MakerBot Industries

Pattywac bearing contest winning design

Thingiverse citizen Pattywac has been working to spur creativity and innovation with his recent design contests.  His first was a magnet design contest and second was a bearing design contest.  Right now he’s running two concurrent contests for rubber band designs (current prize is $100) and another for MakerBot improvement designs (current prize is $65).

The submissions to Pattywac’s contests have resulted in some really incredible designs, such as the winner of the bearing contest, Twotimes with his Mendel inspired X and Y carriage lowrider.  The Cupcake CNC 3D printer was designed to be built within the constraints of lasercut wood and acrylic.  Twotimes’ designs demonstrate how a 3D printer can create effective and efficient improvements not possible with other means.

Do you have an idea for one of these two contests?  (Or an idea you can enter in both?)

This man is the 27th coolest tech person in New York City | Photo Credit: Joi Ito

Bre Pettis made Business Insider’s Silicon Alley 100, an annual list of “100 people in the New York tech community who did really cool stuff this year.” He is #27.

We’ve always known he was special, but now his specialness is quantified and packaged by a leading online business magazine.

“It’s all because of Makerbots,” said Bre, who also said he thought he was something like #99 last year. In fact, he was #52. Indeed, his position on the list is undeniably tied to MakerBot Industries and his role in the DIY 3D printing revolution. His movement up the list from last year can be attributed to a great year for the business.

Tonight he will be hanging out with the likes of Mayor Bloomberg, Kickstarter founder Perry Chen (#18), Gawker founder Nick Denton (#9), and Foursquare founders Dennis Crowley and Naveen Selvadurai (#1).

Congratulations, Bre!

We’ve used a 37mm motor from Kysan motors from the beginning. It’s a 2RPM Motor that has a lot of torque. There is nothing like it out there for brute torque at this price point. We sell it for $20 in our store. They do wear out. My first motor died after about 6 months because it was a MK3 and was getting pushed and eventually the driveshaft bent away from the internal gears and it just stopped. I was doing a public demo a the time and I just switched out the motor and was back in action in minutes. I’ve been using the replacement motor for that one ever since. MakerBots are cutting edge inexpensive 3D printing machines and they occasionally need maintenance and tuning and love. We keep working hard to make them easier to put together, easier to use, and easier to fix.

Because it’s a kit that you put together yourself, there is no warranty on it, but we will replace parts that arrive DOA. Recently we received some complaints about the motors and so we’ve started testing every motor that leaves the building. You can see our testing rig in the photo above. Out of the 455 we have tested in the past 3 weeks, 1 was DOA. With almost 2500 MakerBots in the wild, we’ve had 11 motors in total returned for being DOA. Considering that this is a cheap and rather complicated motor, that is a pretty good statistic and now that we’ve put testing in place, we won’t have any leave the botcave non-functional.

There are some people who have had some problems that we’ve had a hard time replicating and we’re still doing testing to figure out if the problems we hear about are related to ghosts in the firmware, software, hardware or the power supply. If you have a problem, don’t hesitate to drop us a note on the contact page and we’ll do our best to help out!

Robot talks!

With the Botacon approaching on December 11, 2010, we’re looking to line up some speakers and to spur some interesting discussions.

Who do you want to see at Botacon?  A famous robot scientist?  MakerBot owners?  Your favorite amateur robot scientist?  Your high school science teacher?  A robot artist?  An artist who uses robots?

Leave a comment and drop a few names and we’ll see what we can do about getting them there!

It’s a few weeks too early for Beaujolais, but there’s a new ReplicatorG available to tide you over until then.

This is primarily a bugfix release.  There were some situations in which stopping a build could put the communications between the bot and the host out of sync.  If you were sometimes experiencing “temperature inversion” in the control panel, where the extruder temperature and the platform temperature were reversed, this should solve your problem.  It should also fix cases where the extruder would get out of sync and stop extruding after an aborted build.  If you’ve been seeing a delay when you hit the pause or stop buttons (for example, the bot finishing the segment it’s on before stopping or pausing), that should be corrected too.

There are a couple of other small goodies in there too: exiting the app will no longer halt an SD card build.  There’s a first pass at a thingomatic profile for skeinforge 31, and the menus have been cleaned up a bit (thanks, charlespax and justjoheinz!).

As always, grab it from the download page.  Give it a whirl!

(One last note– there have been a lot of people contributing to ReplicatorG lately; so many that I haven’t had time to integrate most of the patches yet!  0022 is going to be the big merge, so if you’ve been hacking away on something, thanks in advance, and it should be in the main tree soon!)

Logo Filler by JohnA

Last week JohnA uploaded a brand new way to pimp out your MakerBot!    With is Logo Fillers you can swap out the logo to match your mood.  Decorative, simple, and expressive – what’s not to like? ¹

One of the interesting things about JohnA’s contribution is the number of comments from people planning the same improvement.  One of the wonderful things about open source projects is if you don’t get to something quick enough, someone else might just take care of it for you!  And, if no one has taken care of your issue yet, either you’re alone with that idea/problem or it’s time for you to start designing a solution.

1. How long before someone designs a way for a MakerBot to detect it’s “health”  or “mood” and display it in the logo? [↩]

Apologies for the delay in the Halloween charm challenge announcement.  I was in Washington, D.C. this past weekend showing hundreds of children how to fold paper airplanes for the USA Science and Engineering Festival and did not have a free moment!

Thanks to everyone who submitted Halloween inspired designs. There are now dozens of spooky 3D printer projects up on Thingiverse. There were many creative entries, and choosing a winner was not easy.

We have two winners!

Onneksi Olkoon PaSuTX:lle ja sen Bat Mobile. That means “Congratulations to PaSuTX and his Bat Mobile,” in Finnish. The Thingiverse user is from Finland, and I happen to know a little big of the language and I always love any excuse to use it. PaSuTX submitted several awesome designs, which is interesting considering they don’t celebrate Halloween in Finland. But we appreciate the Halloween spirit! Actually, in Finland Easter is sort of like Halloween because little kids dress up like witches and do a form of trick-or-treating. So there’s some bonus trivia for you about Finland. We hope to see this Bat Mobile printed in glow-in-the-dark ABS very soon.

The other winner is nicholasclewis, creator of the parametric spider web. We love that it’s fully configurable, and it prints very nicely.

Congratulations to the both of you. Please send along your shipping addresses for your free glow-in-the-dark ABS! Happy Halloween and keep posting your Halloween projects to Thingiverse.

One of MakerBot’s interns, Jack Poon, about printing large scale projects.¹

Crowdsourcing has endless possibilities especially in the hands of creators, inventors and the curious public. So far in the past, Makerbot has invited members of the 3D printing community to create printed pulleys for Makerbot kits. On top of that, Effalo, a thingiverse member, has invited members of the 3D printing community to print out parts for a geodesic dome. He has even offered 2$ for parts sent in to build a geodesic dome. Other projects included a Halloween design challenge, a humane mousetrap design challenge as well as the Deep Water Horizon Challenge.

One of the cool things about crowdsourcing is that it invites people from all over the place to commit to a common goal. These goals can range from practical applications to works of art. People of different backgrounds and experiences can all offer different insights into the problems we face today. So far the combined efforts of everyone has resulted in remarkable feats and diverse ideas. I foresee even greater opportunity for utilizing 3D printers and crowdsourcing. One opportunity is the construction of large scale, complex projects. Imagine if all the people who had access to 3d printers were to print out buildings of an entire city. In no time at all, we could create a scale sized city and invite people to see the city, maybe even rearrange the city. One day, should we ever plan on building a lunar base on the moon, the base could be replicated on Earth first and people would be free to walk through the base and maybe even suggest some ideas of their own. How cool would that be! These are just some of the possibilities of crowdsourcing combined with rapid prototyping. If you know some people around your area with 3D printers, why not start a project like the ones listed above. Get them together to brainstorm and solve problems in the community. In fact, invite members of the community to see some of the prototyped parts created and even leave suggestions and ideas!

Lets print the world!

1. Photo courtesy of NASA [↩]

QC Colab is awesome. They made bronze coins by taking a mold of a MakerBotted coin and then pouring bronze into it to make their own custom bronze coins. They are back with two walkthrough videos so that anyone with the bravery to hook up a vacuum cleaner and liquid propane to a custom made forge make things out of molten metal.

Check out these videos and leave them some nice comments. It’s great that they are sharing their wisdom so that anyone can turn MakerBotted ABS 3D prints into METAL.

This Iris Box thing that’s happening is super awesome. The original box was designed by msruggles.
Recently msruggles has also made a “Shorty Iris Box” so that it’ll take less time to print. Rad!

Alternately you can just print a smaller Iris Box base by jballard. It’s so great when you see a cool design get modified and improved!

We already posted the video, but watch it again!