Posted by & filed under animation.

On Friday of last week, we helped push out a new animated series, Dig Build Live.

The new animated series will feature the styling of David, Steven, and Jordan as they take you into a different sort of Minecraft world, featuring new characters and creatures not found in the game.

You can find the series on YouTube or directly on DigBuildLive.com. You can talk to the team socially on Google+, Twitter.

screenshot of digbuildlive.com

Posted by & filed under 3D Printing, EclipseCon.

Justin’s talk proposal, “Merging technologies to bring 3D printing status to the web” has been accepted for EclipseCon 2013 in Boston!

He’s been working on bringing MQTT support into ReplicatorG via Eclipse Paho. Beyond that, the overall goal is to bring those updates onto the web Internet-of-things style. If you don’t want to click through to the talk session page, Justin will be covering:

  • Integrating Eclipse Paho into ReplicatorG to handle M2M messaging with MQTT
  • Integrating GSON into ReplicatorG
  • Building ReplicatorG with Eclipse
  • Building a web socket server using pywebsocket
  • Building a response site that using HTML5 web socket API

We hope you make it out!

EclipseCon 2013

Posted by & filed under animation.

If you happened to watch the Video Game Awards on Spike TV on December 7th, you might have noticed a Minecraft clip that aired that put the host of the program, Sam Jackson, in the game.

One would often assume that segment was produced by Mojang, but rather that was the animation stylings of David Steele and Jordan Maron. We were originally contacted by the producers of the program a few months before the air date, as they had viewed some of David’s previous Minecraft related animations.

We able to get said clip completed with time to spare. If you recognized the voice of happy guy, who gets taken down by Sam, that was Jordan.

We want to say thank you to Geoff Keighley and the producers at the VGA’s for giving us a ring. We had a blast being able to produce it.

Render still from VGA's

Posted by & filed under animation, video.

A big congratulations to Jordan, David and company for finishing and releasing “Minecraft Style” – A Parody of PSY’s Gangnam Style (Music Video). The music video parody has nearly 10 million views at the time of this writing and continues to climb.

It cannot be stated the amount of work that was put in to this video. We watched over the course of three weeks at the office as it came together, culminating in a video that is nearly a shot by shot recreation of the original (including little details such as certain flipped reflections). All the assets were created from scratch in Maya, from sets to the character rigging.

For a behind-the-scene the look:

Posted by & filed under 3D Printing, Makerbot.

We recently brought in a Makerbot Dual Replicator into the office. The primary reason was for faster product prototyping and it’s been an absolute joy to work with.

Besides working from a product perspective, we’ve also dived into the guts of the software. Justin has been actively build a web status panel that utilizes Eclipse Paho, MQTT, python and the ever present HTML5 websocket. He goes into a bit of the details on his blog.

What to see what our Makerbot is printing? You can always check the stats on our Stickman Makerbot Status page, powered by Justin’s open source code.

David leveling the build plate

Posted by & filed under Arduino, HTML5, MQTT, PHP.

One of the team, Justin, has been working on a number of Internet of things source code lately. He recently published a demo entitled “The internet of things: trigger an LED on an Arduino with MQTT, Mosquitto, Ratchet, and HTML5 WebSocket API” which delves into the basics of getting started using the popular Arduino platform as well as a number of open source tools.

Worth a look if you’re interested in connecting your toaster to the Internet!

Posted by & filed under Maker Faire.

Justin, as well as his wife and eldest daughter Alli are roaming the grounds at Maker Faire Bay Area, which if you’ve never heard of it is a “two-day, family-friendly festival of invention, creativity and resourcefulness, and a celebration of the Maker movement.” If you’re in San Mateo, go out and not only see and hear about cool things being built, but also build right there at the show!

UPDATE: Justin’s daughter Alli was featured on Make:Live!

Watch live streaming video from makelive at livestream.com