Tag Archives: Ultimaker

Watch YouMagine for the Ultimaker Gumball Challenge pieces from Maker Faire Bay Area 2016!

Dragon Climber Toy

Keep your eyes peeled for a slew of new chibi designs popping up on YouMagine over the weekend.

The Ultimaker team invited four schools to participate in the Ultimaker Gumball Challenge.

  • River Bend Middle School, Virginia
  • Saint Ann’s School, New York
  • Comstock High School, Michigan
  • Advanced Learning Center, Utah

Each school was sent 1000 gumball capsules and some 3D-printing filament. Students designed and printed the models and decorated their machines.

All of the money collected in these machines will be donated to support STEM initiatives at the schools, and whichever school sells the most prints will also win an Ultimaker 2+ 3D printer!

Toy Catapult for Maker Faire

You Can Play Along From Home!

This Gumball Challenge joins a bold lineage of fun projects making use of dime store toy dispensers in combination with 3D printing, in particular starting with The Incredible 3D Printing Gumball Gallery art project from DesignMakeTeach who helped to shape this challenge and drew one of his local classrooms into the mix.

We hope that readers and Maker Faire Bay Area attendees both will go home inspired to try challenges like this with their own classrooms and communities!

Here’s the core challenge: “What original 3D printed designs could you create to fit inside a tiny two inch (five centimeter) gumball capsule?”

Want to encourage creativity and teach those new to 3D printing about design constraints? By placing a constraint on size, you encourage creativity and to problem solving. Challenge participants to design whatever they want, or choose a theme.

3 piece puzzle toy

More Gumball Capsules to Come!

Continue to check back for the designs labeled “gumball” on YouMagine in the coming weeks to see all of the student designs, and read more at: www.ultimaker.com/gumball

Designs by comstockps on YouMagine

Visit these designs on YouMagine.com!



Out-of-the-box upgrades: Z-Unlimited

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:

3D-printed-elephant-Joris-van-Tubergen

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!

Print tall with Joris’ Z-Unlimited!

Want to know more about Joris? Did you know that he…

  • makes regular appearances on Dutch TV?
  • played a pivotal role in creating the Kamermaker with DUS Architects and Ultimaker,
  • 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.
  • made the Fairphone + 3DHubs Phone covers possible?
  • has published most of his 3D creations on YouMagine? Check out his profile here.
  • applied Augmented Reality with QR codes to his 3D printing (yes, lots of buzz words!)
  • embedded the source code of a 3D object into an RFID chip, physically embedded into the printed object. Source code inside!
  • And even more about Joris here…

It’s not secret: We’re big fans of Joris and all other makers that are redefining what 3D printing is! We’d love to see what he comes up with next!