Given the amount of work I’ve done with 3D printing and MakerBot over the past 14 months, MakerBot extended an invitation to speak at their retail store. The topic of the presentation was open-ended, so rather than speak about what I’ve done in the past, I decided to up the ante and create something entirely new that I had been thinking about for a while. Despite what I have learned about 3D printing, my 3D design skills are still pretty lackluster. As a result, I wanted to see if I could use three.js to create visualizations that I could then print.

I first coded up a geospatial visualization of my Foursquare checkins using 2d indexing in MongoDB and Google Maps to create a sort of heatmap to ensure my data was sound. Then, using three.js, I transformed that data into a 3D visualization. The challenge came as I realized was that there aren’t any exporters to go from three.js to an STL file, the lingua franca of the MakerBot. So, I wrote a JavaScript library to do exactly that in addition to creating an STL file viewer.