MakerBot Industries

So you’ve got the brand spanking new MakerBot MK5 Plastruder and now you have your old MK4 kicked in the corner.

Dust it off and transform it into a Plastic Welding Gun designed by Donutman_2000! MakerBot a handle and trigger and your set to use the MK4 as an awesome tool for fixing up your models!

Is your MK4 sitting unused and lonely since you’ve upgraded to the MK5? Give it a new lease on life and turn it into a handheld welding gun! Use it to patch up any holes or loose threads in your prints or to glue broken plastic parts back together. You can see me welding the lid of a very poorly printed and particularly dangerous teapot shut to prevent accidental use.

The STL files include parts for a hand grip that slips over the DC motor, a finger guard so you don’t burn yourself on the retainer washer, and a trigger bracket for a push button.

This kind of thing makes me so happy! Repurposed plastruder for the win!

FULL PRINTED from nueve ojos on Vimeo.

Full Printed by nueve ojos is a great video that shows us a glimpse of the personal manufacturing future.

The things I like about this is that it shows how much pride someone gets from creating something digitally and making it a real physical object. The video also does a good job of showing that home or neighborhood fabrication cuts a lot of transportation out of the manufacturing process.

Via Cody Brown

Multi-Day Pill Container by damonkohler

Another useful thing designed and uploaded to Thingiverse!  Damonkohler created and printed this multi-day pill container with eight sections (one which is always open) and a lid which rotates to expose another day’s ration and hide the rest.

One of the reasons I like this thing is that it’s exactly the kind of product that it would take you more time and money to go out and buy than it would for you to print it yourself.  Another reason I like it is that it got me thinking about how I would make a derivative of it.  It would be pretty cool if each of the eight sections could be removed or perhaps a snap fit rotating lid instead of a lid that requires a screw.

And, suppose you had a non-seven day medication schedule – you could alter the design pretty easily to have seven or five sections instead!  These kinds of custom variations just aren’t the kind of thing you can find in a store.

Check it out at woot! Sale is today only!!!

This brings the price of a MakerBot 3D Scanner to a mere

$40 for the MakerBot 3D Scanner kit (for today only and then the price goes up to $50)
99.99 for the Pico Projector
32.82 for the PlayStation Eye

For a grand total of a mere $172.81! (plus shipping)

A makeshift project that doesn't use duct tape

To begin experimenting with photoelasticity, you will need several things:¹

1. A source of polarized light
2. A video or still camera with a polarized filter

What’s that?  You don’t have these things?  No problem!  Up until half an hour ago, I didn’t either.  Here’s what you really need:

1. At least one polarized lens
2. A laptop monitor
3. Your camera or camera phone

Polarized Lens

You can find polarized lenses or polarized filters in a camera shop or on ebay.  Some 3D glasses use polarized lenses – and I just so happened to have a pair.

You can tell they are polarized lenses if you look at someone else wearing the same glasses and notice their glasses have a shimmery quality.  What’s happening is that one of your eyes sees one of their lenses dark and the other clear, while your other eye sees the opposite side clear and dark.  In order to make sense of these conflicting views your brain essentially flickers between the two images causing a shimmery sort of look.  Another way to tell the lenses are polarized is to hold one pair of glasses and rotate the other – if you look through one pair and see the other pair turn dark and clear, you’ve got polarized lenses.

Laptop Monitor – A makeshift source of polarized light

You probably already have a polarized light source without knowing it.  In all likelihood your laptop monitor has a polarized filter or coating to it that protects the LCD screen and also helps cut down the glare coming from the LCD screen itself.

To find out if your monitor has a polarized filter on it, just put your polarized lens in front of the monitor and rotate the lens. ²  If you see the lens go dark at some point and then clear as you continue to rotate, your screen has a polarized filter.  If your screen does not have a polarized filter, well, then, you’ve got a great excuse to get a new laptop!

In order to get a source of white polarized light I just open a new tab in FireFox on my laptop with it’s polarized screen.  Easy!

Camera Phone – A makeshift polarized filter

Once you have a polarized lens, just cut a small circle the size of your camera phone’s lens – that’s all you’ll need.

Just as a sanity check, place your little piece of polarized lens in front of your camera phone’s lens and rotate it as you point it at your polarized laptop monitor.  If you see the camera’s display go dark, you’re all set.

While trying to get a lens out of the glasses I ended up tearing one of the lenses pretty badly.  However, the piece was still more than large enough for my purposes.  I put tape on one end of this small (1cm x 2cm) piece and taped it to my Droid where the untaped side was covering the camera lens.  I replaced the hard phone case over the lens and was done.

But what if I don’t have a laptop with a polarized filter?

As long as you have two polarized lenses, you won’t need a polarized light source.  However, you will only be able to view the photoelasticity effect when you place the clear or clear-ish object between two polarized lenses.  Having a small polarized filter on your camera and a large polarized light source will just make things a lot easier.

My next post about photoelasticity will include a few experiments you can do you yourself. 

1. Photo courtesy of Woodleywonderworks [↩]
2. Or monitor. [↩]

Printing two parts simultaneously

With the introduction of the automated build platform MakerBot has moved from the realm of affordable prototyping into ultra-low-cost manufacturing.

What’s most interesting to me about the possibility of a MakerBot as a manufacturing tool is that it may actually be the most cost-effective option for certain objects.  For many objects, a injection-molded plastic solution will be the cheapest option.  Overall, injection molded plastic is probably the most scalable method of plastic manufacturing.

But, what if you have an object that can only be effectively created by3D printing?  It’s more problematic to print overhangs with 3D printing but it does have the possibility to create fully functional captive parts without the need for assembly.  My favorite example is probably Zaggo’s treasure chest, pictured above.  By printing the hinge’s pins extending into the other half of the printed object, Zaggo was able to print an object that just cannot be created by other, typically cheaper, means.

An interesting side effect of printing “captive” parts is that it can reduce or eliminate production times – since the parts are created together, they don’t need to be assembled.

This means there’s an object (and possibly a business mdoel) out there that is best suited for production on a MakerBot! ¹

I wrote a post earlier in the 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 involve objects that can only be printed using FDM.

1. I’m excluding commercial 3D FDM printers from the running because of their “cheap printer, expensive toner” business models.  They’re just not meant for large scale production. [↩]

The Botcave is a flurry with activity in preparation for the upcoming New York City 2010 Maker Faire at the New York Hall of Sciences.

Clear your weekend September 25th and 26th to attend this event. The festival will last from 10 am to 7 pm on Saturday and from 10 am to 6 pm Sunday. MakerBot Industries will be right next to the 3D printing village. We will have a farm of MakerBots printing all day long.

A day pass is $25.00 for adults, $20.00 for seniors, $15.00 for students, and $10.00 for kids, and $50.00 for families. If you buy a subscription to Make Magazine for $35.00, a Maker Faire day pass is included.

Buy a ticket here and we’ll see you there!

Ok, it’s been a wild week! On Monday we launched the MakerBot Automated Build Platform and A LOT of them are now in the process of being shipped to MakerBotters around the globe. On Tuesday we launched the MakerBot 3D Scanner which sold out instantly. (We’re busy producing those as fast as we can to get them to you!) On Wednesday we didn’t launch a product, but we launched a project that will become a product with the Makerscanner! Oh and there is a new version of ReplicatorG out.

So what are we going to launch today? So far, nothing. We need your help. We don’t have anything to launch today! Can you launch something and take a photo or shoot a video to help MakerBot keep the dream alive? Maybe a MakerBotted boat or a MakerBotted space ship? If you can, you’ll make this the ultimate week of launches!

Photo courtesy of NASA which now is uploading to Flickr!

Ok, I made a paddle boat and launched it!

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.

1. Photo courtesy of camerondaigle [↩]
2. 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. [↩]
3. Not to mention at about 1/5 the cost of plastic. [↩]
4. For those of you interested in such things, imagine their ‘Botfarm churning out all the parts for a RepRap every 90 minutes. [↩]

Stefan uploaded not-so-mini-figs to Thingiverse recently and they are just so rad.

tmophoto‘s been printing them in all sorts of colors!