Joris van Tubergen – designer, inventor and 3D printing innovator.
Prof. dr. Jeroen de Jong and Max Mulhuijzen surveyed YouMagine community members to learn about the motivations of makers and their reasons to share what they made.
Below is a summary of their findings:
An interesting trend is that Makers increasingly develop designs that benefit producer products. At YouMagine, we observe that users upload designs that serve as inspiration for the next generation of Ultimaker printers.
We aim to find out: what are the characteristics of Makers improving 3D printers?
With a response rate of 33% (N = 122), we find an engaging Maker community in the YouMagine platform.
Although 40% of the respondents are also occupied with 3D printing in a business environment, only a few report being driven by commercial motives.
Respondents are driven because they want to help others, learn, satisfy a personal need, or out of enjoyment.
On average, we find that the respondents spend 10 hours on 3D printing per week and have 7 years of experience working with 5 different printers.
Designs that are created to overcome a personal problem show higher scores of online adoption on 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.
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.
Projects and 3D printing companies like Ultimaker and Printrbot who share their design files online (1, 2) allow anyone, without having to ask, to think of improvements and actually implement them. Whether it’s a little tweak or something that turns the whole printing experience upside-down is up to you.
Joris van Tubergen is someone who does exactly that, on a regular basis.
Printing bigger, faster, in a different way and with sweet new materials or new appearances has always been Joris’ trademark. He started experimenting with an existing Ultimaker allowing it to print huge objects, like this elephant:
Z-Unlimited – now on Kickstarter – allows you to print much bigger things than the 3D printer that makes it. How? Joris van Tubergen an out-of-the box thinker with a mentality that an Ultimaker is a device that can be changed to do exactly what you want it to do. He put the Ultimaker upside down, pointed the printhead outward again and let it lift itself up while printing.
You might ask, who is Joris, how does it work and how can I start printing like this? We will have to make it happen together, because Joris needs your support! You can back it through Kickstarter and get your own Z-Unlimited:
Print tall with Joris’ Z-Unlimited!
Want to know more about Joris? Did you know that he…
prints challenging prints more easily because he’s not afraid to hack some GCode parsing scripts together with programming Blender, even though he’s not a programmer by education?
the 3D printed elephant actually had tiny names inscribed into the surface, part of the huge 3D model?
works for the legendary FabLab “Protospace” in Utrecht, as the first Lab manager on site. Joris helped make the first RepRap and Ultimaker workshops possible, even before Ultimaker existed.
At YouMagine we’ve spent the last months creating the 3DPL for the 3D printing community. The 3DPL is a license for 3D Printed things that has been specially made so that people can create, improve and share their inventions with the world. Most of all we want to let us all stand on the shoulders of giants. We want people to build upon previous technologies, improve them, remix them and individualize them. We wish to create the preconditions for a 3D printed world where all the stuff in the world is iteratively and fluidly collectively improved. The 3DPL is a part of our effort to make all the things in the world malleable.
We’re doing this for you and so would like your help. Please give us feedback. Tell us what doesn’t make sense to you, what you hate, what we should change. Please involve others. We’re especially interested in home 3D printer users, companies that use 3D printing, lawyers, people from the wider open source community, inventors, artists, designers, makers and creators in the broadest sense. The 3DPL itself can be found here on Medium and you can comment on it there. Feel free also to ask questions or discuss it in the comments below this post. We consider the license to be in beta, so anything and everything is open for discussion and change. We would like to make it as inclusive as possible in order to cater to the entire 3D printing community so please get stuck in there and tell us what we need to improve.
Why should you get involved in shaping the 3DPL?
We have a real opportunity here to lay the foundations for a world where much of the emerging technology landscape will be available to all under an open source license. A world where a good portion of the inventions made in the future will be shared and created through 3D printing.
Other open source licenses were not created with 3D printing in mind.
In order to safeguard and encourage creation we have to properly protect inventors and innovators or progress and breakthroughs will be impeded.
In order to ensure progress on collectively developed technologies disputes over intellectual property should be resolved in a quick and efficient manner.
In order to encourage sharing and remix it should be clear what rights are held by whom and what one can do with a file that has been shared.
Since the 3DPL is the first and only license for 3D printed things it may just end up being the standard one everyone uses. And it would suck if the 3DPL sucked.
Sketch by Olivier van Herpt
What are some interesting things about the 3DPL?
The design must always be attributed.
All subsequent derivatives of a shared file must be available for remix and sharing.
If the creator requires that you include reference to be printed on or in the physical printed object, such as a logo or name, you have to respect that and are not allowed to remove that reference without the creator’s approval.
If one doesn’t abide by the terms of the license the rights granted under the 3DPL will be terminated immediately.
If you fail to comply with the license such as selling a work that was meant to be non-commercial then you must pay the creator 3 times the gross revenue you made on the sale.
Arbitration for conflicts between parties is arranged for in accordance with the WIPO Expert Determination Rules.
We have 3 license types:
REMIX: With a REMIX license your derivative work must be available to remix and share by others.
REMIX — NON COM A REMIX — NON COM license restricts the use of the Design File, the modified Design File and any Designed Product to non-commercial use only. The Design File, the Modified Design File or any Designed Product may not be used with the intent of making money directly or indirectly from it.
REMIX — RIGHTS MELT REMIX — NON COM for 12 months melting down to REMIX after 12 months. With a REMIX — RIGHTS MELT license your design file is available as a non-commercial share-alike file for 12 months. After this period the license will automatically become REMIX.
One very inspiring YouMagine community member is JJRobots. They make super fun robots such as an open source air hockey robot and an open source self balancing robot. This is just the kind of innovation we’d love to support here at YouMagine so I interviewed the team to find out what they’re up to.
Open Source Balancing Robot by JJRobots
What is JJRobots?
We are two electronic hobbyist who really wanted to share the ideas and knowledge with everyone who loves DIY robotics. JJrobots want to… fill the gap that exists in the DIY world, in which you need to have an electronics/ computing background in order to start a project. JJrobots is oriented to the MEDIUM skill level “maker”, we want to provide them with useful, affordable and flexible electronics that you can use for a lot of different projects. B-robot and the Air hockey robot are just two of a big list of projects we are developing right now. The following project will use the same electronics we are currently selling now in our shop.
Why did you start it?
The idea of JJROBOTS born nine months ago when I, Juan Pedro, working and living in UK, told Jose (my partner here) to open a web page to host the projects that Jose had been publishing in other blog and make it easier to people to make them by themselves (and create a platform to grow with new projects).
JJROBOTS is a blog with information about the projects, documentation, build manuals, schemes, a “how it works” section, and an online SHOP for the hardware parts (electronics, plastic parts…). Our goal is that people have fun making their own robots and, at the same time, learn how it all works. ALL will be OPEN, shared and documented. There will be a growing community behind with forums so you could get help from us and from other users.
We want that people take our projects as a base, and feel free to hack/modify them to the limits!
B-ROBOT is a good example. Starting from the design Jose published last year, we have been improving it in many ways. We have created a new electronics shield for an Arduino Leonardo, instructions, building manual and schemes. The code is now much simpler and better documented. This project is very FUN and ,as you can see in the video, the control is WIFI excellent too! (Kids love the robot)
This is an unique gadget that you could make by yourself (DIY). This is not a toy, it is a robot that uses good motors, quality electronics, and sophisticated control algorithms.
Our idea is also to reuse most of the components involved in the early projects in another future projects. For example, the Wifi module (which is not cheap) will be used soon in more projects (subscribe to jjrobots to keep you updated). You are investing in electronic components that could have several lives (motors, Arduino, wifi…)
Over the years we have realized that people love the open projects that we have been publishing here (B-ROBOT, arduspider, Air hockey robot…) but people have problems to reproduce them. Now there are no excuses! Everyone will have available all the parts and documentation to let them be successful!
Why do you share your designs on YouMagine?
I wanted to use YouMagine since I bought an Ultimaker 6 months ago and I knew about the existence of this website. I do love my 3D printer (now printing with FLEX PLA which has skyrocketed my “maker” capabilities!). This is a very good platform to spread the project.
How does your balancing robot work?
There is information here. But as a short brief:
“B-ROBOT is a remotely controlled self-balancing Arduino robot created with 3D printed parts. With only two wheels,B-ROBOT is able to maintain his balance all the time by using his internal sensors and by driving the motors. You can control your Robot, making him move or spin, by sending command through a Smartphone, Tablet or PC while he keeps the balance.
B-ROBOT reads his inertial sensors (accelerometers and gyroscopes integrated on the MPU6000 chip) 200 times per second. He calculates his attitude (angle with respect to the horizon) and compares this angle with the target angle (0º if he wants to maintain balance without moving, or a positive or negative angle if he wants to move forward or backwards). Using the difference between the target angle (let’s say 0º) and actual angle (let’s say 3º) he drives a Control System to send the right commands to the motors to maintain his balance. The commands to the motors are accelerations. For example if the robot is tilted forward (angle of robot is 3º) then he sends a command to the motors to accelerate forward until this angle is reduced to zero to preserve the balance.”
Why make an air hockey robot?
Everything started when Jose (my partner and friend) built his 3D printer. First, the possibility to design and build our own parts and second, how could we hack the components of a 3D printer to make something different?
Jose´s daughter loves the Air Hockey game and we love robotics so one day an idea was born in our mind… can we construct…??… Mmmmm …. it seemed very complicated and with many unresolved questions (puck detection??, robot speed??), but that is also part of the fun…
What do you hope to achieve with JJRobots? Why do you think its important to teach kids about robotics?
Well, we are loosing the contact with what lies beneath technology. You can buy an Iphone and play with its tactile screen but not know anything about how this device really works.
How does an industrial machine detect broken cookies during the packaging process?
Hacking can be performed only when you really know how a thing works. We want to “hack” ordinary stuff and create cool things showing how it is done. We want to let kids (and adults!) to do it by themselves and by asking for a helping hand in our webpage´s forum.
How large is the company?
Just Jose and I (Juan Pedro). Each one have our own jobs beside jjrobots, so right now, these ideas can not feed us, we will need to find time for this exciting project.
After long deliberation and discussion we’ve finally been able to decide on the winner of our “Develop a New 3D Printing Technology Challenge.” We looked closely at the level of innovation, feasibility & achievability of the technology. We also looked at to what extent the entries would revolutionize 3D printing and be a step change in 3D printing for the desktop 3D printing user. We tried to determine which technologies were not already being worked on within the open source 3D printing community. We also looked at which technology would let designers & makers explore new design directions in 3D printing and make new things possible. Our final conclusion was to award two Ultimaker Originals to two winners.
The First Winner is Laird Popkin with his “High Speed Large Format 3D Printing with Detail Finish” Idea. Laird wanted to solve the issue that 3D printing is too slow by creating a dual nozzle 3D printer. And “build a printer with two extruder nozzles, one very large (e.g. 1.2mm) and one much smaller (e.g. 0.4mm), and to configure/modify the slicer software so that it can use a single perimeter layer that is fine resolution (small nozzle, 0.1mm to 0.2mm layer height) and then interior perimeter and infill using much thicker lines of filament (large nozzle, 0.5-1mm layer height).” He wanted to, “make the modifications to the open source slicer software and configurations to optimize print speed and quality for such as configuration.” His goal was to, “Once the software and configuration are validated on standard hardware, my ultimate goal is to “hack” the Ultimaker to support 2x dimensions, for 8x the print volume, in order to be able to extremely rapidly print prosthetics for entire adult limbs in a single print.” He wanted to start with the Gigimaker design for a large format machine and go from there. We loved the ambition but also thought that he had considered the issues and problems well. We thought that this would greatly help the open source 3D printing community and that he had thought well about the issues and challenges at stake. We hope that Laird enjoys getting an Ultimaker Original and can’t wait to see what he shares with the YouMagine community.
Our second winner is XYZAidan‘s Silicone 3D Printing Process. Aidan made a video describing his process, you can check out above. We liked his ambition and by introducing new materials and a completely new way of 3D printing we could see that his idea could radically transform 3D printing for the home user. His idea to 3D print a silicone mix could be difficult to implement. If he is successful however it would be a significant advance for desktop 3D printing.
In addition to silicone his 3D printing technology would open up 3D printing to many more 2 component materials and this would greatly add to the home user’s 3D printing arsenal. Aidan wants to increase the resolution of 3D printing with his technology and also bring about higher print stability. He hopes to be able to extrude the silicone while having it cure inside the 3D printer’s nozzle. We love this idea and can’t wait to see him implement it! Congratulations to both Aidan and Laird on winning their Ultimaker Original’s. We hope they share their innovations with the YouMagine community and that their work lets others create more technology at home!
At YouMagine we’re always trying to stimulate new exciting 3D printing developments, objects & inventions. We want to make all the stuff in the world better, shareable and malleable. We’ve decided to give away one Ultimaker Original kit to the person who wins the “Develop a New 3D Printing Technology Challenge.” The idea is for someone to come up with an idea for a new 3D printing technology. They will describe to us how they hope to make this a reality. We will pick the best idea coupled that seems achievable on February 1st. This person or group will then win an Ultimaker that they can use to implement their technology. They will then share their invention with the world through YouMagine.
YouMagine has a passion for education. To see what is exactly happening in 3D printing in education we sat down with Phil Savage and Ted Turnbull of Fareham College in Fareham, in the UK. The college has 4 Ultimaker 2’s & 6 Ultimaker Originals as well as a Replicator x2. The College is committed to getting students of all ages to use the printers. They want to increase the quality and learning of their technology lessons. Most schools that are looking into 3D printing are only getting one machine, for one class. Fareham’s 3D printing implementation is much more extensive. Actually it is one of the most extensive ones I’ve seen so far. I took the time to catch up with them at the TCT Show in order to see if they had any lessons that other schools looking at 3D printing could learn from.
Fareham College students assembling Ultimaker Originals
What does your 3D printing implementation look like?
“The plan with the 3D printing hub is initially geared towards enabling and enthusing teachers learn how to use 3D printers in their education practice.
Student course work and teaching materials are financed by the college, with personal and private work for staff and students produced at cost. Education Budgets in the UK have become increasingly stretched in recent years, so acquiring teaching materials aimed at kinaesthetic learning is financially challenging. The VAK (Visual, Audio, kinaesthetic) model suggests that some students learn by being told things, some learn by being shown something but others learn by experiential physical (kinaesthetic) learning. For this last group of students with the budgets the way they are it is hard to find the teaching tools to enable this. However, 3D printers coupled with a growing range of resources, such as YouMagine, give us the tools we need in to enable this learning experience.”
Kids making 3D printers!
Who operates the machines?
“Its a combination of options. Many students and teachers have received enrichment training or continuous professional development training covering using the 3D printers. In terms maintenance and optimization we have people trained to do that as well. The 3D printers are racked in the back of our largest classroom and someone is always present. When we move to a new facility in the next academic year the printers will be in HVAC controlled space.”
A student placing an axis rod on an Ultimaker one.
What have been the major issues you’ve encountered?
“The biggest issue for us has been funding – Ultimaker’s Create program has been an enabler in this regard. We also had to take into account a range of health and safety issues. In the UK we have to comply with legislation known as COSHH, and we’ve had to perform a detailed health and safety assessment process which took quite a long time. One particular area being issues around the properties of materials such as PLA and Nylon, which were hard to certify because of the comparative ‘newness’ of their use in education for 3d printing.”
What are some of the biggest advantages?
“We’ve an ongoing project with our Child Care and Early Years program for people who want to work in nurseries and in the wider child care sector. We are enabling them, in-house, to design and manufacture bespoke board games, toys and other learning resources, with a professional finish, to use with the context of child care provision. This can be achieved at a fraction of the cost and time, by utilizing 3d printing technology, when compared to almost any ‘traditional’ manufacturing process available in education.
Our sports science department is providing its students with 3D Printed knee joints to help them better visualise, understand and learn about skeletal mechanics. For chemistry, students can be provided with molecular modelling kits, at a tiny proportion of the cost of similar commercial alternatives. In total we have 16 ongoing projects at the college at the moment. Amongst other goals for the year we hope to gather a lot of usage data and evaluate how people use the facility. This information can then inform an iterative development process for our use of the technology just as the wider 3D printing industry does.”
Last week at Johns Hopkins Hospital, Baltimore, there was an amazing community event, the Prosthetists meet 3D Printers conference. Currently at 1600 volunteers and rapidly expanding, this community is “Enabling The Future.” E-Nable is collaboratively designing, printing and assembling 3D printed prosthetics for children and other underserved populations.
The e-nable conference was an amazing combination of children, parents, physicians, prosthetist, 3D modelers, software developers and many amazing volunteers. Ultimaker has been a big supporter of this event through a donation of $10.000 worth of printers and YouMagine is supporting it by providing infrastructure for sharing and collaborating 3D designs for prosthetics. Everybody is dedicated to make this work and the mix of people all “joining hands” towards a common goal.
272 hands were created by the community and made into kits by 3DUniverse, ready to be built at the event!
Within the community so much progress was made. Many people met in real life for the first time, because e-NABLE operates globally and online. Contributions come from across the globe and are available for use, study, modification and production anywhere. While global, 3D production can be as localised as the home of a prosthetic user on the family’s 3D printer or a relative or someone neighborhood who has one.
Click here for more photo’s that were taken at the event.
The 3D models for the latest design called the “Raptor Hand” were released just before the event. Yuo can find the official files hosted here on YouMagine. It contains the best design elements from several designs that had been made up to that point. Literally, the designers “joined hands” and made it better! Anyone can contribute and anyone can benefit.
The great thing about 3D printing is that it puts no premium on printing something different every time or making something completely customized. The exact measurements of the body can be used to create a perfectly fitting hand, taking into account the amount of padding material to make it comfortable. YouMagine works with the e-NABLE community to deliver a next generation of model customisation tools, starting with the Hand-O-Matic, which is available at e-nable.youmagine.com. This makes generating a tailored prosthetic hand radically easier, because you only need to provide your measurements. We’re proud to be able to support the e-NABLE community.
Hand-o-Matic: Easily create customized 3D printable prosthetics
I also gave a talk at the event. I explored the question of what defines us as humans. Since we differentiated from the apes, our hands have allowed us to create powerful tools which have become a major part of our society. We shape our own tools and our tools are in turn shaping us. Which tools we use and how we evolve them is what defines us. Our perception of the world changes as soon as we realize that we can be a creator of the physical objects around us. This is not new, we’ve just lost touch with the process of making physical things. We can awaken our maker DNA, but now with more powerful tools. The fact that you can collaborate with people around the world to create real objects that matter, that’s a game changer.
Now we’re using collaborative online tools and desktop 3D to provide hands to people who need them. e-NABLE is about community, sharing, giving, collaboration, making, open source and 3D printing. It’s the ultimate example of humanity enabled by powerful tools.
