MakerBot Industries

Nobody likes waste, and here at MakerBot we don’t either. One of the cool things about using a 3D printer like ours is that there is no waste: you use exactly the amount of material you need to print something, and no more. Unfortunately with subtractive processes like lasercutting, you have waste material. With our CupCake CNC designs, there is a large amount of negative space, which leaves us with these big, rounded squares of wood. They had been stacking up at the lab and we didn’t know what to do with them.

Enter Andreas Ekberg, one of our friends here in NYC. He stopped by NYC Resistor one night to hang out and chat and do cool things with us. Well, he spotted the stacks of blank wood and wondered if we had any plans for them. We didn’t and he ended up taking a whole stack of them home with him to screenprint on. The results are gorgeous.

Waste into art. Super awesome.

More photos below:

Zach and I had a great time at the Maker Revolution event at Microsoft Labs in Boston over the weekend. We didn’t know it, but it turns out that sitting around a table with folks while the MakerBot Cupcake CNC is puttering away and doing its thing and making objects appear where there were none before is really a great community activity! One of the gatherers mentioned that it felt like a geek campfire and it did!

We printed airplane wings, dodecahedrons, and chess pieces. Then I gave a talk about rapid prototyping. We met cool people who are doing cool things. Big thanks to everyone who shared their passion with us at this event.

If you have an event that might benefit from having a MakerBot at a table and listening to a talk about the future of rapid prototyping and manufacturing, feel free to give me a shout at bre@makerbot.com. We’ve talked at Microsoft Labs in Boston and we’re going to be giving a talk at Google later this month and it’s likely we’ll be talking at the NY Tech meetup in June. We’re also gearing up for Maker Faire in San Francisco where we’ll be bringing some machines and showing people how to make stuff with them.

To print out an object you need an STL file. You can create your own or download one from Thingiverse, or even scan one if you have a 3D scanner (WANT!)

Once you’ve got an STL file, you’ll need to get it to the right size. Watch the video to learn how. To do this you’ll need Blender, the open source 3D creative software. It’s great and it’s free!

I’ll be making more videos like this to walk you through the process of slicing the STL file with Skeinforge and sending the gcode from ReplicatorG to the MakerBot.

So I was printing some tweezers I downloaded from Thingiverse the other day, and they turned out really nicely because it was basically one big outline with very few starts/stops of the extruder. Playing with them, seeing how strong they were, and also looking at the cool profile they made got me thinking: Wow, this sort of looks like the profile of a wing! That idea got into my head, and I decided that I absolutely needed to try and 3D print wings of some sort.

Unfortunately I’m barely a n00b at 3D modeling, and I don’t know the first thing about wing design, so I hit up the Thingiverse Community to see if anyone had any models or experience. It turns out that a few of our members are avid RC plane hobbyists and were quick to post a few wing designs here and here. Their passion about this technology was really refreshing, and it was cool to collaborate digitally on a physical object.

The wings themselves turned out really nice. The grains are all in the direction of flow, and they are really smooth. If they don’t outright work, it would be a very simple 5 minute sanding job to get them absolutely perfect. I havent weighted them, but they are strong and light-weight. They are 70mm long, but I’m going to try and print ones that are 120-130mm next (current max build height) The only problem I have is that I don’t have access to any sort of wind-tunnel or RC plane to test them on. Does anyone want samples to play with?

When we set out to build MakerBot, we wanted to build a cheap, affordable 3D printer that we could build using commonly available parts and to make the rest of the parts using Digital Fabrication techniques. Since we had one laser cutter and zero MakerBots at that time, we pretty much had to make everything with the laser cutter.

One of the tricky parts to make is the idler pulley. These are pulleys that serve to tension the various belts in the system and they need to run smoothly. Buying a commercial part that does this would have been a few bucks, minimum. So, one night at around 2AM, I decided to see if it was possible to lasercut them. That presented its own unique challenge, since the pulleys needed to be flanged to keep the belt on the pulley.

After about 3-4 iterations, I came up with a design that used stacked layers of wood that you glued together to build a pulley. This was very tricky, and required assembling parts before you could even use them. Furthermore, the inner rings were very thin and broke easily. We were worried that they would not hold up to shipping, so we shipped extra parts. Also, being constrained by the thickness of the wood was a pretty tough challenge, and the pulleys sometimes come loose on the pulley. Not a big deal, but not elegant.

The whole reason I got into digital fabrication was because of the RepRap project, and the idea of a machine being able to make improved parts for itself. So, fast forward a few weeks and we now have 4 functioning MakerBots here at the lab. I sat down and decided to try and see what parts I could print, and the pulley stuck out like a sore thumb. I went through about 3 iterations before I landed on a nice design. The 608 bearing press-fits into the pulley and it rides like a dream. No gluing parts overnight, it just works.

If you have a MakerBot, you can download this design and print it out to upgrade your machine. How awesome is that?

This is certainly just the first in a string of printable parts that will make up the MakerBot design. We’ll be shipping these as part of the 2nd batch of CupCake CNC kits that will ship on May 1st. Hold onto those wooden pulleys, they’ll be relics someday. =)

I used to be someone who used imperialist machinery parts. I gave those up when I started designing the Cupcake CNC and I’ve never looked back. For working on projects, metric is so much easier. Ever try and figure out imperial bolt types? It’s not easy. With metric bolts, an M8 x30 means that the bolt threads are 8mm in diameter and the threads are 30mm long from the base of the head to the end of the bolt. Easy peasy. Another thing that basically makes the whole metric thing a shoe in? Black. The hardware comes in black.

Did I mention that they come in black? Besides the color black, it’s much easier to design in QCAD and Blender using metric measurements.

So, when you are embarking on making building your Cupcake CNC, we encourage you to make the shift to metric. Do yourself a favor and invest in a good metal ruler with millimeters on it and a pair of digital calipers that can switch to metric units.

Now, I will concede there is one good thing that imperialism is good for and that’s measuring the distance of objects from yourself by eye that are less than 100 feet away. When I was in the film industry, all the focus pullers, even the ones from metric countries, agreed that feet are a better unit for estimating short distances. So, unless you’re looking for a career where you’ll be judging how far away Keanu Reeves is from the lens of a high end camera, do yourself a favor and switch to metric. Your future projects thank you in advance.

Base 10 For The Win!!!!!

On Saturday, Jeff Rutzky, Chris K. Palmer, and George Hart stopped by and hung out with me and the MakerBot Cupcake CNC for a few hours. These guys are pioneers of folding, cutting, lasering, and 3D printing and it was so great to have them by. Make sure to check out their websites for inspiration!

We got to talking about what objects work and Chris promptly got sketchup out and made a really cool Zono10 design. He’s been going wild making insanely cool chocolate molds and uploading them to Thingiverse!

Cory Doctorow wrote a story in 2006 imagining a future of contraband 3D printers. In the story these MakerBot-like machines become illegal because they can make trademarked and patented objects and get around the whole centralized manufacturing process. It’s 2009 and the 3D printers of the future are here. The MakerBot launches us into a new future filled with digitally designed and personally fabricated objects. The future that Cory predicts in his science fiction story where 3D printers are common place is now officially fact. You may not be getting a rocket-pack anytime soon, but we’re delivering on the dream of a machine that prints out the things that have had to stay locked in your imagination. In the near future, you’ll be sending your kids to college and making sure they have a MakerBot on their dorm room desk.

There are other 3D printers out there, but they are either very expensive or have a long and twisty path to existence. When designing MakerBot, my friends Zach Hoeken Smith, Adam Mayer, and I have taken all the research on making 3D printers work and and spent a ton of time finding the cheapest way to get a super precise (to .085mm) machine. Then we designed this machine to look good because we want you to be able to get it, use it, and care enough about it that you can hand it down to your grandchildren and they’ll be able to use it.

This MakerBot Cupcake CNC machine is the Model T of 3D printers, blazing a trail to make 3D printers available to the masses. You solder it and put it together yourself. Unlike $250,000 printer, you have to make it from a kit, just like with the first Apple Computers. By making it yourself, you also get the pride of knowing exactly how it works!

If you are a citizen of the future and you have any interest in 3D printers and MakerBots, then take 5 minutes right now to read Cory Doctorow’s story titled, “Printcrime“. Since it’s licensed under Creative Commons, you can read it here after the jump. If you’re inspired, buy a MakerBot now and become one of the proud citizens of the digitally designed future.

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We’re really happy to be carrying the latest, top-of-the-line RepRap electronics which we use to drive our MakerBots. These boards were developed by me (Zach Hoeken) as part of my volunteer work for the RepRap Research Foundation. As always, the designs are 100% open and free. You can hit up the files on Thingiverse, you can read the blog entry introducing the design on the RepRap Blog, or you can skip straight to the wiki page for full-on documentation.

Oh yeah, and we sell them in our online store if you want to get a hold of one. We’re in the process of getting these boards fully assembled (a first for us) and this will probably happen in the next month or two if you don’t feel like doing SMT soldering.

We had originally hoped to be able to outsource the cutting of rods to specific sizes for the MakerBot, but it turned out to be very expensive so we went out and bought our own wonderful Makita angle grinder and got cutting discs for it. It took an entire day of cutting to get them all cut and you can see Zach cutting through a rod above.

Once they were cut, the ends needed a bit of beveling. In the photo above, you can see Ryan shaping the ends on a grinding wheel.

We’ve cleaned the rods up a bit, but it really helps to go over them with a rag or paper towel and some 3 in 1 oil and run a fingernail down the groove to get any dirt or dust out that has accumulated there.