Bappert envisions a world where people skip shopping entirely and instead rely on their own DIY 3D printer to make their own custom products. Of course, no essay on the 3D printing revolution is complete without a quote from one of its DIY pioneers:
“It’s a really great time to subvert the dominant paradigm of centralized corporate manufacturing.” -Bre Pettis
How do you think at-home 3D printing can democratize manufacturing? What are ways that cheap 3D printers are changing the world right now? Do you think there will be a day when every home has its own 3D printer? What would an average day be like for someone in this 3D printing utopia?
Write your own essay about 3D printers and regale the college admissions committees. If you end up publishing it on your blog, tell us about it!
It helps to wipe down the lasercut edges with a paper towel to wipe away the ash left by the lasercutter. You can use facial tissue, but it shreds and makes a little bit of a mess.1
Follow the directions carefully and look ahead to the next picture when figuring out what to do. 2
The colors of bolts in the pictures are not necessarily the same colors in your kit.
You’ll also need a small philips head screwdriver for attaching parts to the servo motor.
You can use a pair of channel lock pliers for assembling the thumbscrew if you don’t have a vise. The channel lock worked really well – but did require a bit of force.
The wiki/assembly instructions say that all of the M3x16 bolts are the same except for one which has a lower profile. My Unicorn MK1 kit only shipped with the lower profile M3x16 bolts. I spent several minutes comparing all of the bolts to see if one was just slightly lower than the others. The M3x16 bolts that came with my MakerBot Cupcake had ridged bolt heads – whereas these lower profile bolts had smooth heads.
The lower profile bolt heads appear to require the 2mm hex wrench. I barely used my 2.5mm hex wrench.
And… how about some pictures from my build? I tried to take pictures of my build between the other pictures on the wiki to help fill in some of the gaps. I’ll be adding these to the wiki when I get a chance. 3
I used a facial tissue because I didn’t have any paper towels on hand. [↩]
I’ve previously likened this to origami – but it’s very similar to model building as well [↩]
For the next few weeks, I will be writing and posting a series of MakerBot Unicorn Pen Plotter tutorials at wiki.makerbot.com/unicorn-tutorials both to help those who have a MakerBot Unicorn push this tool to the limit and to entice the curious to make a leap into this fruitful if unusual 2D re-purposing of your MakerBot 3D printer.
I will be alternating new tutorials with “print days” where I share loads of new things I have printed by releasing design and gcode files to Thingiverse.com. Please comment on the blog posts and Thingiverse.com releases to let me know how I’m doing — and what else you’d like me to write about.
In my opinion, the MakerBot Unicorn stands proud among its peers not only because it is a swap-in pen plotter toolhead operated within the belly of a beefy 3D printing robot (already very cool), but also because of specific qualities this DIY pen plotter offers a designer: hella plotting speed, positional accuracy within the page (and from print-to-print), range of marking surfaces, range of marking implements, lightning-fast pen lifts, etc.
And most importantly, the Unicorn has a native illustrator’s “hand” (well, “horn”) that leads to a less “machine-flavored” result than I anticipated from a plotter.
In this first tutorial block I get you setup with the tools you need to jump right into basic vector design and printing by leading you through the whole process I go through to complete the print of the Cupcake exploded diagram, and along the way share a few design and printing tricks to make plotting with a MakerBot Unicorn far less elusive and mythological than getting this out of the other sort of unicorn.
For those of you lucky enough to attend Maker Faire a few weeks ago, you may have noticed one of the Bots off to the side making noise but not in fact printing anything. That noise was actually music, and the music was a 28 hour performance of Erik Satie’s 1893 “Vexations,” performed by Armin Fuchs in Dresden in the year 2000.
We named the robotic musician “Gidget” to celebrate his status as our 2000th MakerBot. Gidget is a Cupcake CNC assembled by Widget live last month. Gidget’s impressive performance may have been the most underappreciated event at Maker Faire. His programmer Matt Griffin said, “For some reason, it was extremely easy to make this MakerBot perform it – this particular one – with its really loose belt.”
Matt made a lovely video of Gidget performing the piece, and plans to upload the code to Thingiverse so you can program your own MakerBot to sing you to sleep. Also, look for an upcoming blog post by Matt where he explains how he made this musical magic happen.
The crew at QC-Colab recently celebrated the opening of their hackerspace with the minting of their very own 3D printed coin in bronze. David Hinkle, one of their founders, put together these two videos documenting their process for turning a plastic 3D printed object into a metal part. Thanks David!
John Abella, operator of MakerBot #1136, made a nice video of his Cupcake CNC printing a red fluorescent spider. He printed the spider to test some upgrades, including the new Plastruder MK5. The print took about 28 minutes, but he sped it up so you can see the full print in 7 minutes. Pretty!
Burned extruder board (check out the chip on the right)
Once I was sure my extruder board was burned out, I placed an order for a new extruder board and a new fiddly bit. For those of you with similarly burned boards, it is part “A3949SLBT.” I honestly have no idea what it actually does or how it works – just that it controls the power going to the extruder motor on my 3D printer.
Thanks to the many people who read this blog, there were a lot of suggestions on how to fix this problem. I ended up using a method that was a hybrid of several suggestions. This was mostly due to me not having a lot of specialized tools or products handy.
I dusted off my soldering iron and SMT Soldering Kit. From the kit I pulled out the solder paste, tweezers, and soldering wick.
I pulled out about an inch of the soldering wick and bent it at the end. I then pushed the tip of my hot soldering into the bent piece of soldering wick and the soldering wick into the joints holding the chip in place. I chose to start on the side of the chip that was nearest the edge of the board.
I pulled up as much solder as I could by pressing the wick into the solder joint, clipping the pieces of used wick, and repeating.
I then tried to pull that side of the chip up – but that didn’t work. There was still some solder holding it down.
I then used a pair of wire cutters to clip all of the leads on the side nearest the edge of the board. Using a small precision flathead screwdriver I pried up the leads on the chip.
Half-desoldered and half-cut fiddly bit
Using a pair of needlenose pliers, I bent the chip upwards so that I could get underneath it. It was now attached only by the leads closest to the inside of the board.
This left me with a chip suspended in the middle of the board and little bits of leads still stuck to the pads on one side.
Again, I used the soldering iron to hold the wick against the remains of the leads. I used a little back and forth brushing motion, parallel to the pads, which seemed to work well to basically either solder the lead bit to the wick or brush it right off the board. Once I was done, the pads were relatively clean and smooth.
I then used the soldering iron to press the wick against the underside of the chip where it was soldered to the board – picking up as much solder as I could.
I then bent the chip back down and pulled up as much solder from the top of the leads too.
Chip removed
At this point the chip easily popped off – but I could just as well clipped the leads and soldering iron-wick-brushing motioned them off too.
Here I was left with the soldering pad relatively clean, but a little worse for the wear.
I then took the new chip and applied soldering paste to its leads – a long line across all of the leads on each side. I then used a toothpick to pull apart the solder holding any two leads together.
I used the small fine tweezers from my SMT Soldering Kit to place the chip in the proper orientation. (Pro tip: Zach was kind enough to design the board so that the semi-circle on the chip should match up with a semi-circle drawn on the board itself).
I used the toothpick again to clean out any solder between any two leads.
Resoldered new fiddly bit
I then briefly touched the soldering iron to each lead, which very quickly turned molten silver and flowed around the lead and onto the pad. This went quite quickly.
I hooked the extruder board up to my Cupcake, but it didn’t work fully. I could register temperature and heat the extruder, but I couldn’t move the motor at all – which was the first symptom I had anyhow.
I disconnected the extruder board and used my multi-tester to test for continuity between each lead and solder pad on the chip. While I was at it, I decided to test to see if any two neighboring leads had continuity. A few did. At first I was worried then I tried to test the second fiddly bit chip – which had continuity in the same sets of adjacent leads. Next time I have to do something similar, I will definitely test the joints before testing the board.
I found two leads that were not adequately soldered to their pads, added a little more soldering paste, and touched the joints again with my soldering iron.
This time testing was all good!
Thank you to everyone who posted suggestions and volunteered to help me!
Just in case you’ve burned out the same part, MakerBot has listed part number “A3949SLBT.” 1
But, if you e-mail them and tell them MakerBlock told you to ask for the “fiddly bit” they might know what you’re talking about. [↩]
