MakerBot Industries

Michael Overstreet and Luis Rodriguez had some fun with two talking heads last night. They remade the Colbert interview using MakerBotted heads!

Maker Lapse from Lucas Saugen on Vimeo.

Lucas Saugan made an awesome time lapse. Great to see the instructions so integrated into the build!

I’ve known Gian Pablo for a long time as comembers of NYCResistor and now he’s joining us as a part time blogger here on the MakerBot blog. He keeps his bot at Noisebridge, the SF hackerspace and he’s obsessed with optimizing and using the MakerBot to get things done. He’s also a dad, so I expect we’ll see him blog about MakerBotting as a dad as well! Welcome!

Nicholas C. Lewis who is part of the crew over at Open3DP have come up with a 2D inkjet printer that’s on a XY coordinate system. Can you guess what happens next?

They’ve done an amazing job documenting it, check it out! A “Thing”, a video a flickr album and ablog post. Keep up the good work!

The folks over at Slate put together a great feature video about 3D printing featuring MakerBots! Check it out!

Great article today in the NYTimes. Check it out! (Click past the fold to read the whole thing.)

Also, there’s a great chance to meet a number of the artist and MakerBot Operators featured in the article at the MakerBot Make-A-Thon @ 3rd Ward this Saturday from 2-pm.

Read the rest of this entry »

Mathieu Glachant, aka Thingiverse user Syvwlch, joined Thingiverse right when the site launched. He took my lasercutter class in 2008 and started making awesome things happen. At the Botcave, we’ve been really excited to see his latest project, a clock mechanism that is entirely 3D printable! I interviewed him about the project:

What inspired you to start working on a 3D printable clock?

I had recently become fascinated with escapements, a critical component of mechanical clocks… They synchronize the clock with the pendulum, while keeping the pendulum running, but without interfering with it’s natural period. All that in a little part first designed in the 14th century and still being improved to this day! I spent some time Wikipedia-diving and in my library’s online catalog. Since I only really understand something when I’ve taken it apart, rebuild it, or even better designed my own, (A common Maker trait, I believe.) I wanted a good way to draw and animate one in 3D. When I realized that I might have to draw many different escapements before I really understood them, parametric seemed the way to go. After a couple false starts with other tools, I started up OpenSCAD for the first time and had a first escapement proof-of-concept within a couple hours, and it was obvious it should go on Thingiverse… That was fourteen days ago.

It seemed to strike a nerve, and people were asking if it actually worked… which got me thinking: why not? The escapement is the difficult bit in a mechanical clock, so what is the point of stopping there? It just kinda snow-balled from there, with the clock slowly accreting around the escapement.

Walk me through the process you went through to get the clock to this point. What role did the Thingiverse community play in the design process?

There would be no printable clock project without the Thingiverse community. I don’t think the idea would have even occurred to me… People were asking me if I was planning to design a printable clock, and… I dunno… I just couldn’t say no to MakerBlock. It seemed so obvious after the question was asked. Of course I was designing a printable clock!

The process has been one of accretion, usually by repeating two steps: some rough hacking followed by some consolidation of the code into a library, and building outward from the first part in successive layers of complexity and functionality. By keeping everything parametric, and pushing mature code into the library, the difficulty level stayed about constant thru-out, early mistakes were an easy fix (even several steps later!) and community input was easy to incorporate.

I’m a firm believer in frequent, incremental releases: they keep you in synch with the community, they force you to keep making stuff, and to keep the goals realistic for each release. It started with a little test jig built around the escapement, with a rubber band wound around a drum as a power source, followed by its library version.

Then the next step was to put a gear-train between the power source and the escapement, so I reached for the excellent MCAD involute_gear library, and pretty soon, a few releases later, I had a proof-of-concept design for a clock: an escapement, a gear-train, a power source, and some hands.

At that point, the clock started showing up on Boing Boing, several community members were actively helping debug/improve the design (MakerBlock, DaveD, rustedrobot, barrychuck, just to name a few!) and the first prints were starting to appear, with photos and videos! From those first prints, we started to get some real-life experience about what was, and was not, working with the design.

My hope for the near-term is to see others take the code and the library, and run with it. I honestly don’t care whether I’m the one to publish the first design that works when it’s printed, and there is still a lot of work to get there! I want to see lots of different clocks, with different configurations, shapes and sizes, and I want people to realize how powerful this design method is, how easy this all was, and to tackle stuff that is even more complicated.

Was it frustrating to not have a bot, but be designing for 3D printabilty?

It’s frustrating to not have a bot, period. Just like it’s frustrating to not have a laser-cutter, or to live too far from the nearest hackerspace! For the design process, however, it had its upsides, and the community made up for much of the downsides. Because I didn’t have a bot, I didn’t get bogged down on printability or in the tweak/print/tweak/print cycle, early on. It forced me to ensure the gears meshed in the digital space first no matter what the parameter values where (which would have been a lot easier if OpenSCAD supported recursion, I’m just saying!), and in the end, that makes for a more robust design.
When it came time to chose values for the parameters for a first “printable” version, I got some good insight from the community (particularly from MakerBlock, again), and while I can’t say I wasn’t worried about how it would print… I was pretty confident. After that, again, community feedback from the early adopters’ prints has been really helpful and I fully expect them to be posting their own derivatives soon.

What kind of obstacles did you overcome?

I’ll be honest, the biggest road-blocks so far have been the limitations in OpenSCAD. Don’t take me wrong, it’s pure, awesome genius, but it’s not a full programming language yet. I kept expecting certain things to work (recursion, arrays of variables, heck… variables themselves) like they would in any descendant of C, and when they didn’t, I had to find work-arounds, or brute-force it. When we have a CSG modeler with a Turing-complete scripting language that can spit out STLs (either by extending OpenSCAD or by developing a robust STL exporter for, say, POVray), there will be no limits to what we can design except processing power, memory and the resolution of our printers.

Do you have any other ideas for other epic projects you’d like to take on in the future?

One of the culminations of the printable clock project, for me, would be to show it to the folks at the Long Now Foundation, and ask them for permission to start a new project for a printable model of the 10,000 year clock. In particular, I would LOVE to make an OpenSCAD library for that mechanical binary serial adder they have a patent on… with their blessing of course. I’m hopeful that, given their state aims, they may be receptive to ours. A related, but fully free-as-in-speech, project would be a printable orrery. Not a toy, something precise that a renaissance Maker would have been proud to own. There’s a couple side projects started already with other Makers on clock mashups, and I’d also like to help MakerBlock with his spider robot! Lastly, I’d like to keep exploring the limits of what can be done with this collaborative, parametric design process. I’m very excited by the possibilities in something like CloudSCAD… with a robust version-control system behind it, perhaps?

Thanks Syvwlch, keep up the good work!

Update: Due to the sheer awesomeness of the work and commitment to the community and open design, we’re going to send Syvwlch a MakerBot!

Ask an Engineer 3/26/2011 from adafruit industries on Vimeo.

I was on Adafruit’s Ask an Engineer broadcast. Check it out!

In 1987 I saw AC⚡DC live with friends at the Tacoma Dome near Seattle and they ROCKED! Here at MakerBot we’re excited to bring an AC⚡DC amount of ROCK to the 3D⚡DC event happening in DC on April 28th. We’ll be on a panel as and will be enthusiastically buying beers for 3D printing enthusiasts somewhere in DC later that night.

On April 28th at 3D⚡DC, the 3D printing community will descend on Washington, DC to show policymakers what they are up to. Panels will introduce the 3D printing community to the DC policy community, and explore some of the policy issues that this disruptive technology will implicate. During a demonstration phase, you will be able to see this technology in action first hand, and speak one-on-one with people and companies on the cutting edge. Be the first person in your caucus, at your GS level, or on your adult kickball team to see 3D printing live.

Hope to see you there! Please upload your 3D models of AC⚡DC style Gibson SG guitars to Thingiverse ASAP!

via 3D⚡DC: 3D Printing Comes to the Nation’s Capitol | Public Knowledge.

PS: She was a fast machine, she kept her motor clean, she was the best damn MakerBot that I’ve ever seen!

PPS: For those about to PRINT, we salute you

PPPS: Back in Black (ABS)

PPPPS: Dirty Deeds Printed Dirt Cheap

PPPPPS: She printed all night long

Glen Kotapish sends in these instructions on how to mod your Automated Build Platform Belt to make it last longer and keep it from coming apart. We’ve just considered these belts somewhat disposable, but this hack should keep your ABP in action for longer!

Materials and hardware used: ABP mylar conveyor belt, foil tape (3M Foil Tape 3311 – found at most automotive supply stores and hardware stores – other types of metal tapes may work well too), Kapton tape, scissors, paper cutter, coffee thermos with 3.5” diameter, coffee mug,

Put a new ABP mylar conveyor belt on a metal thermos with approximately a 3.5” diameter (or similar cylindrical object). Place shims behind the belt (shims between the thermos and mylar belt) until the belt is taught around the thermos.

Then wrap the metal foil tape around the mylar conveyor belt. You can use a coffee mug or other object to flatten out the bumps and bubbles in the foil tape as you wrap it around the mylar belt. You can drag the coffee mug’s round surface over the bumps and bubbles. Rocking the coffee mug also works to even out the foil tape. You’ll have to do more than one strip of metal tape depending on the width of your tape. There are tapes and rolls of metal foil with ahesive that are wide enough to cover the full width of the mylar conveyor – this example uses tape that can be found easily at hardware and auto stores.

After completely covering the mylar belt in metal foil tape wrap it in Kapton tape. Now carefully remove the shims from between modified conveyor belt and thermos. Put modified conveyor on ABP and you’re good to go. Be sure to recalibrate your machine’s Z axis for the addition of the foil tape and Kapton tape layers to the mylar belt.

Testing of this conveyor belt has shown no warping so far. The parts off of this build surface have looked good too.

Thanks for sharing Glen!