MakerBot Industries

So on my first day at the Trinity Fire Fighting Robot Challenge, I got the Makerbot set up and everything. I was finishing the last bits of the white ABS plastic still in the plastruder and then fed in a new line of yellow ABS. Now this was a first where the yellow ABS got jammed and the pinch wheel striped it. What happened when I opened up the plastruder was the yellow ABS started getting ahead of the white ABS and eventually they bottlenecked above the heater barrel and got stuck. At some point the Z axis also fell out of alignment but luckily one engineer had a level application installed on his iPhone and we quickly restored it to its proper orientation. He chuckled “this is just me reaching a new level of geekiness” but I think that was a really useful application. I cleaned out the filament from the teeth of the gear. I also met Will Langford there, which was pretty cool.

I met some people who’ve seen the Makerbot in Make: Magazine and online but never in person. People at trinity ranged from junior high school students to professional engineers. It was great getting feedback from all of them. Kids of all ages were just imagining all the things they could do with it. Professional engineers took many pictures and analyzed all the components of the Makerbot. I heard responses from “wow” and “awesome” to “highlight of my day”. One engineer even asked if the Makerbot was competing in the firefighting competition. When I said no, he breathed a sigh of relief. Others were not so convinced on sight and wished for a full demonstration. A few of them were disappointed that I could not getting it running that Saturday but nonetheless, we were all familiar with the stage fright our robots get whenever they perform in front of a crowd. Too many times have our robots worked perfectly in our own basements only to watch Murphy’s law come into effect when others are watching.

Thankfully, that was not the case on Sunday. After the teeth were flossed and the filament ready to go, Goldie started printing everything from dodecahedrons to rocket ships to custom parts for some of the robots at the competition and monopoly pieces. It was pretty exciting to see students and engineers from all over the world dreaming up their next contraption to come hot off the Makerbot. I met people from Israel as well as China at the competition. I even had a great chat with another proud owner of a Makerbot from batch 9. By the end of the day, all but 3 postcards about the Makerbot were given out as well as a bunch of dodecahedrons and monopoly pieces. Otherwise, people went home with lots of pictures.

Jack Poon is an intern at MakerBot. Thanks for sharing Jack! If you’ve got an experience you’d like to share, feel free to drop us a line!

Charles Pax and I were up late and explored the world of sanding down the kapton tape on the MakerBot heated build platform. Charles found that sanding added a lot of “tooth” to surface which increases the amount of surface area and makes the plastic adhere to it with more constancy.

Charles wrote it up on his blog:

After an initial bit of frustration with the heated build platform I sanded the surface with 220 grit sand paper, increasing the surface area significantly, thus increasing the adhesive force. Since doing this I’ve had fewer failed prints, most of which were due to the Kapton being too cool.

The heated build platform greatly reduces warping of prints and so if you’ve been wanting to make bigger things on your MakerBot you should get it!