When trying to improve products and ideas of any nature, it seems that there are two roads that lead to better innovation, the two separated paths of collaboration and competition. Although they’re seemingly opposite methods of motivation, 3D printing community Pinshape and the 3D design and print educators from Mold3D are teaming up and putting on a competitive collaboration between Makers across the world.
Designers are being invited to take part in the MakerTron Design contest, a competition to remodel the body parts that makeup the MakerTron robot (named “Remix” by his original developers at Mold3D), a member of a friendly robot race who, according to the competition hosts, ‘needs humanity’s help to rebuild the destroyed MakerTron species’. Different from most innovative competitions, the goal isn’t only to find the best design out of all the submissions; the judging panel will also take a piece from each design in order to rebuild the MakerTron robot by combining of a variety of the contest’s submitted designs.
The MakerTron robot was initially designed by the Mold3D team, equipped with a Centrally Operating Robotic Engine (C.O.R.E.), made up of the key operating components for the MakerTron bot, located in the robot’s torso. With the C.O.R.E. available for download at Pinshape, the rest of the bot is up to the world to decide. The competition is asking designers to build around the C.O.R.E. System, adding their own version of the head, arms, or legs to help the MakerTron function properly.
Implementing their educational expertise, Mold3D is aiding the competition’s designers with an instructional video on how to scale the connectors for each body part of the MakerTron robot, making the contest accessible for those who are less knowledgable in 3D designing and manufacturing. The body parts of Remix are also easily interchangeable and upgradeable, offering contestants an infinite range of possibilities for their designs. All in all, the contest is meant to redesign the MakerTron in a global fashion, even if you happened to lose the competition, your design can still be implemented on the final collaborative design! From the mouth of Remix the MakerTron himself, “design your own upgrade today and help build a better world for all MakerTron kind.”
Still, in the nature of competition, there is over $3,800 dollars worth of prizes for the designer with the winning MakerTron parts. The contest winner will receive great 3D printing tools, including a ZBrush license from Pixologic, a design tablet from Wacom, a complimentary design course from Mold3D Academy, and two 3D printers from XYZ Printing – specifically the 3D scanning and printing da Vinci AiO and the Nobel 1.0 laser 3D printer (read 3DPI’s review here). The contest is running up until October 15th, 2015, and is open to 3D designers and Makers anywhere in the world. Whether you’re a hobbyist or a professional in the 3D printing field, the MakerTron Design contest is offering us the opportunity to come together in the spirit of competition in order to collaborate on an innovative project.
