MakerBot Industries

I wanted to make sure our 8 month old son felt welcome in our new home, and what better way than by putting his name on the door of his room in Makerbotted letters!

I looked on Thingiverse, where there are more than a few sets of letters for blocks and for including in OpenSCAD, but it turns out that it is super-easy to make 3D extruded letters in Sketchup.

1. Download and install Google Sketchup, if you haven’t already.
2. Make sure you have an STL export plugin installed. I use this one but there are others.
3. Start Sketchup
4. Go to the Tools menu and select 3D text
5. Type your text (it can be a single letter)
6. For your dimensions, 0.075m for height will fit nicely in a Makerbot. 0.01 extrusion is good to start with.
7. Press the Place button
8. Select your letter, and find the STL export option. If you used the plugin I linked to, it’s in the Tools menu.
9. Select millimeters as your export unit
10. Select STL as your export format
11. Open the STL in ReplicatorG
12. Use the Move button, and then Center + Put On Platform to get it all lined up
13. Print!

Here’s a great field test report from MakerBot Operator Renosis!

This new heater core, the Mk6+ is awesome. The smaller size of the core and the thermal properties of aluminum, plus the heater cartridge and its placement make it heat up faster and allow for more control. I timed my old core (mk5/6) and it took 8 minutes and 9 seconds to reach 225 C from room temperature (25 C). The new core nearly halved the time, I go from 25C to 225 C in 4 minutes 15 seconds. I am also happy to report that my temperature is much more steady now with the mk6-plus. I only have a variance of 2 degrees when at extruding temperature. And this is running with default PID settings. I bet of a tweak the P I D…. I could get it to be even more stable! Great upgrade!

Thanks for the kind words!

The Stuff of Invention

Today we are launching the third round of our ABS and PLA plastics as they switch to being supplied on spools in Kilogram weights. The last of our classic colors and styles are now available in both 3mm and 1.75mm filament formats, and some previously unavailable formats are now up in the store! I am happy to report that our crowd-favorite UV reactive “Nuclear” green is now in our classic 3mm format, so Plastruder MK4, MK5, and MK6 3mm users rejoice! Also notable is PLA 4043D filament is now available in 3mm and 1.75mm formats- so hop to it if you want some of this great print stock.

Here’s the full selection of new plastic offerings!

Nuclear Green ABS 1kg Spool 3mm Filament

Blue ABS 1kg Spool 1.75mm Filament

Blue ABS 1kg Spool 3mm Filament

MakerBot PLA 4043D – 1kg spool -1.75mm

MakerBot PLA 4043D – 1kg spool -3mm

Yellow ABS 1kg Spool 3mm Filament

Fluorescent Red ABS 1kg Spool 3mm Filament

Red ABS 1kg Spool 3mm Filament

Check out our full variety of plastics in the MakerBot Store here!

Here’s a cool one — a slick enclosure for the BlinkM.  The “bare PCB” look is great for the design-chic technophiles, but sometimes you want to dress it up a bit — nice job, crox.

This looks to me like part of a stoplight or railway signal…good stuff.  Are there other MakerBot/BlinkM projects out there?

Enclosure for BlinkM i2c-controlled RGB led by crox

This is an enclosure that I made for the BlinkM RGB led from ThingM - blinkm.thingm.com/.

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Future so bright...

The world must seem a funny place to a Maker. ¹  Everywhere you look you see stuff, wonder how it works, and think about how you could make it yourself or make it better.  Owning a 3D printer has definitely encouraged² this tendency³ in me.

More and more I wonder about how the things around me are created.  And, more and more I think about how I would re-design existing things using decidedly low-tech components like gears, rack and pinions, and cranks. ⁴  Just as some would want to make Victorian-themed steampunk variations on every day objects, I’m increasingly interested in just how many amazing things could be designed out pure plastic.

I think it’s just a matter of time before printed clocks and difference engines are a reality.  With printed clocks and calculators, what else can we make?

1. Years ago Bruce Sterling edited a fantastic cyberpunk anthology.  It’s a really really good collection of short stories named “Mirrorshades.”  Thus, was conceived the title of this post. [↩]
2. Exacerbated? [↩]
3. Symptom? [↩]
4. Don’t get me wrong, there’s definitely a fine art to making gears work well. [↩]