MakerBot Industries

It's pretty hard to make bugfixes look futuristic and cool in a screenshot.

Rejoice, Makerbot Operators: ReplicatorG 0014 is now available!  The focus of this release is bug fixes and stability, so very little has visibly changed, but you should find this release far less likely to hang or break, especially if you’re using Windows or Mac OS X.

We’ve also unleashed v2.0 of the firmware for both the motherboard and the extruder controller into the wild.  You can install them using the firmware uploader built in to ReplicatorG 0013 or later.  The v2 firmware should allow smoother printing over serial connections and reduce unpredictable behavior.

Install it and give it a whirl, and as always let me know if you run into any problems or have suggestions for improving ReplicatorG or the firmware!

A few goodies for advanced users after the cut.

Read the rest of this entry »

To celebrate the Desktop Manufacturing issue of MAKE with MakerBot on the cover, we’ve teamed up with the folks at Make: Magazine to give away a CupCake CNC, in the first ever official MakerBot CupCake CNC giveaway and Thingiverse design challenge! One lucky 3D designer will win a CupCake CNC kit for his/her contribution to Thingiverse, and five runners up will receive something special too! Here’s what you do to enter:
       1.        Imagine something you’d like to see printed on a MakerBot CupCake CNC!
       2.        Design your object using any 3D design software you like.
       3.        Upload your design to Thingiverse!
       4.        Share the link to your Thingiverse thing in the comments over on Make: Magazine Blogpost, by May 5th, 2010 at noon PDT.
Don’t have the design chops? Share your idea for a 3D-printable object (step 1 only) in the comments below to still be eligible to win one of five “poor person’s 3D fabbing” prize packs each including:
       •        1 Arduino Duemilanove board (From us!)
       •        A copy of MAKE, Volume 21, the Desktop Manufacturing issue (Courtesy of Makershed)
       •        Maker’s Notebook (Courtesy of Makershed)
       •        1 package of Shapelock Design Plastic (Courtesy of
The Makershed)

Only those who upload a 3D design to Thingiverse and share the link here are eligible to for the giveaway of a CupCake CNC kit. Enter as many times as you like, but you can only win one prize. Although we’ll allow you to submit Things you’ve already designed/posted, we highly encourage you to make something new for the challenge! Winners will be announced on May 12. Need help getting started? Try out Sean’s OpenSCAD tutorial!

Robot Challenge! • Robot Challenge #7: Design a Robot that Makes….

Loyal Customers, Hackers and Dreamers,

We just put Batch #15 up for sale on the store. Our expected ship date for this batch is the middle of May. To summarize, this is my best estimate of ship dates for the following batches:

Batch #12 – Complete!

Batch #13 – We have already shipped half of this batch. If all goes well we will finish shipping by the end of the week. Our original commit date for this batch was the end of April, so we are on track to beat this deadline.

Batch #14 – If all goes well we will begin shipping this batch next week. Original commit date was the middle of May so we are on track to beat this deadline as well.

Batch #15 – Estimated ship date in the middle of May. I’ll keep you updated as I know more.

Special thanks to flatironjoe for giving me some customer feedback. As a result, I’m doing my best to keep you updated on a regular basis.

Cheers,

Sam

I met Lawrence Downes because he recognized me and zach and I asked him what he likes to make. He proceeded to tell me about cooking lead on his family stove to pour into the ballasts of sailboats. This dude is a badass and living life to the fullest with heart and he also happens to be an awesome writer and I’m not just saying that because of what he wrote about MakerBot. I’ve set up a google alert to read everything he writes. You should too. – Bre

By LAWRENCE DOWNES
Published: April 10, 2010

It would be very cool, Bre Pettis decided, to take his desktop manufacturing robot, his MakerBot, out of its big black case and plug it in right there in the Amtrak dining car. It would be, like, ’bots on a train.

I was at Boston’s South Station, when I realized I was standing next to an Internet famous person. I’d seen Mr. Pettis’s Web videos for Make, a magazine for digital do-it-yourselfers. He has a face you remember. Thick black glasses, unruly hair and sideburns. He and his business partner Zach Hoeken, in a porkpie hat, were going home to Brooklyn after showing their MakerBot — a 3-D printer — at M.I.T.

In the dining car, Mr. Pettis started connecting cables as he explained. A computer slices a digital image into thin layers, which a MakerBot reads and replicates. It squirts hot plastic, the kind Legos are made of, onto a platform that moves up, down and sideways, building a replica one squiggly layer at a time. It can model anything you want: gears, or a goblet. Big factories use similar machines to make prototypes. MakerBot is a little factory for your home. Bre and Zach have a company that sells them, $750 for the basic kit.

A guy walked by and ogled the box glowing with L.E.D.’s. “These aren’t the droids you’re looking for,” Mr. Pettis said. That struck him as funny. He decided to recreate the “Star Wars” scene for an iPhone photo. He had me gesture like Obi-Wan. “These aren’t the droids you’re looking for,” I said, realizing I was in the presence of a highly appealing geekiness.

I asked Mr. Pettis about copyright, and his face darkened. MakerBot is a purely open-source project. It’s their design, but we were all taught to share as kids, Mr. Pettis said. Sharing is what we like to do.

He looked on his laptop for something to make for me. We chose a bottle opener. The ’bot started doing its thing while we talked about how awesomely cool it was, and how cool it could become. What if it had multiple printer heads? What if you could print on toast, with Nutella? (Actually, you can.)

I thought: What if we could all grow up like these guys, who kept their childish delight after gaining intellectual voracity and fine motor skills. Mr. Pettis handed me a blue bottle opener. “Hot off the ’bot,” he said. We opened three beers with it.

Cathal Garvey has been testing the traps submitted for his mousetrap challenge!

Regarding the Merry-Go-Round trap, I printed it and set it near the home of the “culprit” for the duration of the Easter weekend. It was baited with a blueberry and some crushed pine nuts, the latter were as close to peanut butter as I could find.

It was my intention to leave it there for several days, then leave it outdoors if no action was seen, then leave it in the lab if no results after the outdoors site.

As it turns out, there was a visitor to the trap; the nut bits were all gone, the blueberry was..soiled, and there was evidence of mouse pee on the plastic (ew). Unfortunately, the trap didn’t work; the wall didn’t seem to have moved, and I think the mouse just shouldered under it to get in and out.

My take on the trap design; it’s a really clever concept, and I think it really could work! But, the interior wall needs to be braced from both above and below, because in the print I made the interior wall just flops over in its seating. Ideally it’d also rotate really freely, so perhaps seating it in a bearing would help, too. As mentioned, it’d be nice if the design were circular with a side-hole for entry also to simplify things.

Overall, I love the concept and I think this trap could work with some design revisions. Unfortunately it didn’t work for this competition, so on to the next trap, ClapTrap!

Fab@Home has announced it’s new 3D printer designs. They don’t sell 3D printers, they do research and developent and then they set them free for all to benefit from and build on their own. How awesome is that? The Fab@Home project is out of Cornell University and I’ve been a big fan of their work since I first got into 3D printing. The fab@home machine is a bit different than the MakerBot in that it focuses on a syringe based toolhead instead of plastic extruder.

I asked Jeffrey Lipton some questions about the new machine to get the full scoop!

Can you give a short history of Fab@Home?

Fab@Home was started in 2006 by Professor Hod Lipson and Evan Malone of the Cornell Computational Synthesis Lab. Hod Lipson did not set out to revolutionize fabbing. Rather, while attempting to design a robot that could “evolve” by reprogramming itself and producing its own hardware, he realized that he needed a rapid-prototyping fabrication machine, or “fabber”. Although, this technology had existed for about two decades, they were extremely expensive, could only print one material, and were restricted to high-tech labs. Therefore, Lipson, with then PhD student Evan Malone, decided to encourage experimentation and develop a low cost open source fabbing system. Within a year the project was award the Popular Mechanics Breakthrough award and hundreds of kits were built. Model 1 fabbers were used on 6 continents in research labs, fablabs, and private homes. For more information see out history page on the Fab@Home wiki.

What’s exciting about Model 2?

Model 2 is a complete redesign of the fabber system. Model 1 was revolutionary, and we learned a lot about the needs of the communities who use the Fab@Home system. When used for organ printing research in bio labs, or in high school, wiring and assembly time was a major barrier for users. While hackers and other of technical backgrounds could bang out a unit in a weekend, others struggled. Additionally the positioning and speed of the system was insufficient for many long large prints.

Now the Model 2 unit uses closed loop positioning to make more accurate and higher speed prints. All wiring is done with Cat5 and usb cables, and the system has been designed to reduce the price to approximately $1600 in material. The system can be build using only a hex wrench set, a small hand file and a soldering iron for thermoplastic inserts.

The Model 2 can use interchangeable tool heads, allowing the machine to be used for printing plastics, milling with a Dremel attachment, and multi material prints, giving it new versatility. Multi material ability on the model 1 allowed us to printer batteries, actuators, sensors and countless other active objects, and the model 2’s design makes these tasks even easier.

One more thing, the Model 2 was designed entirely by undergraduate students, members of the Cornell University Fab@Home student project team. The new software we are designing is being made by Cornell students working with members of the NextFab Organization and the Centro de Tecnologia da Informação Renato Archer (CTI) in Campinas Brazil

Please explain your BSD license. Why did you choose that one?

When Fab@Home first debuted, intellectual property was a major stumbling block for the field of Solid Freeform Fabrication research. All machines were expensive, making you afraid to experiment. No one would try to stick chocolate in an Objet machine! As soon as someone had a good working idea, it was patented, and innovation was halted while it was capitalized. This lead to SFF being uses exclusively in niche markets, creating a low demand for systems, which in turn led to high cost proprietary systems. Making a BSD licensed kit allowed everyone to have a common platform for innovation, which industry and individuals could use alike. Its much easier for industry to innovate if there is no IP strings attached.

With Open-source hardware, licensing comes down to method of production. Fab@Home uses off the self parts to create a system and relies on existing infrastructure. RepRap bootstraps its way towards its own method of manufacturing, and Makerbot relies mostly on centralized production. BSD makes sense if you don’t have a centralized means of production and you want to push innovation on all fronts. Since Fab@Home uses off-the-shelf components, people must profit off the design. Additionally it’s useful to have community members bundle the kits or make units for profit. There is nothing patentable in the design of the Fab@Home units, so there is no real need to protect it.

What are your hopes and dreams for the future?

My hope for personal fabrication is that it will grow into a horizontal industry. In the days of the mainframe computer each company made the chips, OS and programs. Today we have companies that specialize on a single part of the machine. Now companies make large 3d printers and control all aspect from materials to software. Fab@Home, RepRap, and Makerbot are like the early kits that started the personal computer revolution. Eventually, as demand and markets grow, we will have distinct companies and projects to make materials, deposition tools, control electronics, chassis and software. The first step was opening up the SFF systems to any material with the Model 1; Kraftmark already makes several materials for the Fab@Home. Next we will need to develop community wide standards to enable project to specialize.

I dream of making our new Fab@School Project a reality. We are working with the Glen Bull at the Curry School of Education in the University of Virginia on reimagining science and math education. Researchers have proven that the reason Americans hate science and math is because we tend to have bad science and math classes. We have learned to hate math and science as a society. We have not however learned to hate engineering! By putting digital fabrication into the classroom, we hope to enable a new type of hands on building oriented curriculum for schools which will provide students with motivation to learn about science and math in the k-6 age range.

My personal hope is to get my PhD. I started on this project as an undergraduate, and am now a PhD candidate in Professor Lipson’s CCSL. Professor Lipson’s goal is to 3d print a robot, and Evan Malone made the first great leaps in that direction but we still have a lot of work. I’ve been assigned to finishing the task. At some point in the not too distant future, a robot will crawl out of a Fab@Home and I will be allowed to walk out of Cornell with a PhD.

Thanks Jeffry! Great to see this design hit the internet! Go open source 3D printing!

I’ve been receiving a lot of requests to provide more information on our status of shipping orders. I’ll do my best to keep you informed on a regular basis with as much information as I have.

CupCakes

Today we finished shipping Batch #12. We have already begun to ship Batch #13. Our original estimated date for shipping Batch #13 was at the end of April, but we’ve been working around the clock to get them to you as soon as possible. At this point I can’t give you precise ship dates on individual orders, but I can tell you that we are currently ahead of schedule for Batch #13.

Generation 3 Electronics

Many of you have pre-ordered Generation 3 Electronics. We’ve shipped a number of these out already. My best estimate is that we’ll be able to ship the rest at the end of next week.

That’s all I have for now. I’ll keep you posted as I know more. Thanks for all of your support! We’re working hard to grow our company and meet/beat our deadlines.

I love the sight of fresh cardboard

This week we’re finishing up shipping out batch 12. This spring we’ve had some challenges getting all the bits and pieces for this batch but things are moving right along. We’ve had a few experiences lately where we’ve literally bought out all the stock in the world of a part and had to get the parts custom manufactured for us which takes time. It may just look like a pile of boxes to you, but for us, these boxes are bundles of potential creative energy waiting to be opened, built into MakerBots and used to make almost anything. We really can’t wait to see what you do with them and we’re working hard putting these kits together and keeping them going out the door to you!

Today MakerBot Operator Will Langford is on the front page of his school’s website at tufts.edu with a MakerBot. Will was our first intern ever here at MakerBot Industries!