MakerBot Industries

Hey folks!  We did have a good broadcast this week, even though we were missing our own Isaac Dietz.  Just a few of the topics we covered: February is the annual design sprint, and we are encouraging people to participate in Thingiverse Thing-A-day. There was a fantastic basic tutorial for Wings3d from Matt; he also discussed some exciting developments on the Unicorn front.  (Matt apologizes for mis-stating your name, Dan Newman!)

We also talked a bit about OpenSCAD, and made sure people know about Pattywac’s Thingiverse Mash-Up challenge.

We’re going to stick to the 4:30 Friday timeslot, and keep watching our Ustream page for the archives.

I’ve had to sign off on 55 pages of terms on my iPhone twice in the past month and I know that these things are mostly just clicked through. Here at MakerBot Industries, we’re getting to the point of seeing all sorts of scenarios play out, it’s time for us to get professional and have a terms page and an updated customer support page. This is one of those milestones that we’re encountering as a company and before starting MakerBot, I would have scoffed at these documents. At this point, we’ve officially gone too long without having these things being explicit.

Lately the support department has been getting some requests that are, well, interesting and despite our good intentions, can be hard to carry out. We had one where someone who ordered their bot in 2009 was just putting it together and needed parts that we don’t stock anymore. We hooked them up with some stuff from our junk bin of old parts, but that junk bin is not very full these days. For example, we’re out on x and y rods that shipped with the first 200 cupcakes,  you can still order from the supplier, but we can’t replace those anymore.

We will always work with folks to help them their bots up and running, but we’ve also had people want to return fully assembled machines, which we just can’t do. Once we’ve shipped a bot and you’ve put it together, we can’t resell it. We need you to check it out and decide that you want it before you buy it. (sounds obvious right?) It also gets difficult when we get requests for support from the person who wasn’t the original purchaser of the machine. Who knows what happened to it as it passes hands? We recommend that you if you tire of your MakerBot or you want to upgrade it, you donate your MakerBot to a school or try and sell it on eBay.

Because of the flurry of odd requests lately, we’ve updated the customer service page and created a terms page. These pages are a mashup of Adafruit’s and Sparkfun’s documentation and are a starting point until we can get our lawyer to look at them. It’s a document that can be updated in the future. For example, I’m still looking for a way of saying, “You’re in charge of your own safety and use your MakerBot at your own risk.” I’ll be getting some help from a lawyer to get that part together, but my point is that there will be revisions.

The goal here isn’t to be annoying, but to get folks to realize that we need you to get your bot together so we can help resolve any issues right away and to put some clear limits on what we can do. We’ll always do our best to help a MakerBot Operator, but these docs add some structure to what we’re can actually do. Check them out. Shake your fist at them and if you have any better examples, point us to them in the comments.

My Blank Pony by MaskedRetreiver

An exploitable is an image (or series of images) with large empty areas or speech balloons that are intended to be filled with humorous text.

Just in time for Pattywac’s mashup challenge, Alan Ecker has uploaded a Pony Template Blank.  This may just be the very first thing uploaded to Thingiverse that was uploaded is a “blank slate” made available with the explicit intention of being hacked, mashed, and derived into something else entirely.  I love this idea and really hope we see more of them.

There’s been a bit of mash-up madness on Thingiverse lately.  The creations range from really useful to downright scary.  What’s especially amusing is how some of these things pop into existence.  I’ll call this the Ghostbusters phenomena.  If you think of the Stay Puft Marshmallow man, he’ll magically appear.

“Gosh, I hope no one makes an octopus”  POOF!  There’s an octopus uploaded to Thingiverse!

Printable collar stays

Collar stays are one of those funny and amazing things where sales price of the product is so much higher than the material cost.  Nick Starno’s printable collar stays neatly bridge that divide.  They’re practical, they’re quick and easy to print, and they don’t need to be cosmetically perfect since their intended usage means they’ll be hidden from sight.  You could emboss them or have cut-outs.

I’m seriously printing up a stack of these.  With a little tweaking, they could even be used as a good calibration piece.  Even a failed print could probably still be used as a collar stay!

Thanks Nick!

Dodecahedral Protoboard by mrule

Back in December, Dustyn Roberts (author recently of Making Things Move) chided the open source 3D printer community about its single-parts focus during her Botacon Zero talk ”3D Without the Glasses: Making Assemblies of Parts.” In her opinion, designers are missing out on an accumulation of potential possible with an assembly of parts when they focus on the part-that-is-a-thing. Her statement resonated with me tremendously and has transformed how I explore Thingiverse.

I read a post over at the Thingiverse blog about the Yazzo project that WilliamAAdams has been posting to the site, projects built around 3D printed joints and mounting points linked and supported by steel rods (a very RepRap concept). One thing I admire about his Delta Bot: he pushes his 3D printed parts for what can reasonably be expected from plastic, and uses other hardware to extend the project beyond the limitations seemingly enforced by the frame of the build surface. An excellent use of available resources.

As part of the MakerBot Support Team, I communicate every day with dozens and dozens of potential MakerBot operators, and I have noticed that a small but significant number of them are obsessed with build platform size, assuming that the larger the build surface, the better the thing you can make. Implicit to this thinking is the notion that the completed project should be entirely or even mostly 3D printed.

This manner of thinking limits your overall project unnecessarily to the 3D printing technology you have available. I can’t help but believe that this attitude towards design is to a certain degree unique to the 3D printing community — most other design communities have a more heterogeneous approach to materials and tools. It would be rare, for instance, to see a building composed entirely from one substance. And searching around Thingiverse you can see a shift underway away from the part-that-is-the-thing to the use of the 3D printer as an essential but not exclusive tool in a designer’s toolbelt.

A somewhat wooden box by langfordw

Langfordw’s “A Somewhat Wooden Box” might be a less ambitious project than the Delta Bot, but his pairing of 3D printed and lasercut parts lends the entire piece a greater elegance than most of the box and case designs on Thingiverse. For one thing, should he wish to expand, enlarge, or otherwise transform his design, he has a more diverse toolset and larger canvas to work with. Designing the same project with plastic instead of lasercut sides would constrain the range of choices available to him.

Broom head mount by Misguided

Even simpler, but I think directly speaking to the point I wish to make is Misguided’s Broom Head Mount. No one would dream of 3D printing the pole of the broom itself, but 3D printing the mount itself is a much better idea: the mount is the point of the assembly most likely to fail from use, and printing a replacement is no sweat.

The MakerBot Automated Build Platform has made it easier for MakerBot Operators to design elaborate assemblies of subparts to create projects that have very little to do with the scale of the print platform. Most famously, Webca’s 3D printed Makerbot. But there are scores of new 3D printed projects appearing on Thingiverse every day where the designers bring together printed subparts, hardware, parts created using other tools, and imagination to blow your mind.

And really, does it get any better than Skimbal’s Rubber Band Gear Mechanism?

Rubber Band Gear Mechanism by Skimbal

A few more delights I had to add below.

printed Micro-Hexapod by Ijon

These are the printed Parts for a Micro-Hexapod, working only with three Mini-Servos. I need to solder the electronics on an already etched PCB and try everything, after that, you will also get the Files for etching your own PCB, but you can also build the electronics on hole-matrix-boards I made this thing in Cinema4D. The source-file is attached. WARNING: I just found out that the back-and-front-legs are badly designed. I dont know why the first came out so great, but than I broke one of them and had big problems re-printing it, because they all broke when I was re-drilling the holes. I will redesign the legs and change the file! If you rebuild the robot, I am more than happy for every alternative leg-design you come up with!

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Mole's ModHex by moleofproduction

The original didn't work with the servos I had on hand, and I wanted to be able to add more articulation and improve bits without having to start over from scratch. Thus: the Modular Hexapod. The dovetail tongue and groove design was inspired by the Simple Spool System for Makerbot thingiverse.com/derivative:5005 I wanted to be able to switch out parts as I improve them and to avoid absolute positioning. Video of my first configuration in action: flickr.com/photos/moleofproduction/5318014248/ More videos w/ creepiness cranked up to 11:flickr.com/photos/moleofproduction/5331316152/ flickr.com/photos/moleofproduction/5330707869/ flickr.com/photos/moleofproduction/5331321724/ I used the nifty Pololu Micro Maestro x6 servo controller and 4 AAA batteries to get things moving. Skull attachment adapted from: thingiverse.com/thing:4378 printed w/ MakerGear .25 nozzle.

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