MakerBot Industries

Makerbot veterans (owner of bot #117 traveled from Connecticut) and fresh MakerBot Operators alike gathered Wednesday evening to answer these questions and help Makerbot Industries imagine the Makerbot of the future.

Do you want it to look like a Camaro, a Cadillac, a VW bug, or an antique BMW? An old radio? A shiny robot?

Where would you keep it? Your office, the garage, the kitchen, or your man cave? What color should it be? How big would it be? What does it look like? Is it more important to make it cheaper or have better resolution?

Everyone responded that reliability is both priority 1 and 2 and that tinkering is fun, but sometimes it’s just nice when something works perfectly when you want it to.

Do you like having to tweak the machine? Or would you rather just have it work out of the box? How would you improve it?

If you could make anything with your Makerbot – anything at all – what would you make?

The most interesting topic of the evening was whether the Makerbot looks more like a Mercedes Unimog or Volkswagen Thing.

What do you think? There are a lot of ways you can make your voice heard right now. There are comments on the blog, emails to contact@makerbot.com, the google group, and then there is the brainstorm page and now the MakerBot idea torrent!

Unimog photo courtesy of Wikimedia/Stefan Flöper

VW Thing photo courtesy of Wikimedia/Bull-Doser

It’s my first day as a blogger-in-residence at Makerbot Industries and Bre already has me downloading models from Thingiverse and wiring up my laptop to a Cupcake. I’ve been a casual follower of Makerbots for awhile now, but it’s time to get serious. Today, I print my first thingamajig.

I decided to go for the practical and make myself a new backpack strap buckle. I’ve been missing the male side of a buckle for a good seven or eight years now. Today is the day I reclaim the functionality of my backpack strap!

Browsing through Thingiverse, I’m struck by how many things there are out there that I actually need. Things that will rescue half-forgotten or semi-working items I’m too attached to to throw out, but haven’t gotten around to fixing or replacing.

So I’m making a “To Print” list, prioritized from most needed to least:

• Backpack buckle: Lost half of one almost a decade ago
• Rear bike mount: I really need one but I’m not sure the design on Thingiverse will fit my bike
• Tripod mount adapter: I lost two about a year ago
• Desk cord holder: Messy cords drive me crazy, but not crazy enough to buy something to organize them
• Butter dish: The bottom plate of my Ikea butter dish fell apart. My roommate super-glued it, but it fell apart again
• Tube squeezer: Nice to have, but I could probably survive without one
• iPhone dock: My iPhone usually just lays on the floor or on my desk, but it seems more civilized to have a special dock for it
• Business card case: First I need new business cards, though
• Cap for Nikon lens: Pre-emptive printing in case I lose one (you can never have too many)
• Ergonomic plastic bag holder: Nice to have
• Vertical standing soap: Probably could live without it, but it might look nice in the bathroom
• Bull’s head: Okay, I don’t really need this but I’m a Taurus and so I have an irrational emotional attachment to bulls

By the end of the day, I already had a backpack strap buckle and was starting to feel pretty confident with my printing skills. But I did make a couple of mistakes along the way. Bre just got back from Ars Electronica celebrating an honorable mention in the Digital Communities category. He traveled all the way to Linz, Austria and back with his Cupcake CNC, and enlisted me to help get it operational after its long journey. After installing the new Plastruder MK5 on it, he told me to download the ReplicatorG software and a file from Thingiverse, and fire away. He also handed me some files to install for the new MK5.

On the first run, I forgot to install the MK5 files. It still printed the male side of the buckle, but it wasn’t that pretty. Once I got the proper files installed it looked much better:

But then Bre disappeared, leaving me all alone with the printer. Feeling brave, I tried a few things on my own, and that’s when some things went wrong. I accidentally directed the extruder straight into the part plate at one point, and the Cupcake made some pretty horrible noises.

“How many times did you break it?” Bre asked, smiling, when he finally came back. Fortunately, none of the damage was permanent. Both the Makerbot and I walked away pretty much unscathed, and I can’t wait to try out my new backpack buckle!

Olivia Koski is a Laser Engineer with a physics degree and she’s done work making big freaking lasers. Now, she’s taken a break from lasers to go to journalism school getting her masters at NYU and she’ll be at the Botcave a day a week. She’s got lots of writing experience having written for WIRED and Popular Mechanics and she’ll be working on projects and helping to document the behind-the-scenes action here.

You don't need to repeat my mistakes...

Stupid mistakes you probably won’t make when assembling your Plastruder MK5

• I can’t believe this – but I actually mounted the drive gear upside down. ¹  There were three symptoms of this problem.  First, I  couldn’t hand feed the ABS filament.  Second, no matter how much I crunched down on the filament with the thumbscrew,² the filament would extrude about 1cm or so, nothing for 30 seconds, and this cycle would repeat.  Third and finally, when I pulled the filament out there was a bizarre pattern of nasty chew marks and what looked like stretching on the filament.  These are not the sort of marks I would expect to see from this drive gear with its super small teeth.  The first symptoms was caused by the wider base of the drive gear obstructing the filament path and preventing hand feeding.  The last two symptoms were caused by the set screw on the gear biting into the filament about every 30 seconds, forcing the filament down a little ways, and then just rubbing against the filament with the smooth part of the base of the gear.
  • I spent an embarrassingly long time puzzling over this problem before figuring it out.  Even after I realized what I almost certainly had done, I couldn’t believe I had installed the drive gear upside down.  Alas, it was true.  Fortunately, the fix was simple – unbolt the motor, pull off the drive gear, drop it back on, tighten, insert motor, bolt it back on.  All extrusion problems magically melted away.
• I replaced my most severely warped threaded rods on my ‘bot but encountered a bizarre problem.  Even after leveling the Z stage perfectly, it would become misaligned almost immediately as soon as I moved the stage more than a centimeter or so.  I went through this process several times – level, raise, lower, realign, re-level, etc.  Here are some of the problems I guessed at and how I went about eliminating them as causes.
  • I began to wonder if the new threaded rod and a different pitch to it. ³  In order to test if there was a different pitch to the threaded rods, I took four pieces of aluminum foil, pressed a piece of foil firmly against each of the four rods, pulled out the four pieces of aluminum foil and compared the threads with my calipers and ruler.  They were all fine.
  • If the Z axis belt was too loose one or more Z axis rods could lose a step.  I tightened the Z axis belt and tested it again.  The problem remained.
  • Theoretically, the nuts on the Z axis rods could have lost their threads…  So, I held one and adjusted the Z axis belt.  It should want to raise or lower as you adjust the belt.  Wait?  What’s that?  It isn’t!
  • What does it mean when adjusting the belt doesn’t raise or lower a Z axis nut?  It means you installed the new Z axis rods, put the ‘bot back together, and forgot to tighten the set screws in the toothed pulleys onto the Z axis rods.  The result is that the Z axis pulley will be spinning freely without forcing the captive nut on the Z axis rod to raise or lower.

I certainly hope you learn from these mistakes.  Both were confounding problems caused by ridiculous errors.  However, if you have these problems, hopefully you’ll know how to fix them!

1. The next time you see me, feel free to point and laugh. [↩]
2. The only thumbscrew to survive my testosterone driven smashing. [↩]
3. It did not. [↩]

Help MakerBot understand what the community wants by sharing your ideas on the MakerBot Idea Torrent. Anyone can view and submit ideas. You’ll need to register on SourceForge to vote on ideas or to submit new ones. This will help guide research and development at MakerBot and keep track of who comes up with the best ideas.

An idea torrent “lets people submit their ideas, brainstorm them, and vote on them. The most popular ideas and requests are then easily assessable.” You may remember when Dell Idea Storm started. The most popular idea was preinstalled Linux. Now they sell Ubuntu laptops. This system is also used on the Ubuntu brainstorm site.

This is an experiment. We started with a wiki page for ideas, but this has vote up functionality and let’s folks respond and have conversations about ideas. If you’ve already submitted an idea on the brainstorm wiki page, make sure you write a detailed submission on the idea torrent.

UPDATE 2010-09-11: You don’t actually have to sign up with source forge to submit ideas. You can log in via OpenID. That means you can log in using your identity with Google, Yahoo, WordPress, or many others.

Sweetener Holder v0

Some of my favorite things to print on my MakerBot are truly mundane.  My sweetener holder is nothing special – basically a open-top box with two curved cut-outs at the sides.  However, of all the things I’ve printed this is the one thing I use every single day.  I designed and printed it for less time and money than it would have taken me to get one from the nearest store.

I realize jrombousky‘s Strap Buckle Clip¹ has been around for a while, but it’s still one of my favorite things.  Years ago I sewed a carrier bag² and had to use store bought plastic buckles.  It’s these kinds of parts that are so normal and so mundane that it’s just easier, faster, and cheaper to design and print than it would be to go out and get.

I have to wonder though – is this me being lazier or is it actually more work?  Any time I may need to head out to pick up some small item I ask myself “Is there any way I can just design something and print a solution here?”  The other day I looked at the plastic drawstring cincher on my wife’s knitting bag.  This is the sort of thing you see on drawstring pouches, bags, shorts, etc.  It is spring loaded and pinches the cord so that the string stays taught.  After examining it for a moment, I realized that it was a super simple mechanism and I had everything I needed to print something similar.

I’ve uploaded it to Thingiverse, so I hope someone gets some use out of it.  The only catch is it makes use of a standard ball point pen spring. ³  Then again, I see reusing something previously useless as a huge bonus.

1. Be sure and check out the amazing derivatives of this Thing. [↩]
2. Read: Man-purse [↩]
3. I’ve been dying to find a legitimate MakerBot use for one of these! [↩]