MakerBot Industries

Mark Fonseca Rendeiro wrote an article in the Guardian about 26C3, the latest Chaos Communication Congress that mentions MakerBot.

Also present was Bre Pettis and his Makerbot Industries. The knob on your dishwasher broke off? Trying in vain to contact customer assistance and find some way to get a replacement part? Well Pettis had a better idea, and by using a 3D printer, produced his own replacement knob. His tinkering with 3D printing has resulted in the founding of his very own company, Makerbot, which has actual employees and its own manufacturing space in Brooklyn, shipping Makerbots all over the world. Pettis didn’t tell us to buy his stuff, but talked about what other people have been building and how he envisages a future where people aren’t just consumers: he dreams of a return of the tradition of people making things.

I’m blushing! I have to give a shoutout to my fellow co-founders Zach and Adam who aren’t mentioned here!

via Hackers of the world unite | Mark Fonseca Rendeiro

Steven Leckart of Wired stopped by to check out our booth at CES this year! Check out this awesome video they made! Via: CES 2010: Open Source 3-D Printer Turns Designs Into Objects.

Challenger Brand News wrote us up as a company that challenges the status quo!

There are printers, and then there machines designed to manufacture parts. It’s hard to imagine a device that encompasses both, but MakerBot Industries creates a product that does just that: a 3D printer. As stated by the founder, “We make robots that make things.” The company’s goal is “to make it cheap and easy for anyone to fabricate digitally-designed 3D objects.”

The 3D printer works much like a hot-glue gun – plastic is fed into the top of a machine, heated and dispensed in spaghetti-like strands. Using programmed instructions, the machine lays down layers of plastic in the appropriate shape, much like the way a printer distributes ink, until the desired object is formed. To see the device in action, watch this video.

via Here’s a Challenge: Make Your Own…Anything

Bre explains the MakerBot in minute 33 of this video about 26C3. (Shot with a 5D MK2 – Want!)

Projectmovie 2009 on Vimeo on Vimeo

More Botmade stuff on Etsy made with a MakerBot by former MakerBot intern Will Langford. These look great!

3D printed bracelet from the future by BotMade on Etsy.

Polylactic Acid (PLA) is an extremely awesome polymer for many reasons. First, it is bio-friendly. It is made from corn, which is a renewable resource. Secondly, it is bio-degradable which means it will break down in a landfill. Third, it is clear which makes for gorgeous crystalline prints that absolutely scream for LEDs. Last but not least, it has an extremely low shrinkage factor which means it resists warping, even at very large print sizes. All-in-all its a very exciting new filament.

The PLA should print very well at standard ABS settings, but we will be releasing updated settings very shortly that will allow you to get the very best out of your MakerBot with PLA.

The particular variant of PLA that we use is Ingeo 4032D. For full technical specs, check out the PLA datasheet.

We are getting this started off right by offering a special introductory price of $60 for 5 pounds of PLA ($12 a pound). When the sale ends on Monday January 11th, it will go up $80 for 5 pounds ($16 a pound). We want folks to get it and make with it ASAP and we want to give the early adopters a nice discount. Get yours now!

MakerBot and NYCResistor were featured on Motherboard.tv. Check it!

Yo, MakerBot is at CES. We’re telling the world that the time has come to get a 3D printer on your desktop! We’re scrappy, we’re clever, and we make a machine that can make almost anything.

We’ve got the simplest press kit ever! Here’s our One Pager, Photos, Videos, and Other Press!

You may notice that we kept this simple for easy file acquisition. No HTML even!

We’re at CES! Last year we won a the NY Tech Meetup Startup Battle and we’ve just arrived. We’ll be setting things up tomorrow and then Thursday the show begins. We’ll be printing stuff, showing off the MakerBot watch, and giving out a few thousand stickers.

Here’s the map! Click on the map to make it big!

Bonus points and lots of stickers if you’re at the show and you can find us and say, “Yarr, MakerBot is the future!”

Note: Want to check out the press kit? Link!

Robert Bowdidge is documenting his work with a MakerBot to create HO scale buildings and he’s tweaking skeinforge to make it happen!

I made two changes: first, Keith’s blog suggested playing with the Carve setting’s “Extrusion Width over Thickness”. This controls the thickness of each layer, and determines how much the stream of plastic get squished into place. By changing this value from 1.9 to 1.5, the occasional gaps between the extruded plastic disappears, and the surface starts looking more like a flat surface with board texture. Second, I added some “trim pieces” to the top and bottom to cover where the fill path curved back. This final piece looks much more realistic (except that the “trim” over the window has a gap because it’s 4.5 extrusions wide; reducing that size a bit would get rid of that gap.

The third building face still isn’t suitable for close-up viewing, but it looks decent at a distance and in shadow. With this print, I’m starting to believe I could use the Makerbot to build HO buildings.

via Makerbot 216: There’s a Skeinforge Setting for That….