MakerBot Industries

Jonathan Richards wrote up MakerBot is in the Times (UK). W00t!

The next time you have friends round, and the bottle opener goes missing, consider how impressive it would be if you could say: “Don’t worry. I’ll just print off another.”

For $980, you can purchase what may – if enthusiasts are to be believed – be the next step in a revolution that has already given consumers the ability to print high-quality photos at home: highly customisable 3D-printing.

The ‘Maker Bot’, the brainchild of a 12-person team based in Brooklyn, New York, ‘prints’ 3-D objects out of plastic by rendering a series of 2-D layers, one on top of another.

The contraption, which measures about a cubic foot, works by receiving a series of instructions from a small, micro-controller known as an Arduino, which the owner can program.

As each layer is printed, a thin tube of plastic is funnelled down through a sewing machine-like mechanism on to a metal base – heated to 230 degrees – which moves so that the correct shape is ‘drawn’. A bottle opener takes about 20 minutes to print. Among the other objects available in a giant, online collection of designs known as the ‘Thingiverse’, are jewellery, tools, small toys, even an outline of the head of Thom Yorke, the lead singer of Radiohead.

The Maker Bot – 1,200 of which have been shipped worldwide – is just one example of what was referred to at an internet conference in New York this week as “pluggable culture”, a world where, increasingly, consumers are able to build things using simple interfaces to technologies that would previously have been out of their grasp.

Becky Stern, a US artist, for instance, recently used an Arduino she programmed herself to embed a flashing display in a bag – and made the code available on the web.

Just to keep it real, the MakerBot is $950 and there are 1562 in the wild right now.

Read the rest on the Times site! Registration required.