MakerBot Industries

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.

Ben Fraser has a the Test Jig #4 ticking. Exciting!

There are a number of awesome clock projects that are ticking forward. If you have an interest in working on MakerBottable clocks, you’re invited to swing by the MakerBot workshop this Saturday, February 4th, from Noon to 6PM and hack on clocks.

Please RSVP on eventbrite and join the MakerBot Clock Google Group to stay up to date with the latest clock action. Bring any models you’ve made and a laptop so you can work on clocks while you’re here!

MakerBot Clockathon
MakerBot Workshop
Saturday, February 4th
Noon to 6PM
Pizza will be served.

Check out the slideshow of photos that Ben Fraser took of the last Clockathon

Here at MakerBot, we make open source hardware and we freely share digital designs for our products on Thingiverse.com. As a business, we strive to be a model for the bold companies of the 21st century that embrace sharing. You can download the design files for the things we sell on Thingiverse.com.

We created Thingiverse to be the digital design sharing utopia of our dreams. Thingiverse.com integrates with open licenses that encourages Thingiverse users to let others copy and change their work so that others can stand on their shoulders and create the products of tomorrow and the solutions for the next generation. Every day I look on Thingiverse and say “Wow!” when I see the new things that have been shared. People who upload designs to Thingiverse are my heroes.

Things, and digital designs for things, are very different than other types of media. Copyright doesn’t work the same way on things as it does with music, movies, and books. If you’re into exploring the intellectual property landscape of things, you need to read “It will be awesome if they don’t screw it up” by Michael Weinberg.

The Pirate Bay announcement of a new category for digital designs is interesting because it’s another place where people can share digital designs for real things. As a technology, torrents are particularly great for super mega giant files because they distribute the downloading load and I’m curious to see what kinds of things will begin to show up in that category. Because The Pirate Bay takes a bold, no-holds-barred approach to sharing, I’m sure there will be controversies as companies and people who long for the proprietary days of the 20th century come to terms with the raw power of contemporary sharing technology. Cue squeaking of the world’s tiniest violin.

In the contemporary age of sharing, those who share will be the leaders of tomorrow. The sharers will be the ones who will emerge in the 21st century as winners in the rapidly changing innovative landscape. I’ve consistently advised individuals and companies to push their comfort level and share more. If you have a company that feels threatened by the idea of someone sharing digital designs for your products, I suggest you join the sharing community and share those design files yourself on Thingiverse.com.

Gear O’Clock by PrintTo3D

We’ve added 5 last-minute tickets for the clockathon this Sunday. It’ll be a fun day of sharing, hacking, and MakerBotting. Sign up at eventbrite!

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

January 10, 2012 (Brooklyn, NY) – MakerBot Industries is excited to announce the launch of its latest product, The MakerBot Replicator™, which will debut at CES in Las Vegas, NV on Tuesday, January 10th. Available in the MakerBot store for pre-order today!

The MakerBot Replicator™ is the ultimate personal 3D printer, with MakerBot Dualstrusion™ (2-color printing) and a bigger printing footprint, giving you the superpower to print things BIG! Assembled in Brooklyn by skilled technicians, the MakerBot Replicator™ is ready within minutes to start printing right out of the box. Starting at $1749, The MakerBot Replicator™ is an affordable, open source 3D printer that is compact enough to sit on your desktop. Want to print in two colors? Choose the Dualstrusion™ option!

With a build envelope that’s roughly the size of a loaf of bread, The MakerBot Replicator™ gives you the power to go big. Make an entire chess set with the press of a button. Friends, classmates, co-workers, and family will see the things you make and say “Wow!”

The MakerBot Replicator™ creates anything you can imagine with the new MakerBot Stepstruder™ MK8, the extruder is the part of the machine that turns raw feedstock, like ABS (what Lego® is made of) or PLA (a biodegradable material made from corn), into the objects you desire. You can order your MakerBot Replicator™ with single or dual MakerBot Stepstruders on it. By choosing the dual extrusion option, you’ll print with two different colors at the same time. MakerBot Dualstrusion™ unlocks the ability to make beautiful combinations of colors and opens the door to experimenting with with multi-material objects.

The MakerBot Replicator™ is ideal for personalized manufacturing, providing a new way to make the things you want and need. It is also an essential tool for children and students; parents and educators with a MakerBot Replicator™ offer the next generation an opportunity to learn the digital designing skills required to solve the problems of the future. Students with access to a MakerBot have an edge in the future job market. Just like the youth of the 1980’s, who had access to computers, children with access to a MakerBot Replicator™ will become the leaders who make a better tomorrow.

The MakerBot Replicator™ is the tool from tomorrow, today. In the two years since the company was founded, the capabilities of a MakerBot have grown from printing cupcake-sized objects in 2009 to printing things as large as an entire loaf of bread today on on the MakerBot Replicator™. MakerBot Industries continues to demonstrate its dedication to putting the tools of creativity into the hands of the those brilliant and bold enough to bring their imagination into the physical world.

Press Kit: View and download photos of The MakerBot Replicator™

View product specs and pre-order your MakerBot Replicator™ today!

Over the last few years there have been some awesome strides made to make it easy for you to make awesome models to create with a MakerBot. Here are 3 of my favorite!

Cookie Cutters! One of the easiest and most fun things to design and then make on a MakerBot is a cookie cutter. The cookie cutter software was designed in 2010 by Guru and since he published his work, a LOT of cookie cutters have been made. Go use the cookie cutter tool and make a cookie cutter and upload it to Thingiverse… then make some cookies!

Image to 3D! When MakerBot started the MakerBot Artist in Residency Program, Marius Watz was the first in January of 2011 and he rocked it! He launched an entire design tool library that let’s you use processing to create objects from data. My favorite is the photo to 3D model application. Download his code and install his libraries and run mb_04_gui_heightfield in processing and you’ll be able to turn pictures into 3D models!

Kinect to STL! Kyle McDonald followed Marius and did pioneering work with the Microsoft Kinect. Use his Kinect to STL program to scan yourself or your cat and print them out on your MakerBot.

What am I missing? What are the coolest ways that you make models to make on your MakerBot?

Update! Date moved to 1/22. It is now going to happen on Sunday not Saturday!

Last year, Thingiverse user Syvwlch started working on a clock mechanism that you can print out on your MakerBot. Check out the thing on Thingiverse to see how far the project has gone. Lots of work from the community has gotten this project really far. Let’s see if we can push it over the edge!

You’re invited to join us at the MakerBot Workshop for a Hackathon to work on the MakerBot Clock project. It’s going to be an adventure in clockmaking and we’re going to see what we can get done in one day of hacking on the problem. We’ll also eat pizza! Bring a laptop and if you’ve got a MakerBot, you’re invited to bring that too. My hope is that we can have a few informal workshops through the day so that folks can learn how to make gears in OpenSCAD and we can all help each other learn how to build 16-18th century inventions with 21st century technology.

If you’re going to come, please RSVP on Eventbrite so I can figure out how much pizza to order. It wouldn’t hurt to join the MakerBot Clock Maker Group as well.

MakerBot Clock Hackathon!
Date: January 22, 2012
When: Noon till we’re done.
Where: MakerBot Workshop – 314 Dean St. Brooklyn NY 11217

Here are the gears spinning with the help of a drill by Rustedrobot and another video to click through to see the escapement in action.
If you’re too far away to make it to the event, drop a note in the comments and we’ll turn on the dropcam and you can join in remotely.

Joshua Pierce sent us email about his contest.

You are invited to participate in a design competition for development of sustainable technologies and their components for printing on open source 3-D printers.

The goal of the contest is to facilitate an open exchange of 3-D sustainable technology designs that can be printed to meet various
needs in the context of sustainable and self directed development. 3-D printers such as RepRap and open sourced innovation hold great promise for development of appropriate technologies to help millions of world’s poorest communities reach a better standard of living. Designs will be judged on the technical printing viability, feasibility and functionality of the innovation, as well as sustainability from ecological, economic and social perspectives.

Anyone can enter the competition but the contestants must post their digital designs on Thingiverse under an open license (e.g. CC-BY-SA). The contest is funded by the Queen’s Applied Sustainability Group and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC).

There’s no website for the contest that we can find, but there is a pdf!

Happy Halloween from Sphero from GoSphero on Vimeo.

The crew over at Orbotix have made a spooky Halloween video starring Sphero. The costumes were made by Adam (one of Orbotix co-founders) using his MakerBot. Cool! Link. Via Brad.

Chris Fenton is building an electromechanical computer!

Q: “Why build an electromechanical computer?”
A: “Because I have a 3D printer, and I can”

Thanks Eric Skiff! Via NYCResistor