MakerBot Industries

Priya Ganapati wrote a great article about the spider/lego/makerbottable contraption over on the Wired blog.

Weller, a machinist and technician at the McCoy School of Engineering at Midwestern State University, combined milled plastic pieces with the basic Lego Mindstorms set to create a robotic spider that can crawl and turn.

“I wanted to open students’ minds to go beyond ‘let’s put the parts together and program the robot,’” he says. “This project is more than sticking the wheels on a Lego set.” The school uses Lego Mindstorms to introduce freshman students to robotics.

The spider robot’s legs are based on a concept called the Klann linkage. A single leg has a six-bar linkage with a frame, crank, two rockers and two couplers connected with pivot joints. This transforms rotating motion into linear motion.

Weller says he created the spider’s legs from 3/8-inch plastic sheet stock on a 3-axis CNC mill. But it can also be made by a 3-D printer such as Makerbot and RepRap.

As the video shows, the robotic spider moves with grace and turns around with flair, even on a smooth surface. Weller has posted the details of his Lego spider project and says he hopes 3-D printing enthusiasts will try it out.

via Robotic Spider Melds Legos and 3-D Printing | Gadget Lab | Wired.com.

MakerBot is on Mark’s Citizen Reporter podcast!

Bre Pettis envisions a future where people don’t just go out and buy things when something is needed or breaks. He envisions a future where people will once again make things themselves, at home. During one of our legendary breakfast sessions during the 26C3 in Berlin on the last day of 2009, we talked about his vision and his company – Makerbot Industries.

Give it a listen! (mp3 link)

Marc de Vinck is bringing it with the next stage of his Cupcake building documentation! It’s great!

via Make: Online : CupCake CNC build, part 8: Building the X stage.

Check it out! Via @lasern! Would it be possible to make your own corn based filament?

On 02/08/2010 18:00 there will be a workshop at the tokyo hackerspace taught by Yusuke Yumae of HotProceed.

Learn about the revolution in home product manufacturing using affordable desktop 3D printers!

The CupCake is a commercialized kit based upon the open source RepRap 3D printer. It can make parts, models, and machines using plastic fiber that has been melted and deposited by its robotic hand.

Yusuke will demonstrate the part design and build process from start to finish. Watch as a simple part is created using open source CAD software, then translated into commands to drive the machine. In a few minutes, a REAL plastic part comes out of the machine!

Its better than an Ez-Bake Oven!!!

Learn more at the tokyohackerspace blog.

Our designer, James Provost, came up with these initial designs. James came up with this awesome set of style choices and we didn’t go with any one of them, but you can really see the way we were going and what he was thinking. James is a great designer and was flexible and driven enough to come up with the way the name MakerBot would look and designed the site for us.

Joris over at Shapeways is on an interviewing spree! He interviewed Bre and has now interviewed Clothbot!

How do you like your Makerbot?

Loving it!  I had been tracking Fab@Home and RepRap projects for a while but the barriers to entry (sourcing materials, tools and availability of my time) were such that I didn’t jump into them right from the start.  When MakerBot Industries appeared with all the pieces in a convenient kit form, I pounced and landed up with MakerBot Number Nine (see http://clothbot.com/wiki/MakerBotNumberNine) from the first batch.  It’s been particularly fun being involved in bootstrapping the community from the beginning. As each new batch has come online the former-newbies have been pitching in answers to the more common FAQs and taking on wiki editing roles, leaving those of us early-batchers with more time to take deep dives into the larger set of reprap development activities.  In the larger ecosystem of rapid prototyping technologies, I think of my Cupcake as a “bone maker”.  It’s great for prototyping ideas and making the scaffolding around which to wrap skins with more finish. Being able to take a design from drawing to prototype in less than a day is awesome!  When the raw material costs are so low though, being able to tweak and reprint a design ad infinitum can be a bit of a curse.  It takes time to learn when good is good enough.  Using Shapeways has helped impose some discipline on my own design process.

Make sure to check out the whole interview here!

A year ago we started making the first MakerBot prototype. It didn’t work, but isn’t it cute?