MakerBot Industries

It may be harder to print a unicorn on this printer...

I love seeing printable versions of MakerBot parts.  Tmophoto just uploaded a printable version of the brand spanking new Unicorn.¹

What other MakerBot parts can you print up with your own MakerBot?  Oh, nothing much, just…

• Printable Automated Build Platform
• Printable 3D scanner
• Printable Paxtruder
• Printruder, printruder, and printruder
• Printable Frostruder
• Printable dinos, printable dinos, and printable dinos

1. Photo courtesy of gis [↩]

Wait, that's not a football play?

The other day I uploaded a design for a printable battery.  I think the concept behind the design, a watertight vessel for holding an electrolyte with spaces for two anodes, is sound.  However, I’m certain the design is sub-optimal.  You can find better anodes than copper and zinc and a better electrolyte than a saline solution. ¹

I just really like the idea of a printable battery.  It reminds me of the Mr. Fusion from Back to the Future – just toss some stuff in and fire it up.  I’d love to see a flashlight, clip on reading LED, or water throwie that uses this kind of printable power.  Print, insert electrodes, throw in saltwater, glow!  Or, what about a piece of ornament or jewelery that you can empty, toss into a saltwater solution, recharge, and keep rocking?  Or toys that you assemble, dunk in salt water² , and it just works.  Or printing a toy that requires batteries – and then handing printed batteries to the recipient?

I’m hoping that someone better versed in chemistry or materials science³ can improve the heck out of this design.  I can think of several ways to improve this design:

• A version that can work with galvanized nails instead of zinc sheets – so you can make it instantly useable with stuff around the house.
• A version that includes a screw cap, and perhaps room for a gasket, so it can be easily “recharged.”
• A version intended to house better anode materials or better electrolyte solution.
• A version that includes a better way to attach the leads to the battery.  Right now it just has holes where the leads are inserted.  All it would take is a drop of ABS glue or acetone to seal the plastic around the lead.
• A version that includes ribs that separate the zinc anode from the internal copper coil.  The argument against a barrier between the two anodes is that it will not offer any barrier to the electrolyte.  However, if you include a barrier it will prevent the two anodes from touching one another accidentally inside the battery – but thin enough to allow the electrolyte to pass through easily.  The reason I didn’t design this first draft with a barrier or ribs is that it would take a really well tuned ‘bot to print it without strings.
• I’m pretty sure that the overall power of the battery could be increased by wiring copper and zinc electrodes in series and dunking each section into a separate electrolyte solution.

Chemistry and electronics are not my strong suits – I’m hoping that others can help correct and expand upon these ideas.

1. Check out this website for more information about using a variety of materials to make batteries. [↩]
2. Or vinegar? [↩]
3. I’m looking at you Capolight! [↩]

Introducing the MakerBot Unicorn Pen Plotter Kit!  Add 2D to your 3D printer!

The MakerBot Unicorn Pen Plotter is the next step in the evolution of the MakerBot CupCake CNC line of accessories. It takes your MakerBot in a whole new direction- illustration and pen plotting!

Now you can hold the power of the unicorn’s horn in your MakerBot 3D printer!

Created by our summer engineer Will Langford, the MakerBot Unicorn Pen Plotter Kit will allow you to impress your friends with amazing drawings and more.  It has nice tight reproduction quality, and the images have a beautiful and unique drawn character to them.

You can pick your favorite pens, markers or drawing implements, load your raster or vector art files, and watch your machine draw! It works by holding a pen, marker, swivel blade, or something roughly cylidrical and then uses a hobby servo to lift the implement up and down as your xy stage moves around. It turns out it’s perfect for drawing on sticky notes.

You can make unique stickers, diagrams, UPC or QR codes.  Sudoku puzzles, digital photographs, logos, you can even mark up PCBs for etching!  Its an 299.6 DPI CNC pen plotting system for your MakerBot.

The MakerBot Unicorn Pen Plotter can accept pens or tools up to a width of a fat white board marker. That got you thinking? Uh huh! This new toolhead for your MakerBot that can bring a breath of fresh air into your 3D printer by transforming it into a machine that can make 2D art and more!

Buy the MakerBot Unicorn Pen Plotter kit now and for full documentation click here: http://wiki.makerbot.com/unicorn

Note: We’ve noticed that when we launch things, we get slammed with orders. Please be patient as this item ships in 1-3 weeks from the time of your order. We’ll get it to you as fast as we can!

Clamp solutions for friendless tinkerers

This post could also be entitled “How to build an Automated Build Platform if you have no friends.”  There are a lot of assembly steps that would be a lot easier if you have a second pair of hands or special clamps for holding things.  If you’re like me you have neither. 

1. If you don’t have a set of special clamps for holding parts in place, you can wrap a rubber band around the handles of a pair of pliers.  This will make it grip tight enough to hold small parts steady. (Pictured above)
2. If you don’t have a second set of hands for holding little pieces down, you could just use a small piece of tape to keep them in place.  This seemed to work out pretty well for me. (Pictured above)
3. I have some really long heavy gauge twist-tie like wires.  Sometimes I will twist them around parts in order to position them easily.  With this project I found it easiest to wrap the motor wires around a roll of blue painter’s tape so that the ends stuck off about an inch or so.  Doing this kept the wire weighted down and leads positioned so that I could easily tin them.
4. It’s important that you gently press down on the small resistor and capacitor as you solder them down on the one side.  If you don’t, the small parts will actually shift as the solder melts.¹
5. I used my utility knife in place of the exacto/razor knife for all steps requiring a knife.  I’d suggest being super careful no matter what you use.
6. When soldering the second lead of the thermistor, it would be better to cut the small piece of wire to just barely overlap with the lead for the thermistor.  When you attach the lasercut top to the automated build platform, there’s a large cutout that will accommodate the bumps left from the soldered parts – so they won’t be squished flat against the lasercut top.  If you trim the small piece of wire, there will be less of a bump between the circuit board and the lasercut top, allowing the platform to be slightly more level.
7. If you are assembling the belt without a friend, it’s pretty easy to take a longer piece of kapton tape (say 30mm or so) and tape both ends to a table or other clean surface.  Then you can easily lay the belt on it without getting anything tangled.
8. A word of warning – I followed the directions pretty closely and ended up with a belt that looked exactly like the belt shown in the step that says, “Bend the creases to remove them. Your result should look like this.”  However, in the next step it appears the belt is in a mirrored position.  I doubt this makes a difference in its operation, so I forged ahead with the rest of the build.
9. When assembling the rollers I found it easiest to put a piece of folded cardboard on the ground, brace the metal shaft against the cardboard, and force the rubber tube down onto it.
10. When assembling the cables, it took me a few minutes to understand how the blade worked with the plastic housing.  I thought I was supposed to press down with the blade as I yanked on the wire.  In reality, it’s a lot easier.  You just press down into the hole in the plastic housing.  When you do, you’ll end up folding a small metal tab downwards.  That metal tab is what keeps the wires from sliding out.  So, once the tabs are pressed in, set down your blade, and the leads will just slide out easily.
11. Before assembling any lasercut parts, I would wipe down all the wooden parts with a paper towel.  They’re fresh out of a laser cutter, so there’s a small amount of ash on the edges.  A quick wipe will mean your parts aren’t going to be all smudgy later.
12. I didn’t see where in the assembly instructions sandpaper was required.  It is useful to have around never the less. 

What is up with the T slots?

However, I noticed one very odd thing while assembling my automated build platform.  I’ve come to appreciate MakerBot designs for not wasting material, making the best use of space, and just being overall elegant and streamlined.  When I was done assembling my automated build platform, I had four nuts and four bolts left over.  I also noticed that even though the automated build platform was secured to the Y platform using five small magnets² , the underside of the build platform has four T-slots that are completely unused!³

What’s that about?

1. I wanted to see what would happen if I didn’t hold them down and this is exactly what happened.  All I had to do to fix it was re-melt the solder with my soldering iron and press gently on the part. [↩]
2. Indicated roughly by the yellow dots above. [↩]
3. Indicated by the red arrows above. [↩]

Quick - you've got a MakerBot, lots of plastic, and 24 hours to prevent the apocalypse

Ubiquitous cell phones have forever changed movie plots. ¹  How many plots in pre-1990 movies involved people being cut off from communications with other people at some point?  This just doesn’t happen in movies any more – unless they lose their cell phones in some fashion. ²  The point is that cell phones have to be accounted for in a plot – since they are everywhere, their absence must be explained in some way.

So, how would ubiquitous 3D printers change movie plots? ³  Our hero is trapped in a home with zombie hordes closing in and must figure a way out, armed with nothing but a CAD program and 3D printer.

Just as cell phones have an emergency call button setting, perhaps MakerBots of the future will come with a button for “Zombie Apocalypse Emergency,” “Vampire Invasion Emergency,” and “Virus Outbreak Emergency” buttons on the side.  How else do you think movies will account for 3D printers everywhere?

1. Photo courtesy of Gamp [↩]
2. Robbed, destroyed, dead battery, no reception, etc. [↩]
3. For those of you familiar with Snow Crash, imagine matter compilers everywhere. [↩]

We’ve taken the MakerBot Cupcake CNC Basic and Deluxe kits out of inventory until Wednesday. Then there will be a special cupcake SALE in preparation for a big announcement we have coming up soon!

PS. Besides the big announcement we have large, medium, and small sized announcements coming this week too!

Well, there's your problem...

I think of blogging in the most literal sense – a web log.  A log of events, both positive and negative.  That means I feel obligated to post the embarrassing stuff along with the stuff of which I’m proud. ¹

This was just equal parts sheer arrogance, ignorance, lack of respect for robots, and stupidity on my part. ²  I’ve become so comfortable with my MakerBot that I don’t didn’t feel any compunction about hotswapping anything on the robot.  Well, I’m here to tell you that’s just not a good idea at all.

I pulled the motor out of my new MK5 plastruder to fiddle with it a bit and tried to plug it back in – when I heard a little black thingie on the extruder board pop, emit a small white mushroom cloud, bubble, grow an orange firey ring which dimmed to red, cool and bubble.  It’s not anywhere on the wiki, but this is NOT a good sign.

It’s a sign you just fried some tiny fiddley bit on your extruder board and you cannot print anything until you get and install a new fiddley bit or a new extruder board.  If you’re going to pull wires out and put wires back in, definitely shut off power to the robot using the switch on the power supply unit.

Let’s just say the design of the MakerBot Cupcake CNC is really great, just not foolproof.  Exhibit A:  MakerBlock. ³

The only “silver lining” to this is that I tend to jot down more ideas and design more things when my ‘bot is out of commission.

1. God knows I’m not afraid to make myself look extra stupid. [↩]
2. Well, perhaps a little more on the stupidity side. [↩]
3. You see, I’m implying I’m a fool against which no amount of incredible designs are proof. [↩]

We’re furiously prepping for a legendary Maker Faire here in New York in less than a week. Once we get the Bot-farm up and running, we’ll have a small army of MakerBots printing things out all day long.

Submit your charm designs by Wednesday, September 22nd, and we will consider printing them at Maker Faire! We’re looking for things that are quick to print that we can awe visitors with.

At the BotCave MakerBots are already hard at work printing things like this butterfly ornament designed by bpijls to give away at Maker Faire this weekend.

So get to work on a cool design for Maker Faire, and your creation could be given away at our booth!

Modular designs rule

The other day I was chatting with a friend about printing toys on my MakerBot. ¹  My favorite kind of toy are multi-part toys that snap-fit together.  There are a lot of benefits to designing and printing toys as modular parts.

• Handing a pile of parts to a kid is a pretty magical thing. ²  They may put them together in a way that may surprise you.  And, once they assemble the toy, they have a real sense of accomplishment.  It also teaches them how parts can fit together – and gets them thinking about how to improve on your designs.
• Taking a toy apart is almost as natural as playing with them.  There’s really nothing like taking something apart and reassembling it to teach you why certain design choices were made.  It also gives confidence that they might just be able to reassemble something once they’ve taken the time to pull it apart.
• It allows you to print up a replacement part if something breaks.  If you are making something cool, you’re going to be using small, delicate, or intricate parts. ³  Your kid is going to break their toys – but if you designed them in a modular fashion, they’re going to be easy to repair. ⁴
• It leaves room for improvement and upgrades.  You never know how your kid will actually play with a toy.  Maybe the boat will be a robot or microphone.  Or, maybe they’ll demand a third arm, tail, or wings.

1. Photo courtesy of fdecomite. [↩]
2. Do you remember the first time you saw a Lego set? [↩]
3. Also known as breakable parts or points of failure. [↩]
4. My Leonardo Robot has two broken hips and a bad elbow. [↩]