MakerBot Industries

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….

You can now make a custom MakerBot body on Ponoko. We’re obsessively open source and the MakerBot Cupcake CNC files have been available for download from Thingiverse from the moment we launched. Up until now making your own bot has required having your own lasercutter. MakerBot was really made possible because we bought a lasercutter that Adam, Zach, and I share with the others at the NYCResistor hackerspace. Witha lasercutter, we could create lots of prototypes in a short amount of time. Ponoko lets you do this too. It is like having your own lasercutter on demand. Ponoko lets people innovate and then you can upload your designs and then Ponoko will lasercut them and ship it to you. It’s cool. We’ve put our files up on Ponoko’s site and you can have them lasercut them out of lots of different materials and send them to you. We’ve been working with Derek over at Ponoko and he’s set up our files and arranged them in a friendly way so that it’s easy for folks to download the files, modify them if you want and get them made by Ponoko. Want to get your MakerBot made out of Bamboo or get a custom body? Ponoko can handle it.

This may seem a little weird since we are a business and we don’t make any money when people get our designs made on Ponoko. The good thing is that for folks who want just the lasercut parts for the MakerBot body and the extruder that will just work, you can buy them pre-made from us. Having open source designs is a great thing for us. We’ve already seen some folks create scratch built MakerBots and the amount of innovation that comes back into the design when people do things on their own and try new things out and then reshare them with the community is one of those things that demonstrates how awesome it is to share and allow others to innovate with our design files.

Making your own custom MakerBot case is cool because we release our files under an open source license that allows you to download the files to understand and do things with them. If you make any changes, you are required to publish your changes so the community can see the innovations you’ve made. It’s kinda like you get to stand on our shoulders, but you have to let others stand on your shoulders.

We encourage people to share pictures and their modified designs is on our site Thingiverse. If you make a MakerBot you can go to the MakerBot page on Thingiverse and click the “I Made One” button.

Then you can choose to either upload a picture or if you’ve changed the design, you can upload your modified design files and you’re all set! This makes it easy for you get recognized for your work, reshare your innovation with the open source 3D printer community and meet the terms of the license and expectations of the open source 3D printing community. I can’t quite imagine someone standing on someone else’s shoulders and then the bottom person standing on the top person’s shoulders, but the image I get in my mind is a mobius strip of wonderful innovation!

There are a few things to lookout for. We stand behind the MakerBot lasercut pieces because they have our name on them. If you get these files lasercut by Ponoko, you’re doing so at your own risk. When you buy from Ponoko, you’re blazing a trail into new and exciting territory and we think it’s awesome, but if they don’t fit together, remember that’s part of the innovation process! As a guideline, we’ve found that any material you make these designs from should be no thicker than 5mm or the slots just won’t fit.

You can get a MakerBot in Acrylic on Ponoko and it will look HOT, but keep in mind that acrylic has the property of having a binary fail if you screw in your bolts a smidge too tight. The good news is you’ll be able to put it back together with superglue.

Besides the lasercut files, we’ve set up our Ponoko showroom to include the Laserless kit provided by us so that you’ll be able to combine your custom lasercut parts with a laserless kit to equal one basic kit. You can also add the deluxe upgrade kit on the Ponoko site which gives you a bunch of plastic and tools and a power supply, effectively making your kit a deluxe kit.

Traditional people who don’t get open source may shake their heads at us, but we know that being open with our designs and letting people innovate on them and reshare them is a key part of pushing the open source personal manufacturing revolution forward! It is the most exciting time ever to be involved in designing and making things!

Got questions? Drop a note in the comments! Ponoko has written it up too!

MakerBot Operators are blazing trails into the frontiers of personal manufacturing. Check out this great toolhead mounting for a full dremel that Webca made. You can find other options that require a flexishaft by browsing the Dremel tag on Thingiverse.

If anyone gets a chance to try it out. I’d love to see more documentation on getting a MakerBot set up to do milling here! It’s a wiki, so feel free to add your own experience!

There is a big demand for Gen3 Electronics and everytime we put them in the store, we increase the amount we put in the store and they still sell out very fast! Right now we have some in stock and I’m sure that shortly after I post this, they will all be gone.

How will you know when they will come? As soon as they ship, we’ll send you tracking information!

We’ve got 1500 sets of Gen3 on order and they’ll be delivered as they are manufactured. To make things fair, we’re putting them up for pre-sale so that you can get in line without having to check back everyday to see if they are for sale again! Keep in mind that if you order other items from us with in the same order as the Gen3 electronics that the entire order will be sent out when the electronics arrived. Having pre-sales will also help us understand demand for these so that we can continue to keep these in stock.

The cool thing is that with every Gen3 electronics sets, we know there is another CNC machine or RepRap machine being born. Up until January, we rarely sold Gen3 sets, but this year, things are really taking off, and we’re excited to get them to you to do amazing Gen3 electronics projects!

You can find the Gen3 electronics in the MakerBot store!

Do you have a unique project that you’ve got planned or have built with these electronics? Drop us a note in the comments. We’d love to hear more about what people are dreaming up!

Pictured above: Charles Pax created a custom lasercut case for his MakerBot that holds all the Gen3 electronics in bottom of the machine!

NYCResistor is having an art show this weekend and if you’re in the NYC area, you should come and visit! Included in the show will be the original arduino and lots of other projects by artistic arduino superstars!

MakerBot is built on the work that Arduino has done with microcontrollers and there are actually two Arduino derivatives in the MakerBot. One on the Motherboard and the other on the extruder! We love Arduino and we can’t wait to check out this show! You can reserve tickets by clicking here!

@NYCResistor
March 27th, 2010 8-12pm
87 3rd Avenue, 4th floor
$10

Update: The source files have been documented and that documentation can be found here. They are PDFs for now, which is a first step towards publishing the source files. The original files are still not there. If you’d like to see the original files these are derived from to compare, you can find the motherboard here, the stepper driver here, the extruder controller here, and the endstop here,

Open Source Hardware is hardware that has an open license. You can copy it, develop it, and even sell it yourself. You must provide attribution to the designer and you must also release the derivative source files under the same license. This applies even if you use a proprietary program for your designs.

Sometimes an individual or a company makes a derivative of an open source project, goes to market with it and then doesn’t share their derivative designs with their changes. This is not only against the license, but it’s also not ethical. It is a dead end for the innovation and development which is the heart of the open source hardware community.

Right now there are some folks on the RepRap forums that are selling a derivative of our electronics. They’ve stated that they’ve modified our designs to make them more compact. There is absolutely nothing wrong with creating a derivative and selling it as long as you provide the source files.

The problem is that they have not published their source files. They have promised to publish a PDF of a picture of the boards, which isn’t sufficient and that promise was made a while ago. If you modify an open source design, you are required to release your source files. If you believe in the power of open source and community innovation, you’ll release them in the preferred format for modification. A PDF of the boards is not a format that invites modification.  Although gerber files, which are the files generated for manufacturing electronics, aren’t easy for the community to build on, they would have shown the community what changed and been a step towards sharing source files.

What would have been awesome is if they had used our designs, improved on them, and then published their source files. Just copying the design doesn’t bring much innovation to the community and it’s not the classiest move, but it’s within the license for anyone to copy us and manufacture identical boards. If they were to share the design files, we could see what they did to make them so tiny and the community could learn from that. Not only does this impact us financially, but most importantly it slows innovation within the community and sets a bad example for all.

It’s theoretically possible that they have released their source files and I couldn’t find them. If they exist, please comment below so that if we are wrong, we can get the story straight!

Note: See the update above. The documentation process is in process.

At MakerBot, we take open source seriously. It’s a way of life for us. We share our design files when we release a project because we know that it’s important for our users to know that a MakerBot is not a black box. With MakerBot, you get not only a machine that makes things for you, but you also get an education into how the machine works and you can truly own it and have access to all the designs that went into it! When people take designs that are open and they close them, they are creating a dead end where people will not be able to understand their machines and they will not be able to develop on them.

Open source hardware relies on ethics to work. It’s possible to legally chase down folks who break the terms of a license but in most cases the community will usually take care of it by confronting derivatives and not buying from individuals and companies that are building on others work and not releasing their source. I wish there was a public service announcement that would let people who are buying open source electronics to make sure that the design files have been published.

The door is still open for them to make this right. From the tone of their forum post, they are having trouble posting their files, which is something that should have been done before they started selling their derivative electronics kits. We invite them to send us an email at contact(*at*)makerbot(*dot*)com with their derivative files and we’ll publish them. If we have any updates, we’ll post them here.

Got an opinion? We’d love to hear it in the comments!

Photo credit – Creative Commons Share Alike: gfpeck

Time Lapse Makerbot Build from Nick Starno on Vimeo.

Nick Starno and Matt Sharpe created this time lapse while assembling a Makerbot all in one sitting!  It’s a great project to tackle with a friend, and it’s even better to capture on video!

The MakerBot Cupcake Heated Build Platform v2.0 is the most revolutionary innovation in the recent history of open source 3D printing.

No longer will your prints be thwarted by the evil incarnation of plastic physics: CURLING! Curling happens when layer upon layer of plastic cools down on top of each other and shrinks a small percent. This shrinkage builds up layer after layer and the edges of the printed object start to curl up!  The heated build platform greatly reduces curling by keeping the temperature of the base of the object at a steady 110C.

Full instructions are on the MakerBot wiki.  We’re open source and we believe in keeping designs open so you can hack on them! Check out the designs on Thingiverse. We are also going to try something new with this project. We’re going to use our forums for community discussion on this project. Here’s the forum for this project.

Big thanks to Jordan Miller for his early support and research into heated build platforms. Thanks also to Nophead for his pioneering research into heated platforms and his work identifying appropriate materials to for printing on.

Special price of $42 until 3/29 when the price goes up to $50!

NOTE: We have started putting kits together now and will be able to ship them next week (The week of March 29). If you order more than the heated build platform, your shipment will be shipped when kit assembly is complete next week!

Chris Connors is on the lookout for some MakerBot Operators who want to set up at a Maker Faire event in Boston and blow people’s minds!

How would you like to join up with other Makerbotters at Maker Faire Boston? the event is on April 24th, 2010, from 12-4pm at Cambridge Rindge and Latin High School. We will be part of the Cambridge Science Festival. MakerBot 595 and at least one other MakerBot will be there, and it would be great to have a few others, and the people who love them. We can demonstrate how the machine works, share some tips and tricks and show people the magic of desktop 3D fabrication.

If you would like to participate, please contact Chris Connors at connors934@gmail.com. Let me know how you can help out, and if you can bring a Makerbot.

Give Chris a shout if you’re in the neighborhood and bring out your MakerBots for a MakerBot swarm!

Albert is an expert on things that are beginning and on their way up. He wrote up a great post summarizing the state of the 3D Printing universe. Check it out!

So how far are we along this path? It is early days. Probably a little too early to declare that atoms “are” the new bits. But progress has been rapid and it feels distinctly as if we are at the cusp of rapid acceleration. For a geek like myself it is impossible to look at the Cupcake CNC from Makerbot and not think of it as the Apple I of personal manufacturing. At the same time as other 3D printers cost $100,000 or more, the Cupcake comes as a kit for $750. That is two orders of magnitude cheaper. Yes, there is some assembly required (Bre jokes that it’s at the level of IKEA furniture) but it is easy to extrapolate to an Apple II, which will be the Makerbot in a box. In the meantime, there is a growing list of things that can be printed with a Makerbot that can be found at Thingiverse.