MakerBot Industries

Wow! Fynflood proposed with a MakerBot made engagement ring!!!!!

The ring I printed, and then used to propose to my girlfriend.

She said yes! Now to get our MakerBot to print with white gold.

You can download from Thingiverse!

Check out these two videos.

Introduction to Mendel from Rep Rap on Vimeo.

The RepRap Mendel lives!

Mendel’s first print from Rep Rap on Vimeo.

The advent of mobile computing has brought us many things: the sum of human knowledge at your fingertips wherever you are, instant map capabilities, and the ability to wax poetic on the go 140 characters at a time. Well, now you can carry a universe of things in your pocket. Provided your pocket has an iPhone, of course.

The iPhone site is the product of about 4 days of feverish hacking and refactoring of the existing Thingiverse code. It’s pretty much read only, but if you need to do any heavy lifting you can easily switch back to the standard HTML view. The idea is to create a site that is interesting and helpful if you want to kill some time and see whats going on in the ‘verse.

Of course, there is an ulterior motive: I wanted to be able to access the inventory system on my iphone. I’ll admit that I’m a selfish bastard, but also a thorough one. When I launched the parts and inventory systems I was really happy. Especially when I realized that I could skip the whole barcode reader step and just put QR codes with the part url on all of our parts. (Notice we auto-generate QR codes for all parts and things on thingiverse…)

Well, unfortunately I soon realized that the computer-monitor optimized Thingiverse did not make managing the inventory via iPhone very easy. So, instead of simply converting that single page into one that works well with the iPhone, I converted the whole site! Now that its done… its really awesome! All of our boxes at MakerBot are covered in QR code stickers. I just scan one of those stickers with QuickMark and it takes me to the Thingiverse page for that part. From there I can add or subtract from our inventory nice and easy. No more lugging a heavy box to the barcode scanner station just so I can add or subtract one bolt. I can just grab a bolt, scan the code and go!

Ah the joy of 4 days work to save 5 minutes work.

Wow, this is great! Check out this unboxing. This gives you a really good idea of what comes in the basic kit. (They added a USB to TTL cable to their order)

Leigh from HackLab TO unboxes the group’s new MakerBot, a 3D printer
at MiniSoOnCon2009 in Hamilton, Ontario. - Link

It’s release time again– ReplicatorG 0009 and the new v1.6 firmware are now available!  As before, the new firmware is bundled with the ReplicatorG uploader.

• ReplicatorG 0009 for Windows
• ReplicatorG 0009 for Mac OS X
• ReplicatorG 0009 for Linux
• Gen3 Firmware v1.6 sources (for the firmware hackers among you)

The currently recommended version of skeinforge is the 0005 release:

• Skeinforge 0005 for all platforms

Changelogs are after the cut.  As usual, let me know about any problems you encounter.

Read the rest of this entry »

Vik writes over at the RepRap blog about extruder issues. It’s worth a read for MakerBotters too!

Check it out and read the comments.

We are just added a new kit to the store. It’s a Laserless Kit. There is some finesse to lasercutting and we are really proud of our lasercut parts for the MakerBot, but we know people with lasers and they want to buy all the parts minus the lasercut parts and create their own MakerBot-style 3D printer for their own personal use.

You want your machine made out of antique plywood you found in an old barn? Or maybe you want to have Ponoko custom cut you a body out of bamboo? We understand the power of DIY and we know that the easy way is not always the best way for everyone and so we offer this laserless kit.

We’ve spent a lot of time and energy doing research to uncover the best parts that work really well for this machine. You can go out and buy these from 20 different suppliers, but the great part about this laserless kit is that you get all the components and subkits that come with a MakerBot, but no lasers were hurt in the process of putting together this kit!

If you’ve done lasercutting, you know that you may not be saving anything by lasercutting it yourself, you’re going to take some time to get the kerf right with your machine and you’re going to end up doing it a few times to get it all just right, but you are doing it yourself and you have a lasercutter, so damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.

This kit comes with these sub-kits, all lovingly wrapped and packed with sweetness at the MakerBot BotCave.

- Drive system kit
- Hardware burrito
- Gen 3 electronics
- Motors
- Plastruder MK4 (hardware only)
- A pound of natural ABS

Keep in mind this is the basic kit and does not include a power supply, cables, cords, and tools. We sell these separately so you can stock up on what you need before you checkout.

Again, just so there are no surprises. There are no lasercut parts in this laserless kit. You are going to be cutting your own lasercut body kit, plastruder parts, and build platform. Check out the wiki for the links to all the files.

We won’t be providing support from problems that arise from you lasercutting your own parts. If you wanted it to Just Work, you’d be buying the full kit!

One of the problems we’ve had for a while with the Gen3 extruder firmware is the naive temperature control algorithm.  Since the firmware had been simply turning the heater on or off depending on whatever temperature it was seeing at the thermistor at the moment, we’d often end up with wild temperature swings, with the temperature at the nozzle overshooting by as much as 20° C.  Implementing proper PID control has always been pretty high on the list of things to do.

Yesterday, Tim at BotHacker coded up a patch which implements PID on the heater.  The result is much, much better temperature control, yielding a smoother extrusion and less finicky extruder.  The patch has been applied to the svn repository, so you’ll see the results in the v1.6 firmware*, coming later this week.

One of the great things about an open source project like this is that lots of features that might otherwise take a long time for a traditional project to implement are often contributed by users, or already implemented in other open source projects. For example, we recently rolled in upstream changes in Roland Riegel’s great SD/MMC card library that provided us with improved support for FAT32 and SDHC cards.

To help facilitate this sort of collaboration, I’ve created a Google group for discussing firmware development.  If you’re interested in contributing to development or just want to keep an ear to the ground, subscribe to the list and drop us a line!

*What happened to v1.5, you ask? It was packaged up last week, but we were close enough to v1.6 that I didn’t end up announcing it.

We’re on Bavarian Radio. We don’t speak German, but it sounds great to us.

We were invited to repurpose Joby’s products for the upcoming Joby Inspired pop-up shop and gallery. What a fun challenge! After playing with their tripods for a while, we were inspired to designed toy parts that interlock with Joby’s bendable structure. Once we were happy with the design, 3-D printed them out using a MakerBot. Watch the video below for a more in-depth explanation of the project.

If you’re in San Francisco, make sure to check out the show in-person. It opens tomorrow – details here).