MakerBot Industries

ReplicatorG 0019 is now available for your printing pleasure.  This release includes:

• Unlimited undo/redo in model editing mode
• Better support for simultaneous 3-axis motion
• New skeinforge profiles for the Mk. V extruder
• New skeinforge profiles for the automated build platform
• Support for separate PID parameters for HBP
• Experimental .obj and .dae file import

There’s also two new releases of the extruder controller firmware available: one for mk4 extruder users, and one for mk5 extruders that use a relay board.  Get the new ReplicatorG from the download page and give it a try!

Fair Companies made a video about MakerBot, check it out!

You have displeased AnarchyBot3000

Building and operating a 3D printer isn’t all fun and games. ¹² I’ve burned and pinched fingers, yanked out a little hair, and had little bits of molten solder splatter unpleasantly.  Thankfully, I’ve avoided having a robot make me punch myself in the face.

Neil, I think you and I should start a chapter of REAVE. ³

1. Just mostly fun and games.    [↩]
2. Photo courtesy of Bump [↩]
3. Roboticists Escaping A Violent Environment. [↩]

Introducing The MakerBot 3D Scanner! The MakerBot 3D Scanner is a cheap, structured light scanner to turn real things into digital designs. It’s a 3D scanner!

Created by our summer engineer Taylor Goodman, the MakerBot 3D Scanner builds on the 3D scanning technology created by Kyle McDonald.

It’s a cute little scanner kit with lots of depth- just assemble the laser cut parts we supply, and add your Optoma EP-PK-101 PICO Projector, your PlayStation Eye or a Microsoft LifeCam, and an iPod touch or iPhone, (or alternate VGA video source) and you’ve got a small format, low cost 3D Scanner!

The technology behind this device is known as Structured Light 3D Scanning. This kit is for 3D scanning experimenters, as you will need to be a bit savvy to get the best results. If you dont feel comfortable manipulating 3D point clouds, look through the documentation to see if this project is over your head.

Here is the full documentation so you know exactly what 3D scanning with the MakerBot 3D Scanner is all about!

We provide you with a lasercut package so you can mount your (not supplied) projector and (not supplied) PS3 Eye, and get started scanning. When you see your first point cloud you’ll be blown away at what you’ve scanned. If you want, you could duct tape your projector to your webcam and ipod and it might work. One of the benefits of a kit like the MakerBot 3D Scanner is that all a lot of people will have the same setup so that you can compare stories over at the MakerBot Scanner Google Group. Join the conversation!

The first batch of 20 available MakerBot 3D Scanner kits were personally lasercut by our engineer Taylor Goodman at NYC Resistor, and they come with extra dusty DIY character! We’re set to ship these right away. After the first 20, we’ll have 6 week lead time as we level up and get new lasercut parts in. We’re starting with an introductory price of $40 for these first kits and after that the price will go up to $50. Buy a MakerBot 3D Scanner and start experimenting with 3D scanning now!

MakerBot is in the NYTimes today!

Depending on the type of job at hand, a typical 3-D printer can cost from $10,000 to more than $100,000. Stratasys and 3D Systems are among the industry leaders. And MakerBot Industries sells a hobbyist kit for under $1,000.

Check out the full article.

Today my MakerBot equipped with the MakerBot Automated Build Platform is printing out business cards. It makes one every 6 minutes and then rolls it into a box in front of the MakerBot.

Because the MakerBot MK5 Plastruder is so reliable, it has been printing all morning and I’m going to keep it printing all day. I figure at 10 an hour, by the time I leave the botcave, I’ll have 100 3D printed business cards to give away.

For fun, I switched filament colors during the letters on a few of them to get the two toned look. I like the way that looks best, but it requires that I pay attention to it and that’s just too much to ask during the workday.

I had the idea to make business cards last night at 6:15PM and was printing cards by 7PM. My process was that I modeled my name in Sketchup, exported a 3D file in the Collada format, imported the Collada file into Blender and exported it as an STL and then imported it into ReplicatorG and scaled it. Make your own!

Stress

You probably already know that polarized lenses only allow light to pass through in a particular orientation^1 2 You may already know that if you take two polarized lenses and line them up so they are both horizontal you can see through them fine, but as you rotate it so one of them is 90 degrees from the other³ suddenly the second lens goes dark.

What you may not know about is photoelasticity.  If you take a clear piece of plastic and put it between two polarized lenses with a 90 degree orientation, you’ll get to see something very cool.  You will actually be able to see the stress marks within the clear plastic as light, dark, and colored bands.  What’s happening is the slight density variations in the clear plastic are very slightly altering the orientation of the light passing through – making some parts darker and other parts lighter as they are oriented towards or away from the secondary lens.

If you try the same trick, placing a clear piece of plastic between two polarized lenses, and flex the clear piece of plastic you’ll actually be able to see how the plastic responds to the application of force – as you watch stress patterns develop across the plastic.  This process is sometimes used by architects on clear plastic models to better understand how load stress is distributed throughout a building.

I recently obtained several polarized lenses and am very curious to see how my MK4 and MK5 plastruders look through them.

1. Say, either horizontal or vertical. [↩]
2. Photo courtesy of drammatico [↩]
3. Essentially so that one only lets through vertically oriented light and the other only lets through horizontally oriented light. [↩]