We better keep an eye on these guys…
Robot armies for peace
Unfortunately, I have never been to the ‘Botcave, MakerBot headquarters, or the general vicinity of either. So, I learned about MakerBot’s Botfarm comprised of sixteen MakerBots at the same time you did. Sixteen MakerBots! After reading about the MakerBot build party at NYC Resistor, I figured they might have plans for a four ‘bot farm, maybe five. Eight if they were going to be ridiculously extravegant. But sixteen? 1
Perhaps most cryptic and ominous was Bre’s tweet on Tuesday:
Thanks, stay tuned!
RT @kwiens: @bre Wow, you guys are on a roll! That’s my two biggest requests knocked off in two days.
Clearly they have some designs for such production capacity in the form of Makerscanner kits. But they don’t need sixteen ‘bots with automated build platforms cranking out parts to meet the entire world wide demand for Makerscanner parts.
Sixteen! What hubris! For $20,000 you could get one commercial grade 3D printer or you could have a ‘Botfarm sixteen strong equipped with MK5 plastruders and Automated Build Platforms. The largest internal build volume for any commerical 3D printer I can find online is about 6000 cubic cm. A MakerBot has about 1300 cubic cm of build space. Thus, a ‘Botfarm sixteen strong has about 22% of the commercial printer.
Importantly, that’s not the only metric. I don’t know how fast a commercial printer is, but let’s assume for the sake of argument it is twice as fast as a MakerBot. 2 That still means a ‘Botfarm could crank out parts eight times faster than a commercial printer.34
What in the world could they need that kind of raw production capacity for? I don’t know what they have planned for the ‘Botfarm, but it is either going to be awesome or apocaplytic.
- Photo courtesy of camerondaigle [↩]
- I suspect a commerical printer using FDM tech isn’t going to be that much faster than a MakerBot, but I’ve got nothing to support this guess. [↩]
- Not to mention at about 1/5 the cost of plastic. [↩]
- For those of you interested in such things, imagine their ‘Botfarm churning out all the parts for a RepRap every 90 minutes. [↩]
| Tagged with | botfarm, makerbot, makerbot comparison, makerbot farm, makerbot production, robot armies for peace, robot army | 8 comments |
8 Comments so far
Allan E.
Judging from our Dimension machines at my workplace, commercial machines tend to be bout the same speed as MakerBots, because while their print heads move faster, they’re also extruding thinner plastic. There might be others that have speed in mind, but so far most 3DP out there has accepted that a print is a one-day job, and thus, who cares if it’s 8 hours or 16? Either way you’re picking it up in the morning.
MakerBlock
@Allan E: Well, then – it seems a ‘Botfarm would operate at 16x the speed of a commercial printer! (I was trying to err om the side of a conservative estimation.)
Dave Durant
I suspect they’re outgrowing the botcave already and are going to build an addition..
Tony Buser
That photo is so awesome!
What would you do with a MakerBot Botfarm? - MakerBot Industries
[...] week asking what you would do with a fully automatic MakerBot before I heard about extent of the MakerBot ‘Botfarm. What would you do with an army of robots at your disposal? Bonus points for any ideas that [...]
Patrik
What would you do with 16 Makerbots? Make 32 Makerbots of course!
At this rate, it’s probably only a decade or so until we transform most of the Earth’s mass into self-replicating Makerbots…
beak90
I’m pretty sure the commercial ones are actually a lot slower than a Makerbot. I think the dimension guys said it could churn out something like this: http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:84 in 2 hours, but I could be very wrong. Also the SLS processes are a lottt faster than FDM. But they are also wayy more expensive…
Collective Intelligence at SBU | SB Bloggers
[...] the New York City at the New York Hall of Science. I will be mostly at the MakerBot booth with the bot farm in action talking about the awesomness of the personal manufacturing revolution. Come say hi to [...]