MakerBot Industries

The epic launch of the MakerBot Automated Build Platform heralds a new dawn of possibilities for your MakerBot. The MakerBot truly becomes a mini-factory with the addition of the ABP, and can print out as many connectors as you need for the geodesic dome of your dreams. Charles Pax perused the Thingiverse for the things you can print-and-forget with the MakerBot Automated Build Platform. I turned it into a Top Ten list.

If you don’t yet have your MakerBot Automated Build Platform, get it now!

#10 Your Name

Everyone loves vanity plates. Print out your name to display on your mantle, or spell out words for your friends.

#9 Chess Set

Replace lost pieces or entire lost chess sets! Give them as gifts, or use them as paper weights.

#8 Twisted Torus

Bring a 16th-century wooden puzzle to life by printing this reproduction by George Hart. There are dozens of individual pieces, so the ABP will make it a lot easier to print this thing. Bre likes to wear his as a necklace sometimes.

#7 Jewelery

Print earrings, necklaces, rings, bracelets, or even anklets with the ABP. This modular bracelet has slots for LED lights.

#6 Matryoshka Spheres

Be your own Matrushka nesting sphere factory.

#5 Foosball Players

Replace an injured foosball player or recruit an entire team using the ABP.

#4 A City

These buildings are from Tokyo, New York and San Francisco, designed by Thingiverse user gpvillamil. A great challenge would be a replica of New York City printed with the Makerbot Automated Build Platform. There are also models of stone houses on Thingiverse, so you can re-create a medieval village if you’d like.

#3 Armada of Space Invaders

Start printing and don’t stop until you’re swarmed with alien visitors.

#2 A Barrel of Primates

The idea of having an actual barrel filled to the brim with printed monkeys brings joy to my heart. Please, someone, print me a barrel full of monkeys with your ABP. You know you want to!

#1 A MakerBot

It must be done! Just imagine, MakerBots making other MakerBots, non-stop, day and night.

The future of Personal Manufacturing is now! Introducing the MakerBot Automated Build Platform. It’s a heated conveyor belt for your 3D personal manufacturing system! Instead of just making one thing at a time, with the MakerBot Automated Build Platform, you’ll be able to make lots of things at a time. When the MakerBot has MakerBotted something, it just rolls of the MakerBot Automated Build Platform and begins to make the next part!

You know how some machines make one item, and then you start the process over, like a Belgian waffle iron? Well, until today 3D printers pretty much resembled waffle irons. You removed each part by hand, reset the print head, and manually started the next job. With the addition of the MakerBot Automated Build Platform, your waffle iron now resembles the machine they make Eggos with at the factory. You get A LOT of Eggos coming out of the Eggo machine hot and fresh, down a conveyor system and into a box of goodness!

We at MakerBot Industries are really excited, because we love making things, but now we really love making LOTS of things. Now it’s easier than ever to make a lot of one item, or a sequence of different items. All without ever having to reset the machine, load a separate file, or get in there with your hands to remove parts. If I’m still not totally clear regarding exactly what the MakerBot Automated Build Platform will mean for you, here is a movie, to help lock in the key points.

So consider the possibilities. Say you need 10 of that printable tool handle, or 40 of those cable clips. Or you want to build a foosball table, and print out all the plastic men. Or print your own chess set? How about printing out the plastic components of another machine all in a single batch print?

With this latest addition to the MakerBot family. Your machine will not be just a “prototyper” anymore. With the MakerBot Automated Build Platform, your MakerBot becomes a desktop personal manufacturing system making useful object after useful object.

The Automated Build Platform is available now. Get it and turn your MakerBot into your own factory! The MakerBot Automated Build Platform is a perfect match with the MakerBot MK5 Plastruder and MakerBot Filament Spindle.

Duplo Brick to Brio Track adapter

I just love this new Duplo to train track adapter by Zydac.  It is absolutely brilliant on so many levels.  First off, I just like anything that extends an existing toy.  That this extends two different kinds of toys just makes it that much cooler.  I remember as a kid having Duplo blocks and then eventually “graduating” to regular Lego bricks.  The problem is that once you move to the “older” toy, the Duplos become obsolete.

What I like most about this thing is that it totally solves the problem of what do with old Duplo bricks after your kids¹ outgrow them.  Now these old bricks don’t have to be relegated for a dusty bin in the garage.  They can be repurposed and renewed with a totally different toy.

How much more useful are toys when you can use them together seamlessly?  Is this a linear progress – are both toys twice as useful?  With zero actual evidence to back it up, I expect the usefulness would be exponential.

What would you do with a MakerBot?  How would you make toy converters and adapters?  How would you upgrade your toys?

1. Or you. [↩]

Last week, I printed my first object with a Makerbot. It’s a backpack buckle to replace one I broke years ago. The backpack is a large Northface urban traveler bag that I bought for my year abroad in Finland. I’m too lazy to order a new buckle, so I’ve been tying the straps together ever since I broke the buckle:

Untying the knot proved to be more difficult than attaching the newly printed buckle.

The finished product:

The buckle does not hold weight that well. A firm tug on the strap will release it. This particular strap doesn’t bear a load, though, so it works great for holding the strap in place.

Duplicating ducks

About two weeks ago I had taken my daughter to a friend’s house for a dinner party. ¹ She played with some kind of little board game with plastic ducks that you fish out of a moving pond.  On the way back home she asked about that game.

The best, the part that made me proud, was that she asked me about how she and I could print ducks so we could have a version of this game for ourselves.  We discussed how I have red and yellow plastic, but not orange.² How we would have to design the duck, print the duck in yellow, and then paint it with orange for the beak and legs.

I love that my daughter was thinking more about how something was constructed, how we could replicate or create a version of it, and about the material problems we would have to work around in order to create a toy for her.  Arguably, she is really thinking about how to copy existing products rather than designing or inventing.   However, I learned how to draw by copying art from comic books and how to write HTML by taking apart web pages and modifying them.

She could just as easily have asked me to buy the game for her or asked for it as a birthday or Christmas present.  I would much rather she began thinking like an inventor or designer than merely a consumer.

How has your MakerBot changed how your kid sees toys?

1. Photo courtesy of Man & Machine [↩]
2. Yet… [↩]