MakerBot Industries

Thing-o-Matic Alternate Front Panel by dougkeenan

Sometimes a simple hack is all it takes.  Just look at dougkeenan’s “Thing-o-Matic Alternate Front Panel.”

Why would you want a front panel that has a little divot in the left side?  Well, if you’re rocking a MakerBot Automated Build Platform, you already the know the answer.  The MakerBot ABP has gears that advance the conveyor belt so that it can keep printing part after part.  However, those gears on the side rob the operator of a few precious millimeters of build space in the X direction.¹  My making a little cut out, dougkeenan has effectively increased the build area for his Thing-O-Matic.  One of the cool things is that you could even just cut this little piece out of your front panel and gain the extra build area too!

Thing-o-Matic alternate front panel by dougkeenan

panel outline is slightly trapezoidal, with a notch for the ABP gears

This thing brought to you by

1. Left and right. [↩]

While many of you have been swept up in MK7 mania, we know that others of you are sticking with their tried-and-true MK6 and MK6+ Stepstruders.  This is still our #1 extruder design for 3 mm filament, so why not stick with it!

However, when it comes to 1.75 mm filament, it’s true — MK7 is the new champ.  However, don’t count out Mk6 just yet…we’ve just introduced a new, machined one-piece coretube insert for using the MK6 with 1.75 mm filament.

This new coretube will be included with all future MK6+ orders (at a new low price!) and will is also available for purchase as an upgrade for earlier extruders.

MakerBot was featured on the latest episode of PBS’s NYC 2.0 that aired last Sunday, September 18th. Check it out for yourself on the video link above!

NYC 2.0 is an awesome show covering the New York City tech world. Host, Rick Karr visited the Bot Cave to see where all the action happens (and of course, gets scanned in the process)! The topic of the episode was Hackers so of course, he also visited at our neighbors, NYC Resistor.

Those of you who got a chance to stop by Maker Faire this weekend (or read our earlier blog post) are probably wondering when you too can experiment with dual extrusion heads. The answer is: now! We’ve integrated tools into ReplicatorG that simplify the process of creating a two-material print. They’re not in the released version of ReplicatorG yet, but they are available in a git branch for experimenters who want to get a jump start on the future. And who doesn’t want to get a jump start on the future? Details for the bold below!

Read the rest of this entry »

If you’ve been following the GE Air Show on Facebook, you might be interested in the Grand Finale, posted above. Tons of new models, and as always, funny animation.

All the models shown will make their way to the GE page on Thingiverse shortly, so keep an eye out.

It was really fun to work on this. The teams from Impact Media and Evolution Bureau were smart, creative, talented and great to work with. I’d like to highlight the participation of Gabriel Bentley from Impact Media, who basically taught himself Sketchup and Makerbot operations in the space of weeks, and was running a one-man model airplane factory by the end of the project.

Also, one more thing: the observant amongst you may have noticed that there was never a Week 2 video. Well, fret no more – that footage was discovered, and is posted below:

Check out this video of the folks at Engadget racing a duo of turtle shell racers around their offices!

The lil’ guys weren’t too tired to pay a visit to the live taping of the Engadget Show yesterday, where they were a big hit with the audience! Hosts Brian Heater and Tim Stevens drove them around the studio as an intro to a segment on Maker Faire NYC, which featured the turtle shell race track and designer Michael Curry (Skimbal).

The Engadget team also devoted a blog post to the turtle shell racers.  Here’s just a little of what they had to say:

“MakerBot’s Turtle Shell Racers may well be just the ambassador that the world of 3D printing needs. The toy football-sized RC cars are proof positive that the devices can turn just about anything you can imagine into reality.”

Two Color World by m6mafia, ecohen, JonMonaghan, and Skimbal

With the launch of the brand spanking new MakerBot Stepstruder MK7 the citizens of Thingiverse have already started to upload designs that take advantage of the ability to print in two materials during the same build.  Whether it is printing in two-tones, such as the “Two Color World” above, or by using a dissolving support material like PVA, there’s no denying the coolness that is a dual extrusion build.

So, what would you do with a second extruder in your 3D printer? ¹  A single print chessboard?  A single print zebra?

Oh!  I know!  How about a gangsta that dissolves in water and leaves behind a slouching skeleton? ²³⁴  Or, how about a surprise box that you can only see inside once you dissolve the cube in water?

1. Thanks to Geo for spotting a typo here! [↩]
2. Skelesta? [↩]
3. Solusta? [↩]
4. Dissolvesta? [↩]

Toy Robot Toolkit by tbuser

There are now 21 entries in the MakerBot Mascot GrabCAD Challenge with just 9 days to go!  You can check out the hopeful robot mascot competitors here.  There’s still time to design and upload your own!

The number of cool camera-related items keeps slowly climbing.  The camera gantry from jman (pictured above) is not only the most recent entry but also a very clever one: it includes beautifully knurled knob surfaces and a sturdy adjustments…and much of it is available in parametric OpenSCAD files.

This is an especially cool device since it really serves a different purpose than a normal tripod, it’s always awesome to see Thingiverse users making new, cool stuff to solve challenges that mass-market products can’t.  Well done jman!

Camera Gantry by jman

I needed a way of holding a camera in a stable position for desktop photographing of various small items. A desktop tripod was not really working for me, so I designed this gantry (a bit derived from a traveling crane!) The camera can be held at a wide variety of orientations and heights, and then easily locked in place by tightening the knobs at either end. The whole thing collapses down flat to go in a cupboard. The non-plastic parts are four 12mm by 400mmm aluminium tubes, with caps on to avoid scratching and slippage, a piece of thick plywood 50mm by 350mm (in my case with some aluminium angle along the edges for reinforcement), two M6 * 65mm hex bolts with washers and nuts, four M4 * 25mm bolts with washers and nuts, and some foam for under the camera.

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Printing plates for Mr. Maker by ErikJDurwoodII

Yesterday I spent some time organizing the parts in the MakerBot mascot entry “Mr. Maker” by ErikJDurwoodII into printing plates.  Afterward, Erik asked how I did this.  While I had posted some tips on creating printing plates earlier, I didn’t really give a decent step-by-step guide.  I like using OpenSCAD to orient the parts, but I’m sure there are other ways.  Here’s my process:

1. Orient.  Make sure all STL parts are centered and flat on the build surface.
1. The easiest way to ensure this is to open the STL in ReplicatorG, click “Move” in the bottom right corner, then “Center” in the right panel.  Matt demonstrates how to do this in MakerBot TV episode one @ 2:56.
2. Sort.  Sort all STL’s by the number of times each part needs to be printed.  I like to put them into folders labeled “1″, “2″, “3″, etc.
3. Make a Plate.  I use a simple OpenSCAD command to create a transparent representation of the build area.  I like to use an 80×80 mm square so that I can be sure everything is going to fit.  Here’s the command I used:
1. % cube([80,80,0.01],true);
4. Practice Moving/Spinning.  Using just the OpenSCAD translate and rotate commands, you’ll be able to move, spin, and place any part.
5. Plan for Multiples.  Looking at all of the parts that need to printed multiple times, see if you can place them together so that printing a single plate more than once will give you the proper number of parts.
6. Biggest Parts.  The largest parts that can’t be included with other large parts will essentially determine the number of printing plates you need.  Place each large part onto it’s own plate.
7. Medium Parts.  Once you have a general idea of the number of plates you need, as determined by the biggest pieces that can’t be combined with other parts, try to fit the medium pieces in and around other parts.  If you can’t fit them around the large pieces, you’ll need to create a plate of medium parts.
8. Small Parts.  The smallest parts can be sprinkled in and around all the large and medium parts.
9. Pro Tips:
1. If you have a part that needs to be printed an odd number of times, consider putting a single occurrence of this same part into a plate that needs to be printed only once.
2. Sometimes it helps to have extra parts, so printing an even number of a piece that you need an odd number of isn’t actually very wasteful.
3. Consider mirror-flipping a part if it won’t fit.  Some parts won’t fit onto a plate unless they’re flipped, but are just as functional either way.
4. Consider printing small parts multiple times if you can fit an extra instance onto a plate.  Small parts can rip off the build platform, get deformed, break, or get lost.  Printing an extra small part along with larger parts doesn’t add that much time or plastic and will probably save you a lot more time down the road.
5. Save yourself some heartache and make sure you use a Stepper based extruder that will allow you print without a mess of strings between all the parts.
6. Always include the individual STL’s for parts even if you’re uploading printing plates.  Sometimes people just need to print or reprint one little piece and it can be a real pain to carve one out of a printing plate.
10. Rock Star Tips:
1. Some parts such as complex gears or external pieces can better benefit from high resolution, slower printing, or different infill ratios than other simple or internal pieces.  Consider organizing the parts so that certain pieces that need similar resolution/speed/infill ratios are printed together.  Thanks to Bobbens for including this tip in his Mini servo gripper plate.
2. How about creating the entire GCode setup for printing everything using an Automated Build Platform?
3. If you’ve got a MK7 Dual Extruder setup with soluble support material, you could stack parts on top of one another.  This means you could turn a multipart print into one single long print task, print everything as one big chunk of plastic, drop the result in water, let the PVA dissolve, and pull out all of your parts.

Do you use production or printing plates?  What program do you use to make them?  What additional tips do you have?