MakerBot Industries

A few days ago, answering Customer Support questions, I was thrilled to read the following:

I worked on my Thing-O-Matic through the long weekend and yesterday around 6 pm actually started printing. I’m a 53-year-old lawyer with no formal technical training and have never really done any robotics or electronics building on my own before. There were times during the startup process when I thought I might have bitten off more than I could chew. But ultimately I found answers on the web for every issue I encountered and … I DID IT.

I followed up with Greg about his experiences and he added:

I feel like I’ve really become part of an important phenomenon here. I see this little “toy” the same way Benjamin Franklin saw the potential of flight when attending the first manned balloon flight. He heard a skeptic comment “What’s it good for?” Franklin replied: “What’s a newborn baby good for?” I think we’re on the cusp of a real revolution with the maker movement, and I’m excited to be part of it.

Well, MakerBot is thrilled with the growing army of MakerBot Operators. Where possible in the endless maelstrom of support tickets, Ethan, Isaac and I will slip into the blog here to brag about a few of these incredible folks.

Here’s a micro interview with Greg:

Q:   What brought you to 3D printing/MakerBot?

A:   First, a long-term interest in new, personal manufacturing tools.  I believe we’re on the verge of a “new industrial revolution” with this technology.  More proximately, I saw a youtube video about MakerBot, then spent a few weeks looking into other options, and finally decided that I just might be able to tackle building a TOM.  So I took the leap.

Q:   What is your favorite thing you have printed so far?

A:   Hoeken’s Twisted Form Study

Twisted Form Study by hoeken

Just a bunch of regular polyhedrons hanging out doing normal things. Print out the whole series and it looks nice.

This thing brought to you by

Q:   What object do you most want to design (or download from Thingiverse.com)?

A:   I’m an avid collector of 1/18 scale models.  I have a dream of being able to contribute to this hobby with things I make myself.  I’ve been working toward the idea of building a 1/18 scale model of a German V-2 rocket.  Maybe by the end of the year I can do it!

Thanks, Greg, for getting in touch with us.

If any of you MakerBot Operators out there have a great story or picture of you/your bot/your prints, send them our way: support at makerbot dot com.

CC 2011 by Yoyoj3d1

This event notice forwarded to us from the MakerBot Users Group in Seattle!

This Saturday, January the 29th, Jigsaw Renaissance and the Seattle Makerbot Users Group are hosting a family friendly gathering to share the fun and excitement of the 3D printing community! Members of the Seattle Makerbot users Group will be bringing Makerbots and Mendels as well as knowledge and some expertise on how to use them.

This is a great opportunity to meet others who are interested and active in 3D printing. Come and find some local experts with whom to ‘talk shop’, and share the excitement of this up and coming technology
When: January 29th 2010
5:00pm-7:00pm (if you’re bringing a bot please arrive at 4:30pm to set up)

Where:
Jigsaw Renaissance
1026 Madison Street
Seattle, WA 98104
If you own a Makerbot or 3D printer and would like to bring it to the gathering to share your knowledge, please gives us a heads up on our discussion forum so we can make sure you’ll have a table and electricity.

Jigsaw Renaissance: http://www.jigsawrenaissance.org
Seattle Makerbot Users Group: http://groups.google.com/group/seattlemakerbot

ReplicatorG is your friend!

This is the third in a series of posts about ways to get even better print results from your 3D printer.  The absolute best part about the two prior posts, on calibrating hardware and upgrading hardware, have to be the voluminous comments.  Please keep your hints, tips, hacks, and suggestions flying in!

• Calibrate Software. Once you’ve got your 3D printer hardware tuned up, it’s time to look to the software, especially the Skeinforge settings for your machine.

1. Skeinforge calibration.  There are a number of guides out there, but the one I would recommend is the series written by Dave Durant.
   1. Skeinforge basic settings
   2. Five critical Skeinforge settings
   3. Configuring the latest version of Skeinforge
   4. Creating a new Skeinforge profile
   5. Tuning a new Skeinforge profile
2. Find the best print temperature for your choice of plastic.  The ideal plastic temperature would be hot enough that it will stick to the platform and to the layer underneath.  It should also be cool enough that by the time the next layer is laid down the prior layer isn’t too molten allowing it to deform.  I print PLA at around 195-205 for small to larger objects, respectively.  I print ABS at around 220-230 for small to larger objects, respectively.
3. Find a good build platform temperature.  Not so hot that the plastic is kept molten, but not so cool as to allow warping.  A good warm build surface also allows the plastic to adhere to the build surface better.  When printing in PLA I like to keep the build platform at about 70 degrees and at 135-140 for ABS.  There’s very little warping with PLA even without a warm build surface, but the PLA sticks so much better.
4. Even after your machine is well calibrated, there are still a number of ways to improve Skeinforge calibration.  There are just dozens of little settings to tweak.  Configuring the Skeinforge Oozebane setting can remove the little plastic strings that get left between parts. ¹
5. Calibrate Skeinforge for printing with a higher Z-axis resolution by trying to print with thinner layers.  The main downside is that printing overhangs may become more difficult.  Reading Dave Durant’s posts should help with this.
6. Tune your “start.txt” and “end.txt” files in ReplicatorG.  You can add some pretty cool things to the start and end files.  You’ll need to read up on your GCode, but it’s well worth the trouble to fine tune the start routines for your machine.  Perhaps you need a longer extrusion time?  Need to adjust where the wipe procedure homes in?  This is the place to get to work!
7. Experiment with using the “outline” plugin either in conjunction with or in lieu of the “wipe” command.  Thanks to Riche for e-mailing me this tip!
8. Skeinforge 0006 or 35?  It’s tempting to stick with an older version of Skeinforge once you’ve got all of your settings dialed down.  Switching to the latest Skeinforge version within ReplicatorG allows you to use the latest features, improvements, and plugins.  Yeah, it’s more work.  But, then again, if you were afraid of a little elbow grease you wouldn’t have build your own 3D printer, would you?
9. Cupcake:  Can you build a set of “start.txt” and “end.txt” files to replicate the auto-homing behavior of the Thing-O-Matic using your stock Generation 3 electronics?  I bet you can!
10. Thing-O-Matic:  Calibrate your starting height in Skeinforge.  Obviously you don’t want to smash the print head into the build platform.  Neither do you want to start building10mm above the build platform.  You may find that it’s best to start at different heights depending upon the material you’re printing on and the plastic with which you’re printing.

What am I missing here?  What software calibration tricks and tips do you have to share?

Links to the prior posts!

1. How to get better results from your 3D printer – Part I (Calibrating Hardware)
2. How to get better results from your 3D printer – Part II (Upgrading Hardware)

1. Some have referred to Oozebane as a dark art, not without some cause. [↩]

When you order your MakerBot Thing-O-Matic, it says 7 week lead time. That means that it’s our goal to ship it out within 7 weeks. Because there are more than 200 different types of parts from a massive amount of suppliers, operations at MakerBot are challenging and the operations team here at MakerBot works hard to get things here on time and sometimes our suppliers meet their delivery dates and a lot of times they don’t. We’ve had issues where we order something and the first batch is perfect and the second batch is junk that we have to send back and start over with another supplier. Also, sometimes we go back to order more of something and find that there aren’t anymore and we have to get them manufactured from scratch. This isn’t a new phenomena, we’ve been dealing with this from the beginning. At about the 800th bot, we ran out of stepper motors that had shafts that would fit the pulleys we had on the cupcake and because we had thousands of pulleys already, we had to get those motors made custom from scratch. This coincided the new year and we had a backup of something like 12 weeks at one point. Ugh. We emailed everyone who had ordered a bot to let them know, but it sucked for us and for Operators waiting for their bots. Nobody likes to order something and wait.

MakerBot is 25 people now but demand continues to grow. The thing is, we keep getting orders and we’re still working to scale up to meet demand. A year ago we were 5 people and everyone was doing everything including packing boxes. Just because we have more people now hasn’t slowed the pace. We’re still pushing the limit of the minimal amount of sleep to get so we can work hard to get MakerBots into the hands of creative people around the world.

One of the things that’s changed since we’ve started scaling up is timing. It takes us more time to put things into production. We were able to prototype the Cupcake in two months (and 2 cases of ramen and countless bottles of caffeinated club mate) and bring the first batch into production in one more month after that because we were only pulling together 20 kits. Now we have a much more challenging math problem allocating resources and trying to make predictions on how much of something we should buy and how much we think we’ll sell. It’s tricky. When we launched the MakerBot Unicorn Pen Plotter, we ordered parts for 250 of them. I love this kit, it’s a great way to turn your MakerBot into a sweet plotter, but it’s sold much slower than anticipated, partly because within hours of launch in the store and the sharing of the source files, there was a printable clone available. In retrospect, being obsessed with open source and having awesome operators, we should have planned for that! We’re getting better at making predictions, but things like getting slashdotted can change our gameplans at the drop of a hat!

I’ve seen a bunch of sadfaces on the internet about the cupcake being out of stock and that there are only 250 of them left. We’ll have these back up in the store in spring when we get some parts that are taking forever to get made. I’m proud of the cupcake, we launched the cupcake and later added a heated build platform and then an automated build platform and then we added the MK4 and then the MK5 and all these things pulled more power which started burning out the mosfets and we switched over to including a relay board with the kit. We modified the cupcake as much as we could and have done as much as we can to create an upgrade path for folks. User improvements like the z-rider mean that folks may be able to continually upgrade their cupcake, but for us, we’ve been really happy to move on to the Thing-O-Matic with MakerBot Generation 4 electronics and a cantilevered z-stage. When those last 250 cupcakes go up for sale in the spring, I’ll be happy that folks can get a great 3D printer for cheap for a limited time.

What’s coming up that’s got me excited? I’m super psyched for the next release of ReplicatorG and our front room is transforming into the MakerBot Botfarm™ with all the MakerBots we built for CES back in Brooklyn getting set up to print things out all day! More about that when it’s all set up!

I walked around and took some snapshots after writing this and put up a slide show so you can see a little window into our life at the MakerBot Botcave.

Z-Rider by Twotimes

The last post dealt with ways to get better print results from your 3D printer through hardware calibration. The suggestions and comments were easily the best part of that post, so keep them coming!  As before, some of these tips are more important to the Cupcake, but they’re all considerations when trying to get the best possible prints from your robot.

• Upgrade Hardware.

1. Make or buy a good feed system for your filament.  Some people use baskets suspended from the ceiling, coils sitting on lazy suzans, or filament spindle boxes.  I used a DIY filament spindle for about nine months before switching a filament spindle box.  The elimination of tangles was dramatic.  A simple tangle can completely screw up a print job by stopping plastic extrusion or yanking the Z stage or entire robot out of whack.  The investment in a good trouble free filament spindle box will make sure you can walk away from your 3D printer with peace of mind.
2. Whether you get a filament box or make your own, definitely get a “feeding tube” for the plastic.
3. Cupcake:  There have been many Z axis cranks, but the original by Zaggo is still my favorite.  This was the first printable 3D printer upgrade of which I really took note.
4. Cupcake:  If you’re upgrading from a basic Cupcake CNC kit, the most important upgrade you can get IMHO is definitely moving to the MK5 Plastruder.  This single upgrade will make your life easier than you can imagine.
5. Cupcake:  Source, print, assemble, and install Twotimes’ XY lowrider for quieter and smoother printing.
6. Cupcake:  Upgrade to the Automated Build Platform or source, print, assemble, and install the Pfierce Robotic Build Platform by Chooch for flatter and automated printing from a heated build platform.
7. Cupcake:  Source, print, assemble, and install the epic Z axis riders by Twotimes or TheRuttmeister for smoother printing and less Z wobble.
8. Cupcake:  Source, print, assemble, and install the Zydac’s Z Axis Extender Kit or the Pfierce Z-axis extenders by Chooch for extra build height.

What am I leaving out?  How would you upgrade your hardware?

Sean of Butterscotch swung by our booth at CES and did a great interview with us. Check it!

How to get better results from your 3D printer: Calibrating Hardware

With the recent launch of the Thing-O-Matic, I’ve collected a number of ways to get a better result from a 3D printer. ¹  If you’ve got a suggestion, please let me know in the comments!  Some of these tips are more important to the Cupcake, some are really only applicable to certain versions of these printers, but they’re all considerations when trying to get the best possible prints from your robot.

• Calibrate Hardware. The most obvious way to get a better print is to calibrate your machine’s hardware.  These kinds of tweaks could take a number of forms.  You could:

1. Make sure all of the bolts/nuts are tightened properly.
2. Make sure all pulleys are tightened properly to their bolts.
3. Get the right tension on the belts by setting the proper tension on the pulleys.  There are a few pulley tensioners on Thingiverse that could help with this issue for Cupcakes.
4. Make sure the bearings on the X and Y axes slide smoothly.  If the hole the bearings slide into are too tight, they will cause the bearings to bind up on the precision rods.  The solution is to sand the hole slightly to widen it.
5. Insert something springy between the X or Y axis end caps and the X or Y axes. ² This reduces play, noise, and will ensure a slightly better print job when it comes to small details.  There are printable end caps that help reduce this problem.³
6. Make sure the extruder has the proper filament tension.⁴
7. Adjust your stepper motor torque for the Thing-O-Matic or Cupcake.  You want enough power that the stage moves in a responsive manner and won’t lose steps, but low enough that you’re not overheating the motor or operating in a needlessly noisy way.
8. Thing-O-Matic:  Make sure the endstops are properly and securely adjusted.  If there is any wiggle, you could get variable starting build heights.
9. Thing-O-Matic:  Make sure the cables running to the X and Y stages have enough slack to work and but not so much they will get caught on something.
10. Thing-O-Matic:  Make sure you’ve run the wires down the proper sides.  Even if you have your Thing-O-Matic wired properly, running the wires near to the wrong wires can lead to EM noise which could case printing problems.
11. Cupcake:  Level your build platform.
12. Cupcake:  Level your Z stage.
13. Cupcake:  Reduce the play between the XY axis stage and the XY build platform.
14. Cupcake:  Make sure there is no grime in the Z rod threads.
15. Cupcake:  Replace warped Z rods.
16. Cupcake:  Add Z axis wobble arrestors.
17. Cupcake:  Widen the Z axis holder on the Z platform by sanding the notch if you’re having a problem with just one bent rod.
18. Cupcake:  Take the clamp off the worst Z axis rod and double-clamp the best Z axis rod (via the MakerBot Support Stream and Charles Pax).

More tips on getting better print results tomorrow!

1. Photo courtesy of MakerBot [↩]
2. I use little bits of paper towel [↩]
3. I’m having trouble locating these Things.  If you can leave a link in the comment, I’ll update the post. [↩]
4. This is SO much easier with a MK5 Plastruder it’s not even funny [↩]

As someone who spent a bit of time at Stanford myself, I couldn’t help but notice this Thingiverse item: Hoover Tower by tshannon – Thingiverse

And look at that picture!!  3d Modelers: I suggest that you always take a picture like this, right after you finish your first print.  This one is just perfect…it looks so good that I bet the carillon in the tower even works.

OK people: now who wants to model the Dish? Or at least the Knoll?

The MakerBot Cupcake is currently out of stock as we wait on a few parts to be custom manufactured before we sell the last 250 Cupcakes. Being from the internet, I’m trained that when I need to buy something, I go online and it’ll arrive on my doorstep a few days later. Manufacturing things doesn’t always work like that. Sometimes we buy all of the things in the world and then have to get it custom manufactured which takes time and that is what happened to us in this situation.

When we get it back in stock, we’ll have a little sale on it to celebrate the last 250 cupcakes! In the meantime, I’d suggest setting your sights on the Thing-O-Matic if you need a 3D printer!

This is the sort of thing that really makes a customer support person’s day: Ray’s Hobby Projects: First-time experience with the MakerBot.  This customer received a Cupcake that had the full bevy of possible problems.  And what did they do?  They fixed them.  And in two days no less.

Check out this fix, which we’ve publicized a little, but more people should know about:

The last issue that got really annoying was the z-axis motor making a gigantic noise and skipping steps. We found that this was due to the overly tightened screws and one solution I found online seemed to suggest that one platform screw should be released and ignored just to remove the over-constrained tension force. I was doubtful about this fix, but to our great surprise, this actually worked! No more loud noise and no more z skipping!

And there are several other fixes detailed in the post! Kudos to Ray for ingenuity and persistence.