MakerBot Industries

Drag(on) Racing

Last night Bre asked me if I wanted to have a design race.  Yes, yes I do. ¹  The rules he proposed were:

1. An agreed upon common word or theme
2. 25 minutes to upload the design to Thingiverse

Since he made up the rules, I got to choose the topic.  Here there would be DRAGONS!

And 24 minutes later, Thingiverse was two dragon designs richer with Bre’s Dragon Blocks and my Dragon design.

So, help us out – which design would you choose?

1. Apparently had Bre forgotten what happened the last time someone challenged me.  Poor poor laser dinosaur… [↩]

Jemima Kiss wrote a great article for The Guardian covering MakerBot.  Take a look!

Finding the ultimate Christmas present for the discerning geek has never been easy, but a small team of professional tinkerers based in New York has come up with the ultimate geek must-have – a printer that “prints” in 3D.

Rather than printing with ink on a page, 3D printers build up objects using layers of plastic. They have been available since 2003, but Brooklyn- based firm MakerBot, which started early in 2009, has developed a small printer that comes in kit form. Having to assemble the “robot” printer adds to the charm for true tinkerers, but this DIY approach also makes it far cheaper than it might be; until now, commercial 3D printers haven’t been available for much less than £25,000.

This year, 3D went mainstream, from big-budget movies to the latest 3D cameras, camcorders and TVs. MakerBot goes one better by offering three tangible dimensions, created with their Meccanoesque kits. The first model, the Cupcake CNC, sells for $649 and the newer Thing-O-Matic for $1,225.

“If you have trouble putting Ikea furniture together, get a friend to help you,” explains Bre Pettis, co-founder and chief executive of MakerBot. “But, for a tinkerer, making something that makes things is the holy grail.”

MakerBot “prints” in either ABS, the plastic that Lego is made from, or corn-based PLA – which smells like waffles when it is used. Hacker community website Thingiverse displays the witty creativity of “fabbers” (desktop-based fabricators and fans of 3D printing): from space invader earrings and keyrings to full-size lamps, built in sections. One Marty McGuire tells the story of going to buy a shower curtain for his new flat, but finding the store had run out of shower curtain rings. This is the kind of challenge the MakerBot owner lives for, and he enthusiastically set about measuring, designing and then printing out his own shower curtain rings.

There’s an obvious bonus: buy one MakerBot and you can probably make a good batch of Christmas presents – Pettis admits he’s made bottle openers and dragons as presents. The only limitations are your imagination – plus the 12.5×12.5×12.5cm dimensions of the Thing-O-Matic and the fact that you can print in any material you want, as long as it’s plastic. If you’re short of ideas, you can choose from the 5,000 designs already uploaded by the MakerBot community.

MakerBot has sold just 3,000 machines so far but is struggling to keep up with demand. A UK supplier, Robosavvy, is now selling the Thing-O-Matic for £847. As with the realised ambition of Bill Gates, who famously said he wanted to put a computer in every home in the world, all of us will eventually own a 3D printer, says Pettis. The key is to make these machines affordable.

“We’re not engineers – we’re tinkerers,” he says, explaining that MakerBot’s background in tinkering means a preoccupation with finding parts as cheaply as possibly, so much of the DIY kit is off the shelf. “If we were engineers, this thing would cost 100 times as much. But our goal is to democratise manufacturing so anyone can have a machine that makes anything they need. We want to render consumerism useless – and that doesn’t work if the machine isn’t cheap.”

We’re nearing the end of our supply of MK4 plastruder components and we’re not going to reorder them and in fact, we never want to wind another piece of nichrome wire again. We brought the price of the MK4 down as low as possible and that’s helped us bring down the price on starter kits, but we’re almost out of them. We reckon we’ve got enough in stock to take us through the end of the year and then they will be gone. We will no longer support MK4 Plastruders from January 1st onwards.

Without the MK4, we’re going to let go of the starter kit in its current configuration. We should have enough parts to sell those thorugh the end of the year. After that, you’ll still be able to get an ultimate kit, which is still the ultimate deal on a 3D printer!

Just a quick note for developers and testers: we’re migrated our bug tracking to Lighthouse from the Github issue tracker. If you’ve written up a bug or feature request in Github, it should be in the Lighthouse tracker now instead. Give it a whirl!

Thing-O-Matic troubleshooting

This weekend¹ I was able to get my Thing-O-Matic 3D printer operational.  I’m super happy about this.  However, I did run into some minor hiccups along the way.  Here’s the first problem I ran into, how I diagnosed it, and how I solved it:

• Setup
  • I’ve got a Thing-O-Matic with the automated build platform option installed. ²
• Symptoms
  • As soon as I powered on my Thing-O-Matic, I noticed the extruder’s current temperature was about 21 degrees but that the “Platform Current Temp”was 255.  Having just powered the machine, this didn’t seem likely.  The automated build platform was cool to the touch.
• Diagnosis
  • The first thing I tried was to restart ReplicatorG, resetting the Thing-O-Matic, then unplugging and replugging the Thing-O-Matic.  I also tried disconnecting/reconnecting the cables from the automated build platform. ³  None of this or any combination thereof worked.  From this I inferred that it probably wasn’t a mechanical connection issue or a simple software hiccup.
  • I believe that part of blogging is about sharing the stupid thing I do so that others can learn from my mistakes.  With that preface, please do not do what I am about to describe.  The next thing I tried was increasing the temperature of the build platform just slightly for a very short time.  If the platform couldn’t read temperature and couldn’t heat up, then there may be a big problem with the heated build platform board itself.  I put a finger⁴ on the platform and told it to warm up to 30 degrees Celsius.  This is another thing I do not recommend.  A smart person would have used a thermometer.  I felt a little heat and immediately turned the heat back down to 0.  The potential problems with this stupid test is (a) turning on the heat without a working temperature sensor could ruin a lot of parts very quickly and (b) it’s always a bad idea to put any part of your body⁵ on a heating surface.  What this inadvisable test showed me was that the board was still getting power and the heater was working.
  • Another possibility is that either I had not connected the wires or they had come undone as I closed up my machine.  Shining a flashlight into the case, I could see that the wires for the temperature sensor were plugged in where they were supposed to be.  They appeared to be where they were described on the assembly instructions.  However, I recall having had a similar problem with my automated build platform for my Cupcake CNC.  It turned out that I had inserted the temperature sensor (the black, green, white wire clip) backwards.  While connecting cables after that step I had accidentally unplugged this cable.  I plugged it back in after confirming which pins it went to, but without confirming the orientation.  <facepalm>
• Treatment
  • After I flipped the build platform temperature sensor cable, ReplicatorG was able to measure temperature. 

1. Well, technically this morning, but who’s keeping score anyhow? [↩]
2. I suppose having a little extra build volume might theoretically make the heated build platform or standard acrylic build platform a more attractive option for some.  The extra functionality you get from an automated conveyor belt makes the extra time and care associated with assembling the automated build platform totally worth it. [↩]
3. I didn’t try disconnecting/reconnecting any of the cables to the boards underneath inside the printer because I really didn’t want to bother with opening and closing it up again. [↩]
4. My least favorite one [↩]
5. Even your least favorite finger [↩]

Did you say DOUBLE???

That’s about the situation in which I find myself.  I already own a 3D printer – MakerBot Cupcake #465, “Bender.“ ¹  I’ve got him all tricked out with a couple of printed upgrades, MK5 plastruder, and an automated build platform.  Well, today the last bits I need to finish my Thing-O-Matic arrived. ²  I’m very hopeful I’ll have it online and operational before the end of the weekend.  The weather forecast for the California bay area says it’s going to rain all through the weekend.  It sounds like perfect robot assembling weather to me.

However, I’ve had one nagging thought.  Assuming all goes well, I’ll have two fully functional 3D printers in my home.  I have no problem keeping one busy, but two?

What would you do with a printer that had an automated build platform and double the printing speed of a Thing-O-Matic?

1. Photo courtesy of Vincente Alfanso [↩]
2. Once operational, I intend to name my Thing-O-Matic “Flexo” [↩]

The latest version of ReplicatorG is now available for download!  This is primarily a bugfix release, with improved default Skeinforge profiles and better machine descriptors.  There’s now an emergency stop button on the control panel, so if you’ve ever leapt for the reset button after accidentally clicking “Z-” one too many times, leap no longer!  (Props to Marius to getting that in to this release.)

This release fixes the too-hot Thing-O-Matic profiles mentioned in yesterday’s post.  It also includes example STLs and convenience gcode scripts accessible from the “File” menu.  (See the ‘Attribution.txt’ file in the ReplicatorG/examples directory for more information about the sources of the examples.  Hint: they’re all from Thingiverse!)

As always, let us know what goes right and what goes wrong.  Changelog below!

Read the rest of this entry »

New MakerBot operators frequently ask for a good first design project for printing on their MakerBot. Well, I’m a tremendous fan of the Custom-Cookie-Cutter-Generator by guru, a Processing tool for creating your own cookie cutter designs by adjusting nodes on a polygon and then hitting a keypress to generate the STL file you need.

Hitchcock cookie cutters by MiFGa

He completed his first version of the tool very quickly back in June as a part of the 30 Days of Creativity challenge. I used this version of guru’s project to make a pair of Hitchcock themed cookie cutters for the Halloween Challenge by grabbing the unlekker.net libraries and then jumping into the Processing script and adding the additional node points I needed. But aside from guru’s own cookie cutters, I didn’t see that many other people taking advantage of the tool.

Well, that is bound to change really soon — he has updated his tool to allow a great run-time version with a few more extremely useful keypresses, including “c” to circle up the nodes, “t” to load an image to trace, and even more exciting, “+” and “-” to add or remove node points.

How To Make A Cookie Cutter from Nikolaus Gradwohl on Vimeo.

He also made the above “How To” video which shows a few techniques including hitting the “c” key to circle up the nodes,¹ so I really can’t see how any self-respecting MakerBot operator can avoid dropping everything to make a cookie cutter. In fact, I just made two … and it took me less time than to write this blog entry. Seriously.

— Matt

1. I’d suggest adding a bunch of nodes with “+” if you have a really elaborate cookie cutter design in mind, and then hitting “c” to circle them up before you start to drag them out to trace an image. [↩]

Simple fix for ABP gear slip by tc_fea

Tony Cervantes brings us this tiny timely tale of tragedy and triumph on Thingiverse:¹²

I ruined the snap fit slot on my MakerBot Automated Build Platform while I was learning to use the ABP. (Tranlated to English: I had to replace the belt several times due to my screw-ups.)

The wooden snap fit slot holding the geared roller loosened to point where the motor gear would force the roller gear out of the slot and slip.

Tony’s fix involves cutting a two inch section off of a standard paperclip and bending it around the metal motor and the metal for the conveyor belt.  Apparently his hack has lasted through at least 14 builds.

If this has happened to your Automated Build Platform, you might want to try off a new side panel using Chooch’s Printable ABP.

1. Today’s post has been brought to you by the letter “T” and the number “5″ [↩]
2. There’s no particular reason for the alliteration – I just started typing and got carried away. [↩]

Huzzah for progress!

When MakerBot hired Marty McGuire (aka, the infamous Schmarty) to work on Thingiverse they didn’t just hire a web warrior, they apparently hired a man who is as stealthy as a ninja.  A few days ago a new Thingiverse feature was stealth-released.¹

While editing one of my Things I noticed that there was a new option.  Under the “Details” tab, just above “Save your thing,” the new option reads, “Work in Progress [checkbox] Is this thing a Work in Progress?”

I used to be hesitant to share unfinished designs.  What I came to realize is that sometimes even an unfinished idea can be a powerful thing.  With the derivative system on Thingiverse, people are able to design a variation on someone else’s work and then upload it as a derivative.  The citizens of Thingiverse have been really amazing at improving upon other people’s ideas – whether they were finished designs, unfinished designs, or even just the seed of a design concept.  Admittedly, such innovation isn’t for everyone.  Now, with the “Work in Progress” flag it will be very easy to see whether an idea is ready for prime-time or whether it needs a little spit and polish before it is workable.  With a standardized way to designate a design as a “Work in Progress” designers also won’t need to clutter their titles or descriptions with such disclaimers.²

Thanks Marty!

1. Photo courtesy of Daniel*1977 [↩]
2. For some reason I tended to go overboard “Proposed draft design for a preliminary sketch of an idea … on scratch paper” [↩]