Job Responsibilities

• Design, prototype, and test experimental plastic extruders.
• Run thermal, mechanical, and flow simulations to speed up development process.
• Experiment with new plastics to optimize flowrates, reduce oozing, and increase quality.
• Work with our R&D department to integrate results into next generation machines.

Job Requirements

• BS or MA in Engineering – Mechanical or Materials preferred.
• Taste for simplicity and elegance in technical design.
• Fluent in both written and spoken English.
• Willing and able to relocate to NYC.
• Familiar with ProE and/or Solidworks.
• Experience with thermal and mechanical simulation software.

Bonus Points

• Deep and abiding love of robots and/or digital fabrication.
• Previous experience designing/operating/repairing plastic extrusion machines.
• Previous experience designing consumer goods.
• Knowledge of common manufacturing techniques.
• Current owner of a MakerBot 3D printer.
• Active participant in the open hardware community.

To apply, please send your resume and a brief bio to extrusioneer@makerbot.com

Oh, and you can even embed the item in your own site, which is pretty cool:

The botswarm is expanding. We’re looking to hire on a new person for our team, and this time we’re looking for someone to help us on the virtual side of things. Besides making Thingiverse an awesome place for the 3D printing community, there is a lot of backend software needed to run a hardware company. We’re looking for a talented and brave soul to help us continue rocking the free by democratizing manufacturing.

Is this you? Is this someone you know? If so, check out our job posting for the job requirements.

Joel Belouet and Catarina Mota have collaborated on what may be my favorite (and delicious) MakerBot project of all time. Using a MakerBot + Frostruder + Heated Build Platform they have managed to 3D print and cook a real cookie. That’s right: your MakerBot is capable of autonomous cookie creation from start to finish. MMM. Oh yeah, and check out the their hilarious documentation site.

MakerBot is looking to expand. The next person we’re looking to hire is an electrical engineer. We’re looking for someone with a deep and masterful understanding of the workings of electrons and how to control them. If you are the type of person who ends up boring people at dinner parties talking about Boron and other doping agents, you may be our person! This position will be focused on building the latest and greatest open source electronics for MakerBot, so we’re really looking for someone with experience in mechatronics. The role will primarily be electronics based, but they will be controlling things such as motors, relays and other mechanical beasts.

If this is not you, but describes someone you know, please send them our way. If you refer us someone we end up hiring, we’ll hook you up with 5lbs of plastic.

Check out the craigslist posting for full details on the position and details on how to apply.

We’ve been working very hard in the MakerBot R&D lab lately. The thing that has been our main focus lately is the Plastruder. As many of you know, it can be a bit finicky at times. One of the failure modes of the extruder is that the drive pulley will strip the filament. Drawing on excellent research by Nophead and others in the open source 3D printing community, we’ve developed an improved drive mechanism: the MK5 Drive Gear. In fact, this drive pulley pushes about 2x harder than the old MK3/MK4 Drive Pulley. We jut got 700 of them in the MakerBot Store.

The design is pretty simple: there is a chunk of Stainless Steel 304 with a knurled groove that has the same diameter as the old drive pulley. Therefore, this part is a drop-in replacement for the old pulley. Since it is stainless steel it is very difficult to damage the pulley, even if you tighten it down too far. Furthermore, since the knurling on the pulley is so fine, it has a limited ability to self-clean as any stripped filament will typically fall out of it. If you’re feeling hardcore, you can download it from Thingiverse and make it yourself.

As sexy as this new pulley is, we wanted to be able to prove that it was indeed better than the old system. So, we turned to our trusty friend, Science! We formed a hypothesis (that the MK5 drive gear is better than the MK3 Drive Pulley). We created a test rig and we ran a bunch of tests. We tested the MK4 with both the new and old drive pulleys at a variety of spacings. As we had hoped, the new MK5 drive pulley came out on top.

For the force measurements, we used a very nice yet affordable Dillon GL-500 Force Gauge. This gauge has a few really nice features: a 500N capacity (~50kg) with an accuracy of 0.2N (~20g). Besides being nice and accurate, it can also measure both pull and push forces. It can record peak force, and even has RS-232 output which we could use to record measurements digitally. It is also a really solid, well built device.

The test rig was lasercut from some plywood and bolted to a chunky 2×6. If you want to replicate our results at home, you can download our template and lasercut it. The test process was pretty straightforward. We typically repeat this process 10x per setup to get a decent sample size.
The design is pretty simple: there is a chunk of Stainless Steel 304 with a knurled groove that has the same diameter as the old drive pulley. Therefore, this part is a drop-in replacement for the old pulley. Since it is stainless steel it is very difficult to damage the pulley, even if you tighten it down too far. Furthermore, since the knurling on the pulley is so fine, it has a limited ability to self-clean as any stripped filament will typically fall out of it.

1. Unclamp filament drive, remove the motor, and clean the teeth.
2. Re-attach motor, and set the filament idler wheel distance.
3. Clamp down extruder filament drive with output hole right against the force gauge probe.
4. Rest the force gauge to record Push force in Peak mode
5. Run the filament drive forward at 255 PWM (full-on)
6. Wait until the filament reaches the force gauge probe and fails (you can tell because the force gauge numbers climb and eventually stop at the peak.)
7. Record the peak force reading

After a bit of testing, some pretty clear results emerged: the MK5 drive pulley can generate a much stronger push force before failure by a solid margin. Since it is made from Stainless Steel, it is also much stronger and more durable than the Aluminum pulley which can easily suffer damage to its teeth when setting the gap. A word of warning: if your hot end does jam, the new drive pulley is strong enough that it may actually destroy your insulator retainer. You should definitely print out some replacements before you begin using with the new and improved MK5 Drive Gear.

If you would like to get your hands on this new hotness, they are available right now in the MakerBot store. Hot off the lathe. The kit comes with a new drive pulley, a 3mm set screw, and a new spacer stick so you can get the best force out of your drive pulley.

For the curious, here is the data we generated during our testing:

An excellent step in the right direction for open source 3D modeling with fonts.

OpenSCAD Bitmap Fonts Module by tbuser – Thingiverse.

NASA is currently taking ideas from the public for about the next week or so at http://opennasa.ideascale.com. People can submit their ideas and vote on the ideas of others.

I submitted an idea for NASA to get involved with the desktop manufacturing / 3d printing movement. It can be seen here.

Desktop manufacturing and 3D printers are beginning to emerge as a growing industry. See RepRap – http://www.reprap.org/ and Cupcake CNC – http://www.makerbot.com/ for two examples. The technology allows you to design a model and have it manufactured in a device about the size of a large inkjet / laser printer. Instead of ink it extrudes plastic onto a platform. By layering the plastic objects can be created.

NASA could work with the desktop manufacturing community to design models for use in 3D printers. There are any number of items that could be modeled – rockets, satellites, the Shuttles, the International Space Station. The designs could be released into the public domain for anyone to use.

NASA engineers could also look into helping to develop the technology behind the 3D printers to make them better.

OMG.  Gorgeous.  3D scanning is awesome.

Make: Online : Laser-mapped subterranean passages.