MakerBot Industries

MakerBot is looking to expand. The next person we’re looking to hire is an electrical engineer. We’re looking for someone with a deep and masterful understanding of the workings of electrons and how to control them. If you are the type of person who ends up boring people at dinner parties talking about Boron and other doping agents, you may be our person! This position will be focused on building the latest and greatest open source electronics for MakerBot, so we’re really looking for someone with experience in mechatronics. The role will primarily be electronics based, but they will be controlling things such as motors, relays and other mechanical beasts.

If this is not you, but describes someone you know, please send them our way. If you refer us someone we end up hiring, we’ll hook you up with 5lbs of plastic.

Check out the craigslist posting for full details on the position and details on how to apply.

Modular Dungeon Walls                                                       Dungeon Tiles for Miniatures Gaming

Remember the first time when you became fascinated with dungeons and dragons? Plenty of designs have been uploaded in Thingiverse keeping dungeons and dragons still cool and exciting. Check out the Modular Dungeon Walls by TheRooster or Dungeon Tiles for Miniatures Gaming by Telvin_3d.  The Modular Dungeon Walls’s grid is 30mm made with 4mm thick walls and 26mm squares. The Dungeon Tiles for Miniature Gaming uses 21 scale dungeon tiles based on 25mm squares in 2×2 grids. Receive more instructions and details by visiting their pages.

Watch live streaming of TechCrunchDisrupt that is taking place in NYC from May 24-26. Bre will be on a panel at 2pm EST called “Getting it Built” with John Biggs, Editor, CrunchGear; Adam Hocherman, Founder & President, American Innovative; Liam Casey, CEO, PCH International and Christopher Hawker, Founder & President, Trident Design.

Check out our Fail Force test rig at the MakerBot R&D lab- We test out the maximum push strength of the new MK5 Drive Gear!  Watch the results in real time!

Nirmal Thapa, pictured above working away at the MakerBot Botcave is going to be with us this summer helping on the blog and exploring ways to get more MakerBots in the hands of teachers and students. I’m looking forward to his posts!

We’ve been working very hard in the MakerBot R&D lab lately. The thing that has been our main focus lately is the Plastruder. As many of you know, it can be a bit finicky at times. One of the failure modes of the extruder is that the drive pulley will strip the filament. Drawing on excellent research by Nophead and others in the open source 3D printing community, we’ve developed an improved drive mechanism: the MK5 Drive Gear. In fact, this drive pulley pushes about 2x harder than the old MK3/MK4 Drive Pulley. We jut got 700 of them in the MakerBot Store.

The design is pretty simple: there is a chunk of Stainless Steel 304 with a knurled groove that has the same diameter as the old drive pulley. Therefore, this part is a drop-in replacement for the old pulley. Since it is stainless steel it is very difficult to damage the pulley, even if you tighten it down too far. Furthermore, since the knurling on the pulley is so fine, it has a limited ability to self-clean as any stripped filament will typically fall out of it. If you’re feeling hardcore, you can download it from Thingiverse and make it yourself.

As sexy as this new pulley is, we wanted to be able to prove that it was indeed better than the old system. So, we turned to our trusty friend, Science! We formed a hypothesis (that the MK5 drive gear is better than the MK3 Drive Pulley). We created a test rig and we ran a bunch of tests. We tested the MK4 with both the new and old drive pulleys at a variety of spacings. As we had hoped, the new MK5 drive pulley came out on top.

For the force measurements, we used a very nice yet affordable Dillon GL-500 Force Gauge. This gauge has a few really nice features: a 500N capacity (~50kg) with an accuracy of 0.2N (~20g). Besides being nice and accurate, it can also measure both pull and push forces. It can record peak force, and even has RS-232 output which we could use to record measurements digitally. It is also a really solid, well built device.

The test rig was lasercut from some plywood and bolted to a chunky 2×6. If you want to replicate our results at home, you can download our template and lasercut it. The test process was pretty straightforward. We typically repeat this process 10x per setup to get a decent sample size.
The design is pretty simple: there is a chunk of Stainless Steel 304 with a knurled groove that has the same diameter as the old drive pulley. Therefore, this part is a drop-in replacement for the old pulley. Since it is stainless steel it is very difficult to damage the pulley, even if you tighten it down too far. Furthermore, since the knurling on the pulley is so fine, it has a limited ability to self-clean as any stripped filament will typically fall out of it.

1. Unclamp filament drive, remove the motor, and clean the teeth.
2. Re-attach motor, and set the filament idler wheel distance.
3. Clamp down extruder filament drive with output hole right against the force gauge probe.
4. Rest the force gauge to record Push force in Peak mode
5. Run the filament drive forward at 255 PWM (full-on)
6. Wait until the filament reaches the force gauge probe and fails (you can tell because the force gauge numbers climb and eventually stop at the peak.)
7. Record the peak force reading

After a bit of testing, some pretty clear results emerged: the MK5 drive pulley can generate a much stronger push force before failure by a solid margin. Since it is made from Stainless Steel, it is also much stronger and more durable than the Aluminum pulley which can easily suffer damage to its teeth when setting the gap. A word of warning: if your hot end does jam, the new drive pulley is strong enough that it may actually destroy your insulator retainer. You should definitely print out some replacements before you begin using with the new and improved MK5 Drive Gear.

If you would like to get your hands on this new hotness, they are available right now in the MakerBot store. Hot off the lathe. The kit comes with a new drive pulley, a 3mm set screw, and a new spacer stick so you can get the best force out of your drive pulley.

For the curious, here is the data we generated during our testing:

I printed a stereoscopic viewer by Kongorilla and it took about 6 hours of printing time and it fit together great. I lasercut some acrylic mirrors and slapped them in and supperglued it shut since I didn’t have the right screws on hand. It works great! We’ll have these on hand at Maker Faire! If you haven’t seen Kongorilla’s pdf of images, it’s freaking awesome. Check it! Kongorilla won a runner’s up prize in the MakerBot Giveaway. This is a super fine design and great documentation.

So far my favorite thing to do is watch a slideshow on flickr.

It turns out youtube now has 3D movies and these viewers work perfectly!

“So what do people make on a MakerBot?”

We get this question all the time and the truth is that there is no one thing that people need a MakerBot for. Some people use them for practical objects and some people use them to make decorative objects, some people prototype contraptions and others, like the amazing and wonderful Becky Sterns, make a Yeti! So awesome!!!!

Becky is going to have this yeti at Maker Faire and has agreed to let it stand guard over the MakerBot table for part of the Faire. You have to come check it out!

The end of May is MakerBots out in the world time! Besides Google I/O and Maker Faire, MakerBot will be exhibiting at Techcrunch Disrupt and I will also be on a panel at 2:00pm on Wednesday called “Getting it Built” with John Biggs, Editor, CrunchGear, Adam Hocherman, Founder & President, American Innovative, and Liam Casey, CEO, PCH Internationalas well. Should be good stuff, if you’re there, make sure to find me and say hi!

Maker Faire is an extravaganza of making things! It’s this weekend in San Mateo and it’s going to be a blast!

We’re getting ready for Maker Faire this weekend by tightening all the screws on our MakerBots and packing lots of ABS so we can print things out all weekend. We may even have a Frostruder set up if we can find a compressor or an airtank and a bicycle pump. We’ll have a table set up to show MakerBots MakerBotting!

If you’re planning to be there, plan to find us and say hi!