MakerBot Industries

The store was down for a few hours today as we made some changes to it. Some of these you’ll notice, some you won’t. They will make life easier for everyone though. Here’s a quick list of the new changes:

* Its now on its own server which is much faster! (Previously it shared a server with the makerbot site, thingiverse, blogs, and a few other random sites)
* We now have SSL and all your account information is now encrypted and secured.
* We now accept credit cards directly! No more using Paypal. Good for those of you that work at universities or in large corps and want to buy a MakerBot
* Magento now uses memcached on the backend for caching sessions and such. Should result in a speed boost.
* We found and installed a new order status module which will result in more informative order statuses (eg: ‘On Hold’ is now ‘In Production’.)
* We found a module that will serve as a start for UPS WorldShip integration which means we’ll be switching to UPS soon.

PS. We use Magento, which is awesome, open source ecommerce software.
PPS. DNS may still be propogating, so you may still see a ‘site is down’ message. It will be back ASAP.

Belakor’s flickr stream is full of awesome sci-fi movie props. I can’t wait to see what he does with his MakerBot!

Makerbot #156 on Flickr – Photo Sharing!.

From the MakerBot Flickr Pool, Dawning.ca made his own USB2TTL adapter!

I didn’t have a USB2TTL cable laying around and so I looked in to what one entails. Turns out the magic in those cables I already had in a break-out board.. I just soldered on a header and used a little breadboard to pull over the pins I needed. But alas, it didn’t matter. All the magic was gone from that FTDI chip anyway. Though I’ve ordered another one of those rather than paying more for a whole cable that doesn’t give me the same flexibility.

The Poor-mans USB2TTL adapter on Flickr – Photo Sharing!.