenses for you, please be advised that you should take the time (at least once!) to read through the different licenses to find out which one suits you and what rights you are restricting.

We repositioned the content on the page and changed the order of importance of things on the page. The page should be faster to load and quicker to use for you.

Commenting on models just got easier and you can decide to follow or unfollow activity streams.

We’ve updated our email addresses for them to be more personal for you. Although we continue to send any email to the old emails to us we now will use support (at) youmagine, hello (at) youmagine for support questions and supercomputer (at) youmagine for automated emails. You can always just email joris@youmagine for any and all questions! Also the support emails now get sent to the whole YouMagine team, so even though I will answer your questions all of us will read what you have to say in order to understand what our community’s needs and suggestions are.

Our error messages have become friendlier with a kinder tone. Our 404 page now explains that a community member did nothing wrong and gives them links to the gallery and main page as well as a way for people to report dead links should they wish.

If one of your designs is added to a collection then the notification email will also inform you to which collection this design has been added and which design has been added. This has been requested by a lot of people!

We’ve made the Bill of Materials easier to use and added an explanation of what the bill of materials should look like.

Our automated thank you emails have been changed yet again. We’ve updated the text, subject line and timing as per your suggestions.

We’ve solved some caching issues and solved the sizing of photographs on different devices. We’ve changed the related designs to “other designs” in the same category. This means that for now the other designs should be quite random and lead to serendipity. In future we will make them more logical for you.

We’ve added a list of many 3D printers and also let people link through to a detail page about the printer.

A contributed image by another user can also now be the primary image of your design.

OpenSCAD files are now downloaded instead of displayed as plain text. We’re wondering what you think of this feature since some prefer to copy paste the text into OpenSCAD while others prefer to download the file.

We’ve done research into how to best improve the search and will be doing this in the next sprint, these coming two weeks. Please let us know how to further improve YouMagine! Email joris (at) youmagine.com with any feedback, bugs or ideas.

e-NABLE Steampunk Prosthetic Hand By Jacky Wan on YouMagine

Close up of the steampunk hand

We love working with e-NABLE to help them create functional prosthetic hands using 3D printing. We really encourage anyone who has a printer or CAD skill to help them out. One of the most beautiful and completely totally over the top amazing things to come out of e-NABLE is Jacky Wan’s Steampunk hand.

Steampunk 3D printed prosthetic hand.

Its an amazingly well designed and post processed hand and really shows what you can do with a desktop 3D printer and a lot of finely detailed work in painting and finishing it. You can download, add to, remix or print out this wonderful hand here. This is the same YouMagine community member who made the Ducati bike and light saber.

Close up of the detailing on the 3D print.

WikiMode and Jam released on YouMagine

The Jam Logo

Jam

We’re continuing to improve YouMagine for you and have quashed a lot of bugs in the past two weeks. We’ve also released the alpha version of Jam. We’ve been talking about Distributed Innovation at YouMagine for a while, the idea that people will increasingly use digital manufacturing tools and software to collaborate worldwide on open source projects and businesses. This is a trend that has been occurring gradually over decades but with 3D printing hardware becomes malleable changeable and can be iteratively improved. Agile engineering and product development will increasingly occur and barriers to entry to many industries will be significantly lowered. It is for such a world that we are building YouMagine.

Jam is a key tool for us that will help make 3D design and collaboration more social and interactive. At the moment Jam is the 3D viewer that you can see on YouMagine in the carousel on your model page. Check out any model in the gallery to see that. You can zoom in and out and look at files using it. Gradually however we will add new features to it. Jam is a key piece of infrastructure that the 3D printing world is missing, a tool to with a group of people work collaboratively on 3D printing files. We called it Jam because we’d like it to be a tool that could let you have a Jam session but then for 3D printing, also because Jam is a disparate but delicious mix of things and because we’re in Geldermalsen in the Netherlands where people make a lot of jam (and 3D printers!) Do take it for a spin and give us feedback!

WikiMode

WikiMode

WikiMode is another social design feature. You can in the Edit tab of any uploaded model enable WikiMode. This lets anyone else who is logged in to the site add documents, descriptions, categories, tags, designs and images to your design. WikiMode is a way for groups of people to design things together. The original file can not be deleted by other users.

Bugs & Improvements

We’ve moved our servers to Cloud66 and Digital Ocean, this has increased the response time of the site and lets us serve up your delicious triangles at higher speeds.

We’ve also made a new Postmark account to serve up welcome and other automated emails to you. Some people have responded very positively to our emails, others have been skeptical. We’ll continue to tinker with the emails but do tell us if you hate or love them. You now get an automated email if someone starts to follow you or if you are added to a collection. One of our automated emails was actually generating links to 404’s and this has been fixed as well.

We’ve added images of 3D printers that you can add and now can only pick from a list of printers in your profile to show people which machine(s) you have. For the moment we’ve only added very few printers including the current Printrbot machines, the Ultimakers and the Prusa i2 & i3 (Update: We’ve added an expanded list of printers, for now email joris (at) youmagine.com if you’re printer is not on it. Have no fear we will add many more in the weeks to come its just that there are rather a lot of 3D printers out there and we want to see how we can do this in a manageable way.

Manage your printers in your profile.

There was a bug whereby the message counter for some people indicated that they had a new message but this was not the case. This has been fixed. We also made the drop down in the categories field have one blank option rather than be set default to one of the categories to let people tag and archive things better. We got rid of the “Droste effect” bug whereby you could enter an existential minefield through YouMagine by following yourself.

You can now copy our RSS feed and the social media links at the bottom of the home page have been improved as well. We’ve slightly updated the design of the home page with tweaks and improvements. We made some improvements to our API and the documentation of our API.

We hope you like the changes and keep the feedback coming.

Updates and improvements to YouMagine

Today we migrated to new servers in order to improve our response time for you.

You can now also add videos to your designs to show how your uploaded project works and what it does. We hope that this will especially help those who are making more complex items. We also hope that people will upload build videos to show how things are to be assembled if they require assembly.

We changed the design of our Terms of Service to make them more readable.

Our Notice and Takedown procedure has also become prettier and more readable.

We updated a number of security procedures and security updates to make the site safer to use.

We updated to a new version of Rails.

There was a bug whereby the thumbnails were not displayed next to the search results, this was fixed. We improved the search to show more recent designs.

If a community member ends up on the 404 page then we now display a search window so they can directly search for what they are looking for.

People can now make longer abstracts of their designs and edit them.

We’re working hard to improve the site further, email joris at youmagine.com should you have any feedback, ideas or improvements.

City of the Future designed by Dutch School kids

A model of the city of the future

The Parkschool in Utrecht did a project with all of their classes whereby they got the kids to design the city of the future. The kids then used 3D printers and laser cutters to make a model of this city. Class 7 & 8 designed the model for the city, grade 6 used the lasercutters while grade 5 designed an amusement park. Kids as young as 5 & 6 were involved in making designs for this city of the future. We think that this is a great initiative to teach kids digital fabrication methods as well as get them involved in thinking holistically about the future at a young age. The City of the Future project has been selected by the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs for inclusion in their City of the Future project which is wonderful news!

YouMagine Survey Results Part 3

How many things do you 3D print per month?

We’ve conducted a survey among 500 of our Community Members in order to find out how YouMagine is doing and what tools we have to build in order to help 3D printing. Since we like to share and we want to build tools for the future of Distributed Innovation we made some fun graphics for you. We thought that this was a good idea since this is the largest survey that maps the 3D printing community. The first post about the survey results are here the second is here and you are currently reading the final one.

On average our community members 3D print 21 things per month. This is an indication that the 3D printer is becoming a part of people’s lives. Reliability of the printer is especially important if people want to make things often.

How often do you use your 3D printer?

34% of our community use their 3D printer every single day. For them the 3D printer is an appliance that they continually use. 11% use there 3D printer rarely. For them their 3D printer is not currently a significant part of their lives. 50% of the community uses their printer at least 4 times a week. These usage numbers are encouraging and mean that fore this group the 3D printer is not a toy but rather a tool that they use continually.

What slicing software do you use to 3D print?

If we look at what slicing software people use then we find that some slicers that were popular only a few years ago have virtually fallen completely out of use. 58% of people use Cura and 23% use Slic3r which means that these two open source slicers account for the vast majority of 3D prints. Its also good to know that Ultimaker’s Cura is so popular. Simplify3D is doing quite well having an implied market share of 10%.

What is your favorite thing to 3D Print?

If we look at what people like to make then the most popular single category is household items with people preferring to make practical things that solve real world problems such as hooks, housings, repairs and enhancements for daily life. We see a lot of very practical things on YouMagine from enhancements for Ikea furniture, solutions for organizing tools, kitchen paper holders, table cloth clips, hooks, organizers for batteries and cradles for electric toothbrushes. Enhancing your daily existence with 3D printers to organize your life may not be what gets the headlines but it is what a lot of people are actually using 3D printers for. The second most popular item is 3D printer enhancements. We see a lot of things on the site from practical spool holders, to a camera mount for the Robo3D, Ultimaker fan mounts, calibration tools for Kossel’s, bearings,, CoreXY brackets, a turntable for your printer, Printrbot extruders, to complete 3D printers such as MonkeySh#tFight, the iTopie and the Spatial One. Those most interested in 3D printing are very often interested in improving their own printers and sharing the results.

Which is the best filament supplier for 3D printing?

We asked our community what the best 3D printing materials supplier was. Over 33% of the sample has not found one indicating that while people have been trying out vendors they have not yet found a reliable supplier. 30% of people entered a name of a vendor which was unique. The 3D printing materials market is therefore very fragmented with many vendors in many countries selling filament. The most popular choice was ColorFabb followed by Faberdashery and then Amazon. This shows us that the online retailer is already making an impact on the 3D printing market through its 3D printing offerings.

Conclusion

In general we can conclude that 3D printers are, for some, becoming a daily addition to their lives chiefly through the making of fun gadgets and practical household items. People want more reliable, bigger and faster 3D printers and they want the process of designing things and printing them to be easier. People really like PLA as a build material but have not found a reliable vendor for it. Bed adhesion is still among the most pressing problems for 3D printer users. And at YouMagine we really need to improve our search ! We would like to thank those 500 community members who participated in this survey. We hope to use their information and feedback to further improve our site and guide us to building tools for the future.

Results of the YouMagine 3D printing survey part 2

Previously we told you about the results of our community survey amongst 500 members of our 3D Printing community. This is the largest and most in depth desktop 3D printing survey conducted to date. Today we can share you the second part of this survey.

At YouMagine we want to enable collaborative worldwide innovation in 3D printing and build the tools to let people in a distributed way work together to create, remix and share open source technology. We call this Distributed Innovation and want to build the tools for our community to engage in letting more people make better things.

In order to make sure that we are building the right future we want to understand our community and get feedback on what we need to do better. Through this process of letting our community guide our roadmap and development we can also give people an insight into what is happening in 3D printing. We would like to qualify this information to a certain extent however because we would expect our community to skew towards people who have been involved with 3D printing longer & be more open source minded than a random sample of the 3D printing community.

We asked Alexey Butakov to make us some nice illustrations to show off some of the graphs.

What do we need to improve about YouMagine?

Probably the most important thing for our development is the above graphic. We need to improve search and navigation. We’re working hard on this and have adapted our roadmap to the findings. We also received a lot of individual feedback about bugs and issues that need addressing, we found this super helpful also. We’ve identified different types of users whereby we’re generally seeing that one group wants more interaction and collaboration whilst the other seeks quick access to many designs. We’re making lots of quick steps forward on improving our overal design and user experience.

What needs to be improved in order to make 3D printing better for you?

The main thing that needs to be improved is the reliability of the 3D printers. If we drill down into these numbers we can also see that certain issues such as bed adhesion and dialing in new materials is also an issue for people. Reliability not only encompasses machines and in order to improve the overal experience improvements in software, electronics, materials & machines will have to be coordinated. People also want larger build volumes and faster 3D printers. Cost is not an issue for many.

One thing affecting many is warping and bed adhesion. Here we see that it is still critical to get your first layer right. Rather than be a solved issue for many we can see people looking at many different strategies to make materials adhere to beds. The best strategy is also very material dependent and depends on if you have a heated bed or not. Over the past few years a lot of new types of materials have become available for desktop 3D printers. These have exacerbated this problem especially since the best bed adhesion solution differs per material. Personally I’ve taken to washing down my glass heated build plate with a dishwashing soap with a high alcohol content. This degreases it and makes for excellent adhesion. As a YouMagine team we are leaning towards using only soap but some still use glue or tape.

There is a wide distribution of bed adhesion solutions for 3D printers

We’re seeing that even though there are a number of products out there to solve the issues. Most people still use glue or blue painter’s tape. Hairspray is also quite a popular solution. There is still scope to as an industry make better beds or come up with better solutions to this issue. Bed adhesion issues and warping are still the leading cause of failed prints. It would make a lot of people really happy if someone solved this issue.

I hope you enjoyed these results, thank you so much to all who participated. The third and final installment of our survey results can be found here.

Aidan Leitch’s Silicone 3D printing process

Aidan’s Syringe Extruder Top View

A few months ago we held a Contest whereby we challenged our community to develop a new 3D printing technology using an Ultimaker Original. 13 year old Aidan Leitch was one of the winners and attempted to make a Silicone 3D printing process.

You can download the files here on YouMagine.

Aidan made a Syringe extruder that uses a peristaltic pump to extrude a two part silicone into a basin to cure. The resulting shapes he’s been able to create are closer to blob than Michelangelo but this is a very promising idea. There are many two component materials such as polyurethane & epoxy adhesives. If we could make it possible to print materials such as these reliably it would be a big step forward.

I asked Aidan about his project and he said that,

“One of the biggest issues was making a good syringe extruder. There were some designs already out there but none that truly fit what I was doing. The part that took me longest was making changes in Cura. “

What more work will you do to improve the project?

“To improve, I’d need to make a better syringe extruder (possibly a direct one, as opposed to using the filament to push the syringe) and also a better system for delivering the other part of the silicone mix. The peristaltic pump I used was really slow.

The basin fixed to the build plate

What results do you have right now?

As of right now, I have successfully had the printer add one part of the silicone into the basin of the other part and have them cure. To make it work better, I’d to make the previously mentioned changes (better syringe extruder and better delivery system) along with further tuning of the software. Many of the parts for the paste extruder are fully 3D printable and attach directly to the printhead. Besides this, there are the electronics/pump, the basin, and some changes in the software.

What did you learn?

I’ve learned quite a bit from this project! Here’s some examples:

-How to read and write basic Gcode

-How to accommodate in software for physical issues (like friction in the syringe)

-Uncured silicone is messy stuff

Because it is all deliciously open source you can download and build on Aidan’s project here.

YouMagine Community 3D Printing Survey Results Part 1

In order to find out how to improve YouMagine we conducted a survey with 501 Community Members. We’d like to thank all of you who participated! We’ve analyzed the answers and read through all of the input and suggestions you gave. In addition to the responses that we can tabulate directly we asked for a lot of “open” responses in order to get suggestions & ideas. We’re currently comparing these ideas & suggestions with our development roadmap to see how we can change the roadmap in order to better meet our community’s needs. We’ve already put a number of easier to implement ideas and improvements into our development backlog and these will be built soon. We’re also going to be doing more analysis in order to see what YouMagine should become in the future. We are building YouMagine for you and the better we can make it suit your needs the better it will be. Because of this the survey was very important to us. We are looking for more mechanisms whereby we can let users tell us what to build and what to change. If you have any ideas in this regard, please do tell us.

Survey Limitations

Even though 501 respondents is a significant sample of our community and can be used as a representative sample for the 3D printing community globally due to its nature this survey will have some limitations. Firstly, the people who are likely to complete a survey will tend to be predisposed to caring about the subject of the survey. What the silent majority thinks is not something you can actually ever survey. Or in other words, “What percentage of people don’t like surveys?” & Why don’t some people like surveys?, is something we’ll never know. Our community consists of people who tend to be passionate about open source and open hardware. Our sample is also skewed towards people who are experienced 3D printer operators. We will also tend to have more people who have been 3D printing for longer and have built their own kits as well as designed and built their own 3D printers. Because YouMagine is supported by Ultimaker we will also tend to have more Ultimaker users and Ultimaker-minded people than the 3D printing population at large. We will also tend to reach more people who like to share their open source designs online because that is what the site does at the moment. We therefore are assuming that we’re missing many companies, closed source people and noobs in the sample. But, generally the sample, if qualified as above, can be used to gauge what our community needs and be used to generally learn about 3D printing peoples.

Survey Feedback

We got some feedback about the survey itself. Many found it a very positive thing and told us that it was good that we were listening to our community in this way. Some did however think that the survey was too long. We will make any surveys we do in the future shorter. Some others thought we should have more “other” and Not Applicable responses. We will do this next time. Some were confused by the bed adhesion question. In this question we asked “For bed adhesion I use…?” People noted that it would depend on the bed and material. We added this question also as a control question but understand that it may be confusing. Similarly for the slicer and 3D modeling software questions people indicated that they used several instead of just one.

Findings

Where does the YouMagine community live?

We know from Google Analytics that our community comes to us from 218 countries and territories worldwide. People from 49 different countries completed the survey. Immediately this shows us the limitations of our survey approach. The most popular country by far is the Unites States.

Analytics top ten

USA
Germany
Netherlands
UK
France
Spain
Canada
Italy
Australia
Switzerland

Survey top ten

USA
Netherlands
Germany
UK
Canada
Spain
Sweden
Switzerland
Belgium
France

We can see differences between the popularity of the site versus the respondents and should be mindful of these. Below you can see a heat map showing you the top 25 countries and the relative popularity.

What do we need to improve most about YouMagine?

We can clearly see that the biggest point of improvement needs to be search. We’re working on this and it will be improving soon. People also think we need to have better navigation. Generally if we read through the comments people also feel that we can improve the usable space. A lot of people don’t like the margins around the pages and think that images can be larger and we can be using the space more efficiently. We will be working on a complete site redesign that incorporates these wishes.

If we break out the users we can see that two different distinct user groups can be identified. One group wants things such as pagination, see many designs at once, scroll quickly through many designs etc. They want to find and download things quickly. We’re looking at how we can speed up the workflow from this group. The other group wants more interaction and social features. We also learned from the survey that often single features such as issues with the aspect ratio of the photos is a huge turn off for individual community members. We’re using the outcome of this survey to build the site as you would like to have it built. If you have any suggestions as to a feature or improvement, please do email joris (at) youmagine.com

The second part of the survey is here and the third here.

3DSlash integrates with YouMagine

We’re proud to announce that 3DSlash has integrated with YouMagine. 3DSlash is an easy 3D modeling application that lets you build by adding or destroying blocks. 3DSlash is fun and a great way to quickly make things or adapt STL files. You can import an STL to it and quickly adapt it by adding blocks, removing them or by removing many blocks.

3DSlash a browser based 3D modeling tool & also a downloadable application with more features. You can select several different tools that can remove a single cube, remove slices of cubes, add lines of cubes or drill out an area. In the application version you can also fill, fuse, push, pull and extrude. Both versions are free and you can use or download them here.

You can now save your 3DSlash design on YouMagine and upload them to share them with the YouMagine community. Your designs will initially be in their “unpublished” state and you can decide to publish them.

Here is a tutorial showing you the basics of 3DSlash.

With 3DSlash you can also import a picture, make it the right size and then create an object that is also the right size. The tutorial below shows you how to make an iPad stand. We think it is a wonderful tool and can’t wait to see how everyone uses it!

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