The desktop 3D printing evolution has taken the world by storm. For me, it all started a little over two years ago when Yelp bought its engineers a MakerBot Thing-O-Matic 3D Printer to play around with. The sounds and smells that accommodate desktop 3D printing have since become second nature to our corner of the office.

While we haven’t yet found a way for 3D printing to help our users connect with great local businesses, it has been a great driver of innovation and fun in our engineering team. What started out as a few engineers printing toys has since spiralled into super creative projects that have stirred up great support from everyone here at Yelp.

It was a group of mobile developers that assembled Yelp’s first 3D printer. I was quickly drawn to the machine after seeing it print a ridiculously bad looking (but functional) whistle. Soon after, a small group of engineers and myself rallied behind printing our own copy of the infamous Turtle Shell Racer.

The large parts of the Turtle Shell Racer pushed the Thing-O-Matic to its limits and forced us to tweak and modify the printer constantly. The result however was amazing! We turned a spool of plastic and a few lunch breaks and evenings into a cute little R/C car. Seeing how far we had come empowered us to see what designs we could come up with ourselves.

We wouldn’t have to wait long to put our imagination to the test. A few times a year, Yelp has a two-day period called Hackathon where our engineers set aside their everyday responsibilities to work on projects that are purely innovative and fun. At the next Hackathon, my team and I decided to try and send an iPhone to Space via weather balloon. The idea was to Check-In from Space using Yelp’s mobile app.

The weather balloon’s tracking service that was shared with our Yelp colleagues proved very popular, as the 3rd party service soon went down due to an overload of traffic. With the help of 3D printed parts of our own design and a lot of tenacity, our iPhone did reach the edge of Space. However, on reentry we lost our balloon somewhere in the hills near Pyramid Lake in Reno Nevada.

It wasn’t until the next Hackathon a few months later, when we returned with an autonomous reconnaissance drone loaded with custom 3D printed parts, that we were able to locate and recover our balloon payload. Our drone consisted of a Bixler airframe, an Ardupilot system, a GoPro camera and a custom short range “First Person View” system.

Amazed by the drone we had managed to build, we decided to build a bigger and better drone to explore and share the possibilities of this new technology. We would also open source all our code, parts and 3D models. To our amazement the “ Burrito Bomber” concept drone we made and its accompanied video went viral. Before long our drone and it’s Thing-O-Matic 3D printed parts had a quarter of a million views on YouTube and had been covered by CNN, The Huffington Post, Forbes and more! They seem to really like the idea over at Amazon too. You’re welcome Jeff.

Our next project would truly test if the sky’s the limit for 3D printing. We decided to try and print in the Earth’s Stratosphere at 100,000 feet altitude. Making a printer that’s light enough to be carried by a weather balloon but able to 3D print in an icy -50° Fahrenheit would be our biggest challenge yet. Using a modified Printrbot Simple, custom g-code and a lipo battery we decided to give it a shot. After only one failed attempt, we succeeded in printing a small Yelp / Printrbot logo at no less than 111,159 feet. That’s a full year before NASA’s 3D printer will join the 20-mile-high club.

Not all 3D printed projects here at Yelp involve boy toy themes like space or drones though. Currently we’re experimenting with 3D scanning using a Makerbot Digitizer and printing on the more reliable Makerbot Replicator 2. At our most recent Hackathon we clay sculpted and 3D scanned our Yelp mascots before 3D printing them at “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids” size. Using a resolution of 100 microns and spray painting the models revealed the perfect game pieces to accommodate a custom Yelp Monopoly board. Oh, and obviously we also open sourced them (we even added a free bonus goat).

Now, in an effort to start cloning talented engineers, I’ve been using a Microsoft Kinect to scan engineers and print their busts. So far the clones have been lacking in the productivity department though. If you’re interested in building a great product, playing around with fun technology and want to save me the trouble of trying to perfect 3D printing cloning technology, you should think about applying to Yelp.

Back to blog