MakerBot Industries

To celebrate the Desktop Manufacturing issue of MAKE with MakerBot on the cover, we’ve teamed up with the folks at Make: Magazine to give away a CupCake CNC, in the first ever official MakerBot CupCake CNC giveaway and Thingiverse design challenge! One lucky 3D designer will win a CupCake CNC kit for his/her contribution to Thingiverse, and five runners up will receive something special too! Here’s what you do to enter:
       1.        Imagine something you’d like to see printed on a MakerBot CupCake CNC!
       2.        Design your object using any 3D design software you like.
       3.        Upload your design to Thingiverse!
       4.        Share the link to your Thingiverse thing in the comments over on Make: Magazine Blogpost, by May 5th, 2010 at noon PDT.
Don’t have the design chops? Share your idea for a 3D-printable object (step 1 only) in the comments below to still be eligible to win one of five “poor person’s 3D fabbing” prize packs each including:
       •        1 Arduino Duemilanove board (From us!)
       •        A copy of MAKE, Volume 21, the Desktop Manufacturing issue (Courtesy of Makershed)
       •        Maker’s Notebook (Courtesy of Makershed)
       •        1 package of Shapelock Design Plastic (Courtesy of
The Makershed)

Only those who upload a 3D design to Thingiverse and share the link here are eligible to for the giveaway of a CupCake CNC kit. Enter as many times as you like, but you can only win one prize. Although we’ll allow you to submit Things you’ve already designed/posted, we highly encourage you to make something new for the challenge! Winners will be announced on May 12. Need help getting started? Try out Sean’s OpenSCAD tutorial!

Robot Challenge! • Robot Challenge #7: Design a Robot that Makes….

I met Lawrence Downes because he recognized me and zach and I asked him what he likes to make. He proceeded to tell me about cooking lead on his family stove to pour into the ballasts of sailboats. This dude is a badass and living life to the fullest with heart and he also happens to be an awesome writer and I’m not just saying that because of what he wrote about MakerBot. I’ve set up a google alert to read everything he writes. You should too. – Bre

By LAWRENCE DOWNES
Published: April 10, 2010

It would be very cool, Bre Pettis decided, to take his desktop manufacturing robot, his MakerBot, out of its big black case and plug it in right there in the Amtrak dining car. It would be, like, ’bots on a train.

I was at Boston’s South Station, when I realized I was standing next to an Internet famous person. I’d seen Mr. Pettis’s Web videos for Make, a magazine for digital do-it-yourselfers. He has a face you remember. Thick black glasses, unruly hair and sideburns. He and his business partner Zach Hoeken, in a porkpie hat, were going home to Brooklyn after showing their MakerBot — a 3-D printer — at M.I.T.

In the dining car, Mr. Pettis started connecting cables as he explained. A computer slices a digital image into thin layers, which a MakerBot reads and replicates. It squirts hot plastic, the kind Legos are made of, onto a platform that moves up, down and sideways, building a replica one squiggly layer at a time. It can model anything you want: gears, or a goblet. Big factories use similar machines to make prototypes. MakerBot is a little factory for your home. Bre and Zach have a company that sells them, $750 for the basic kit.

A guy walked by and ogled the box glowing with L.E.D.’s. “These aren’t the droids you’re looking for,” Mr. Pettis said. That struck him as funny. He decided to recreate the “Star Wars” scene for an iPhone photo. He had me gesture like Obi-Wan. “These aren’t the droids you’re looking for,” I said, realizing I was in the presence of a highly appealing geekiness.

I asked Mr. Pettis about copyright, and his face darkened. MakerBot is a purely open-source project. It’s their design, but we were all taught to share as kids, Mr. Pettis said. Sharing is what we like to do.

He looked on his laptop for something to make for me. We chose a bottle opener. The ’bot started doing its thing while we talked about how awesomely cool it was, and how cool it could become. What if it had multiple printer heads? What if you could print on toast, with Nutella? (Actually, you can.)

I thought: What if we could all grow up like these guys, who kept their childish delight after gaining intellectual voracity and fine motor skills. Mr. Pettis handed me a blue bottle opener. “Hot off the ’bot,” he said. We opened three beers with it.

Cathal Garvey has been testing the traps submitted for his mousetrap challenge!

Regarding the Merry-Go-Round trap, I printed it and set it near the home of the “culprit” for the duration of the Easter weekend. It was baited with a blueberry and some crushed pine nuts, the latter were as close to peanut butter as I could find.

It was my intention to leave it there for several days, then leave it outdoors if no action was seen, then leave it in the lab if no results after the outdoors site.

As it turns out, there was a visitor to the trap; the nut bits were all gone, the blueberry was..soiled, and there was evidence of mouse pee on the plastic (ew). Unfortunately, the trap didn’t work; the wall didn’t seem to have moved, and I think the mouse just shouldered under it to get in and out.

My take on the trap design; it’s a really clever concept, and I think it really could work! But, the interior wall needs to be braced from both above and below, because in the print I made the interior wall just flops over in its seating. Ideally it’d also rotate really freely, so perhaps seating it in a bearing would help, too. As mentioned, it’d be nice if the design were circular with a side-hole for entry also to simplify things.

Overall, I love the concept and I think this trap could work with some design revisions. Unfortunately it didn’t work for this competition, so on to the next trap, ClapTrap!

Fab@Home has announced it’s new 3D printer designs. They don’t sell 3D printers, they do research and developent and then they set them free for all to benefit from and build on their own. How awesome is that? The Fab@Home project is out of Cornell University and I’ve been a big fan of their work since I first got into 3D printing. The fab@home machine is a bit different than the MakerBot in that it focuses on a syringe based toolhead instead of plastic extruder.

I asked Jeffrey Lipton some questions about the new machine to get the full scoop!

Can you give a short history of Fab@Home?

Fab@Home was started in 2006 by Professor Hod Lipson and Evan Malone of the Cornell Computational Synthesis Lab. Hod Lipson did not set out to revolutionize fabbing. Rather, while attempting to design a robot that could “evolve” by reprogramming itself and producing its own hardware, he realized that he needed a rapid-prototyping fabrication machine, or “fabber”. Although, this technology had existed for about two decades, they were extremely expensive, could only print one material, and were restricted to high-tech labs. Therefore, Lipson, with then PhD student Evan Malone, decided to encourage experimentation and develop a low cost open source fabbing system. Within a year the project was award the Popular Mechanics Breakthrough award and hundreds of kits were built. Model 1 fabbers were used on 6 continents in research labs, fablabs, and private homes. For more information see out history page on the Fab@Home wiki.

What’s exciting about Model 2?

Model 2 is a complete redesign of the fabber system. Model 1 was revolutionary, and we learned a lot about the needs of the communities who use the Fab@Home system. When used for organ printing research in bio labs, or in high school, wiring and assembly time was a major barrier for users. While hackers and other of technical backgrounds could bang out a unit in a weekend, others struggled. Additionally the positioning and speed of the system was insufficient for many long large prints.

Now the Model 2 unit uses closed loop positioning to make more accurate and higher speed prints. All wiring is done with Cat5 and usb cables, and the system has been designed to reduce the price to approximately $1600 in material. The system can be build using only a hex wrench set, a small hand file and a soldering iron for thermoplastic inserts.

The Model 2 can use interchangeable tool heads, allowing the machine to be used for printing plastics, milling with a Dremel attachment, and multi material prints, giving it new versatility. Multi material ability on the model 1 allowed us to printer batteries, actuators, sensors and countless other active objects, and the model 2’s design makes these tasks even easier.

One more thing, the Model 2 was designed entirely by undergraduate students, members of the Cornell University Fab@Home student project team. The new software we are designing is being made by Cornell students working with members of the NextFab Organization and the Centro de Tecnologia da Informação Renato Archer (CTI) in Campinas Brazil

Please explain your BSD license. Why did you choose that one?

When Fab@Home first debuted, intellectual property was a major stumbling block for the field of Solid Freeform Fabrication research. All machines were expensive, making you afraid to experiment. No one would try to stick chocolate in an Objet machine! As soon as someone had a good working idea, it was patented, and innovation was halted while it was capitalized. This lead to SFF being uses exclusively in niche markets, creating a low demand for systems, which in turn led to high cost proprietary systems. Making a BSD licensed kit allowed everyone to have a common platform for innovation, which industry and individuals could use alike. Its much easier for industry to innovate if there is no IP strings attached.

With Open-source hardware, licensing comes down to method of production. Fab@Home uses off the self parts to create a system and relies on existing infrastructure. RepRap bootstraps its way towards its own method of manufacturing, and Makerbot relies mostly on centralized production. BSD makes sense if you don’t have a centralized means of production and you want to push innovation on all fronts. Since Fab@Home uses off-the-shelf components, people must profit off the design. Additionally it’s useful to have community members bundle the kits or make units for profit. There is nothing patentable in the design of the Fab@Home units, so there is no real need to protect it.

What are your hopes and dreams for the future?

My hope for personal fabrication is that it will grow into a horizontal industry. In the days of the mainframe computer each company made the chips, OS and programs. Today we have companies that specialize on a single part of the machine. Now companies make large 3d printers and control all aspect from materials to software. Fab@Home, RepRap, and Makerbot are like the early kits that started the personal computer revolution. Eventually, as demand and markets grow, we will have distinct companies and projects to make materials, deposition tools, control electronics, chassis and software. The first step was opening up the SFF systems to any material with the Model 1; Kraftmark already makes several materials for the Fab@Home. Next we will need to develop community wide standards to enable project to specialize.

I dream of making our new Fab@School Project a reality. We are working with the Glen Bull at the Curry School of Education in the University of Virginia on reimagining science and math education. Researchers have proven that the reason Americans hate science and math is because we tend to have bad science and math classes. We have learned to hate math and science as a society. We have not however learned to hate engineering! By putting digital fabrication into the classroom, we hope to enable a new type of hands on building oriented curriculum for schools which will provide students with motivation to learn about science and math in the k-6 age range.

My personal hope is to get my PhD. I started on this project as an undergraduate, and am now a PhD candidate in Professor Lipson’s CCSL. Professor Lipson’s goal is to 3d print a robot, and Evan Malone made the first great leaps in that direction but we still have a lot of work. I’ve been assigned to finishing the task. At some point in the not too distant future, a robot will crawl out of a Fab@Home and I will be allowed to walk out of Cornell with a PhD.

Thanks Jeffry! Great to see this design hit the internet! Go open source 3D printing!

Today MakerBot Operator Will Langford is on the front page of his school’s website at tufts.edu with a MakerBot. Will was our first intern ever here at MakerBot Industries!

Kevin Connolly writes about Open Prosthetics over on Boingboing. He points the way to the Open Prosthetics Project. This is a really cool project that is asking for help to improve and innovate prosthetics!

The most MakerBottable prosthetic appears to be the Trautman Hook and the project has already created files using Alibre and made them available for download. Getting them made in metal would cost between $435 and $7213 depending on the process you use to get them made out of metal, but the cost will be less than a dollar in plastic for anyone who makes them on a MakerBot. Is plastic a viable option? Can MakerBotted plastic be cast in metal? These are frontiers waiting for MakerBot Operators to explore and share back to the prosthetics ning community that the open prosthetics project has set up. They’ve also set up a wiki for documentation of the Trautman Hook.

The designs on the site are released into the public domain which is very cool. The project organizers encourage any derivative works. MakerBot Operators are fearless digital designers that are not afraid to try things out and iterate a design and it seems like this may be a great place for operators to print things and support innovation in the prosthetics space.

I’ve downloaded their public domain Trautman Hook files and uploaded them to Thingiverse to make it easy for folks to share their copies and derivatives. I take no ownership of the files but I am publishing them on Thingiverse to make it easier for folks to make derivatives and track those derivatives. The public domain license is there and so you can go downoad them, check them out and modify them to be easily MakerBottable. Share pictures of your copies and upload your derivative files if you make them!

What will be the challenges to printing prosthetics? What is the best way to work together to support open prosthetic development? We can only find out if we try!

Download, Print, Assemble, Innovate and Share!

Wow! Awesome video by Shira Lazar!

Last night MakerBots were MakerBotting at a National Lab Day event and Bill Nye stepped up and started explaining it! Cool!

If you haven’t heard of National Lab Day, you should check it out. It connects teachers, scientists, engineers, volunteers and organizations. Very cool.

Check it out! MakerBot in Business Week!

Will Langford, who runs the Tufts Robotics Club, had a nice article about robots, people, engineering, and MakerBot on his school’s blog. Cool!

Looking at engineering on a broader level, Langford says it’s the responsibility of engineers and product designers to “to situate their solutions within the context that it’s needed for.” He’s getting some of that real-world experience through an internship with MakerBot Industries, a Brooklyn-based start-up that uses computer-aided design software to produce 3-D pieces like his dorm room coat hook.

The way the printer works is both simple, and slightly magical. Using a small, heated platform, plastic tubing is fed through the top of the printer and slowly melted and cooled. Currently limited by the platform size, which is between four and six inches in diameter, the printer is great for building smaller scaled pieces, from salt shakers to earrings.

“Their whole aim is to make these 3-D printing machines that usually only universities and research institutions have, because they cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and make them available to a lot more people for a thousand dollars,” he says.

Having purchased a MakerBot printer himself, Langford says he is excited by the ease of assembly, which will make it more accessible to not just DIY-ers, but also the average consumer.

“It’s Ikea,” Langford says with a laugh. “A lot of people just want to be able to design their own things and have them now and not have to just accept whatever design Sony or whatever huge corporation determines is best.”

And Langford continues to make more things: glasses to share on the digital design site Thingiverse.com, or 3-D printed jewelry to sell on Etsy, an online storefront.

“I’m pretty sure I don’t want to be stuck in the normal engineering setting, designing normal things,” he says. “I want to be testing assumptions. I want to fully physically realize my ideas as much as possible.”

via Tufts E-News: If You Build It….