At MakerBot, we are on a mission to make manufacturing things yourself inexpensive, easy, and fun. We hold the MakerBot Operators of the world in the highest regard. We’ve been engineering our tails off to bring you the best personal 3D printer and we rejected the proprietary cartridge model for printing materials which other companies use, because we encourage sharing and iteration. And those are both best done when material is inexpensive. You can be generous and give things away and the cost of failure is low. We believe the low cost of failure will drive people to iterate their designs, bask in the glow of innovation, and invent the future.

I hate the ink cartridge business model where the machine is ultra cheap and the ink cartridge is absurdly expensive. Have you ever bought an inkjet printer inexpensively and then run out of ink at a critical moment? Then you have to go out and spend a lot of money on a whole new cartridge. It often is cheaper and more convenient to buy a new printer than it is to buy a replacement cartridge. On top of that, I’ve had an inkjet say it’s out of ink when there’s visibly still ink in the cartridge. This is done by chipping the cartridges to monitor use, so you can never use all the material. That makes me so mad. It’s wrong.

This is such an old, accepted model of doing business, we don’t even think about it anymore. Razor blades, ink cartridges, photo printers, Swiffers, and mobile phones & service contracts. That’s the old world. That’s a wasteful world. That’s a world in which consumers are treated like hostages. That’s not the future I want to live in. The way we’re doing things at MakerBot is common sense. It shouldn’t be a revolutionary business model, but these days, it is.

On Teacher Appreciation week, I’m remembering my elementary school teacher Ms. Harrelson, who said nothing has to be perfect; just give it a shot and see what happens.

Unfortunately for Ms. Harrelson, I made something on Monday and it’s basically perfect. This was really exciting because it was one of the first things I made with my new Replicator, I barely changed the default settings, and it printed flawlessly the first time. Behold, my apple.

Apple by jbakutis

This started with the purely awesome Original Apple logo in 3D by acen. I wanted to photograph some of our people here offering an apple to a teacher they really liked. But acen’s has a bite taken out of it. First I discussed with the design guys how we could change this into a dualstrusion model, with a red peel, and natural colored fruit on the inside. Jason suggested another route: why not split acen’s model in half and mirror it to get a whole apple?

Bing, bang, boom.

I made this on a Replicator at 0.27mm layer height, feed rate of 55, 5% infill. I wanted something that would look good from a distance in a picture, but I’m telling you this thing looks beautiful. No cracking, no irregularities, and honest to goodness practically no effort. In Replicator G, under Scale, I clicked on “Fill Build Space!” – or in other words, I Keith-ed it¹ . This made the model 6” tall, so I scaled down by 0.7 to get an apple that’s just over 4 inches tall. For this, we made the leaf a separate piece, so this isn’t a dualstrusion file.

Sminnee asked on Thingiverse if I used any support material, but the answer is no. I might add another shell if I make it again; I just used one this time. I wonder if the very top, right where the leaf piece fits snugly into the apple itself, would have looked smoother with a little more structure in that area. One of our modelers, Jason, thought the model should have a hole all the way through the center of it. This gives the stem area, which dips down, a little beam of internal support.

But on account of the hole all the way through, this is also now a possible jewelry piece.

There are several fruit pieces, fruit bowls, and other accessories on Thingiverse (listed below). So here’s one more for your collection, or perhaps you think your mom would want a fruit bowl on Sunday. Enjoy!

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1. not surprisingly, I did this at Keith’s suggestion. [↩]

I saw this video yesterday of a bird-like robot landing on a target perch through a combination of gliding and shaping its wings asymmetrically in a few different ways. The result is a micro-aerial vehicle that can make a delicate landing on a person’s hand.

I’m trying to get a good look at the wings themselves to see what material those are. Their paper, “Dynamics and Performance of a Tailless MAV with Flexible Articulated Wings,”¹ has a lot to say about choosing a material for the wings based on its relative rigidity. My quick scan makes me think ABS would do well in the range they lay out, given its elasticity.

The point is I want to make this bird on a MakerBot. And even though Daniel Terdiman writes at CNET that there are military applications for this project, I was a child in the 90′s and I just want my own Zazu. This isn’t trivial. I had a bird once, and I’m pretty sure it…well, let’s just say he “set himself free” in the saddest possible way. I imagine pet robot bird would stick around a little longer, and there would be no need to keep him in a cage.

1. A. A. Paranjape, S.-J. Chung, H. H. Hilton, and A. Chakravarthy, “Dynamics and Performance of a Tailless MAV with Flexible Articulated Wings,” AIAA Journal, vol. 50, no. 5, May 2012, pp. 1177-1188. [↩]