MakerBot Industries

The Cupcake CNC was presented at an open-source themed talk at the Gottesman Libraries @ Teachers College, Columbia University.

Very Special Thanks to Skye MacLeod from http://aftered.tv for producing this video the New Blankets for organizing the event.

Nose to the Grinding Wheel

Many of our MakerBot users aren’t aware of all the hard work that goes in to producing a CupCake CNC. This is Part I of The Unsung Heros of the 3D Printing Revolution Miniseries. In this Miniseries, we will explore some of the processes that transform raw materials into your CupCakes, right here in Brooklyn, NY, USA.

CupCake’s aren’t all electronics and motors. We put a lot of hard work and elbow grease into making your robot. In this photo we see Widget, MakerBot Employee #2, preparing Z-Rods for the batch 11 shipment of your CupCakes. The Z-rod controls the height of the plastruder head during printing operations and four rods are required per CupCake. Widget carefully shapes each rod by hand, taking care afterward to inspect each one according to our rigid quality standards. Each rod is then carefully packaged, sealed and labeled. This is just one of the hundreds of labor-intensive processes we take to ship your bots.

In the next part of our Miniseries, The Unsung Hero’s of the 3D Printing Revolution, we will take a look at the people who assemble and build your CupCake CNC’s.

OMG.  Gorgeous.  3D scanning is awesome.

Make: Online : Laser-mapped subterranean passages.

Have you ever been in the situation where you’re printing the most amazing object that you downloaded from Thingiverse and the plastruder fails you? You know you’re going to have to rebuild it and it might take you a week to find the half hour it’s going to take to fix it and it’s very frustrating.

Instead of shaking your fist in the air, you can get a spare parts kit and assemble a heater barrel assembly on hand and swap it in if there are any problems.

Besides the heater barrel assembly, the MakerBot Spare Parts Kit includes an extra plastruder pulley and enough nichrome for 3 heater barrels so when you rebuild your first one and build your spare, you’ve still got enough for one more rebuild. Over time these wear down and installing a fresh one can really breathe some life back into your MakerBot. Oh and there is an insulator retainer and idler wheel so you can just slap those in if they break!

Here’s the complete list.

• 1 Extruder Pulley
• 1 Mk4 insulator retainer
• 1 Mk4 Idler wheel
• 3 100k Thermistor
• 1 Mk4 Retainer Washer
• 2 Zip ties
• 2 M3 50mm bolts
• 4 M3 nuts
• 4 M3 washers
• 1 Mk4 Heater barrel
• 1 Mk4 nozzle
• 1 Mk3 thermal barrier (PTFE)
• 2 M5 nuts
• 2 M5 14mm bolts
• 3 feet of nichrome wire. (enough for 3 re-wraps)
• 1 M6 nut
• 5 crimp on connectors
• 6 inches of thermal tape

That’s a lot of awesomeness in a small kit! Get your MakerBot Spare Parts Kit today!

We literally ordered tons of colored plastic in 5 pound rolls. As soon as we put it in the store, folks asked for smaller rolls. We tried a few ways to break them down and none of them were fun at all and all of them resulted in a big mess. Then, in a lightning bolt of inspiration we realized it would all work better with a bucket!

And so we offer you 1 pound rainbow packs. We’re going to offer these at an introductory price of $12 a pack. We’re going to sweat through the weekend turning the bucket and plastic so that you can get some colors, try them out and make some beautiful colored objects.

Cathal Garvey, the man who brought you the makerbottable dremelfuge and micro-lathe needs a mousetrap and he’s willing to pay $25 for someone to design it.

I have a problem. There lives in my house a tiny mouse, and as I am friend to all animals I wish him no harm.

The live mousetrap I tried didn’t work: crafty mouse escaped it repeatedly. I also invented a few wacky methods involving pitfalls, narrow bottles full of bloating foods and even tried to suck him out onto a vacuum cleaner head covered with cheesecloth. No avail!

I am offering a bounty for something:
$25 to the first design that catches the mouse. It must:
- Not harm the mouse
- Be printable on a Makerbot
- Work

Mouse get!

Whichever design Cathal chooses, we’re going to sweeten the deal and send them a MakerBot t-shirt if they will upload the design to Thingiverse under an open license.

Can you build a better (MakerBottable) mousetrap?

Robert W. Lucky over at IEEE has written about MakerBot as the precursor to teleportation. Check it out!

Teleportation: Finally, a Little Science Behind the Science Fiction

Will we look back on the MakerBot as the beginnings of teleportation?

BY Robert W. Lucky // March 2010

Teleportation has been an enduring dream of science fiction. We’re nowhere near the ”Beam me up, Scotty” stage, but there are already hints of teleportation today. It started, in fact, in the 1970s, when—first with facsimile and then with computer networking—we began to reproduce paper documents at a distance by scanning, transmission, and printing. For all practical purposes, the document has been teleported. Now, what about physical objects?

Transmission of the information necessary to reconstruct an object is not a problem; what we need are 3-D scanners and printers. I’m not sure there are any 3-D scanners, but there is a fascinating open-source effort going on now to develop a 3-D printer, called the MakerBot. The MakerBot works like a computer-controlled hot-glue gun, squirting melted plastic onto a platform moved by stepper motors. Under software control, it can reproduce plastic objects up to about the size of a small milk bottle.

You can buy a MakerBot kit for about the cost of a typical personal computer. When assembled, it looks like a trap for small animals made with an Erector set. No one would confuse it with a consumer product, and I get the impression that it takes an engineer to run it. But then, so did the first personal computers (remember the Altair and Heathkits?). Engineers should find the idea intriguing. When I saw a recent demonstration, one attendee cried out, ”I’m really excited, and I want to buy one, but I don’t know why!” I thought that this perfectly encapsulated the experience.

There is already a dedicated group of experimenters out there assembling MakerBots, using 3-D modeling software to describe objects, and using the MakerBot to create teakettles, Darth Vader heads, custom Lego blocks, ornaments, model railroad buildings, and more. While this sounds like a cute hobbyist toy, what it portends for the future could be very significant.

The last piece of the teleportation puzzle is a 3-D scanner that generates data in a form that the MakerBot can use. Such a scanner doesn’t seem impossible. In the meantime, the early adopters are sharing their modeling data; there is a growing library on the Internet of designs for MakerBot objects. These libraries are an inevitable step along the way to widespread use, just as they were in the programming world. (Think of the journey from assembly language to scripting.) Others gradually come up with improvements, which are shared as well. The result is hardware upgrades via e-mail. Eventually, there will come a time when there is little point in crafting your own object models. Someone out there will have already done whatever it is you need.

All this in itself is startling, but looking to the future, there are some fantastic possibilities.

The first possibility is recursion. It is a word that we apply in mathematics and programming, but couldn’t it describe a property of hardware? In other words, couldn’t a MakerBot make a MakerBot? Obviously, we can’t yet render the motors and electronics, but the physical structures of the MakerBot could be made by the MakerBot itself. So you buy one for yourself, and then give duplicates to your friends, who could then make more duplicates for their friends until it becomes a viral MakerBot infection. (Of course, commercial versions of the MakerBot will probably come with industrial-strength copy protection.)

Let’s let our imaginations run even wilder. With modular construction, we could use a MakerBot to make a bigger MakerBot, which in turn could make a bigger MakerBot. The electronics could, of course, stay the same while the physical world grows—or shrinks, for that matter.

As MakerBots proliferate, will they evolve? I imagine they will—not just planned mutations but random ones as well. We might see survival of the fittest, whatever ”fittest” means in a MakerBot world. The possibilities are endless.

But enough dreaming—reality is exciting enough. Beam me up, Scotty! Or if not me, at least a plastic doll.

This article originally appeared in print as “Almost Teleportation.”

via IEEE Spectrum: Teleportation: Finally, a Little Science Behind the Science Fiction.

While in Berlin in December I got to meet Eberhard, aka Zaggo, at the CCC conference. He’s passionate about 3D printing and making beautiful software. He’s built an amazing object manipulator and slicer for mac osx 10.6. It’s beautiful. If you’re running a mac, you owe it to yourself to download it and try it out!

Pleasant Hardware » Blog Archive » Pleasant Future – 3D printing with MakerBot and other hardware.

Just a friendly reminder from Makerbot Industries that plastic filament and water don’t mix well.  We subjected some plastic samples some very humid conditions, i.e. submerging them in water for 48 hours.  Then the samples were used in a plastruder, and checked against a control group.  Turns out, the drenched plastic’s performance was awful, the extruded filament being more brittle and even “popping” during prints.

Turns out, the RepRap folks already know all about it:

Do not remove the coil from its packaging until you need it. The filament picks up atmospheric moisture in humid conditions, which forms bubbles of steam as the molten plastic extrudes.

-from VikOlliver at reprap.org

So now as an added precaution, Makerbot is now shipping all of our plastic in sealed bags with a silica gel packet to keep away humidity.  Happy Printing!