MakerBot Industries

Now that people are building their machines and people are starting to print, I think it’s time to turn up the heat. Oh yeah, I’m talking about the MakerBot Hall of Fame. This is where you can show the world just how awesome you are. You spent a week (or two!) soldering tiny parts, bolting together 200 M3 screws, and burning your fingers on your extruder. Now, we’ve come up with a bunch of different categories, so there is something for everyone. Here they are:

• Tallest Print
• Biggest Volume
• Longest Print
• Most Complex
• Best Replication
• Biggest Overhang
• Highest resolution (layer density)
• Most Awesome Print Ever

Here are the rules:

1. You must print your model on an authentic MakerBot
2. Modifications to your machine are encouraged, but not required.
3. To enter, upload your model to Thingiverse and then email us.

Oh, and what’s a contest if you don’t award yourself a victory. Here’s my entry for tallest print. I guess I win by default since Bre never posted his tallest object to the wiki.

I’ve been on a kick lately of finding cool, useful things to print with my MakerBot. The current way of running a print is to tape on a square of foamcore. Well, that can get tedious and it sucks to have to use another consumable in addition to the foamcore. Well, I dreamed up a design for a clip to hold the foamcore down so you can print. It turned out pretty nice, and I’ve been using it to do prints.

There are a few catches though:

1. You can’t print large objects (>80mm) as the head will hit the clips. Use tape for those jobs
2. They don’t play well with endstops on the Y axis. I don’t use endstops because I’m tough, but if you use them just beware.

It’s really trivial to print off 4 of them using Skeinforge’s multiply feature. If you lose them, you can just print out more. Awesome!

Nobody likes waste, and here at MakerBot we don’t either. One of the cool things about using a 3D printer like ours is that there is no waste: you use exactly the amount of material you need to print something, and no more. Unfortunately with subtractive processes like lasercutting, you have waste material. With our CupCake CNC designs, there is a large amount of negative space, which leaves us with these big, rounded squares of wood. They had been stacking up at the lab and we didn’t know what to do with them.

Enter Andreas Ekberg, one of our friends here in NYC. He stopped by NYC Resistor one night to hang out and chat and do cool things with us. Well, he spotted the stacks of blank wood and wondered if we had any plans for them. We didn’t and he ended up taking a whole stack of them home with him to screenprint on. The results are gorgeous.

Waste into art. Super awesome.

More photos below:

So I was printing some tweezers I downloaded from Thingiverse the other day, and they turned out really nicely because it was basically one big outline with very few starts/stops of the extruder. Playing with them, seeing how strong they were, and also looking at the cool profile they made got me thinking: Wow, this sort of looks like the profile of a wing! That idea got into my head, and I decided that I absolutely needed to try and 3D print wings of some sort.

Unfortunately I’m barely a n00b at 3D modeling, and I don’t know the first thing about wing design, so I hit up the Thingiverse Community to see if anyone had any models or experience. It turns out that a few of our members are avid RC plane hobbyists and were quick to post a few wing designs here and here. Their passion about this technology was really refreshing, and it was cool to collaborate digitally on a physical object.

The wings themselves turned out really nice. The grains are all in the direction of flow, and they are really smooth. If they don’t outright work, it would be a very simple 5 minute sanding job to get them absolutely perfect. I havent weighted them, but they are strong and light-weight. They are 70mm long, but I’m going to try and print ones that are 120-130mm next (current max build height) The only problem I have is that I don’t have access to any sort of wind-tunnel or RC plane to test them on. Does anyone want samples to play with?

When we set out to build MakerBot, we wanted to build a cheap, affordable 3D printer that we could build using commonly available parts and to make the rest of the parts using Digital Fabrication techniques. Since we had one laser cutter and zero MakerBots at that time, we pretty much had to make everything with the laser cutter.

One of the tricky parts to make is the idler pulley. These are pulleys that serve to tension the various belts in the system and they need to run smoothly. Buying a commercial part that does this would have been a few bucks, minimum. So, one night at around 2AM, I decided to see if it was possible to lasercut them. That presented its own unique challenge, since the pulleys needed to be flanged to keep the belt on the pulley.

After about 3-4 iterations, I came up with a design that used stacked layers of wood that you glued together to build a pulley. This was very tricky, and required assembling parts before you could even use them. Furthermore, the inner rings were very thin and broke easily. We were worried that they would not hold up to shipping, so we shipped extra parts. Also, being constrained by the thickness of the wood was a pretty tough challenge, and the pulleys sometimes come loose on the pulley. Not a big deal, but not elegant.

The whole reason I got into digital fabrication was because of the RepRap project, and the idea of a machine being able to make improved parts for itself. So, fast forward a few weeks and we now have 4 functioning MakerBots here at the lab. I sat down and decided to try and see what parts I could print, and the pulley stuck out like a sore thumb. I went through about 3 iterations before I landed on a nice design. The 608 bearing press-fits into the pulley and it rides like a dream. No gluing parts overnight, it just works.

If you have a MakerBot, you can download this design and print it out to upgrade your machine. How awesome is that?

This is certainly just the first in a string of printable parts that will make up the MakerBot design. We’ll be shipping these as part of the 2nd batch of CupCake CNC kits that will ship on May 1st. Hold onto those wooden pulleys, they’ll be relics someday. =)

We’re really happy to be carrying the latest, top-of-the-line RepRap electronics which we use to drive our MakerBots. These boards were developed by me (Zach Hoeken) as part of my volunteer work for the RepRap Research Foundation. As always, the designs are 100% open and free. You can hit up the files on Thingiverse, you can read the blog entry introducing the design on the RepRap Blog, or you can skip straight to the wiki page for full-on documentation.

Oh yeah, and we sell them in our online store if you want to get a hold of one. We’re in the process of getting these boards fully assembled (a first for us) and this will probably happen in the next month or two if you don’t feel like doing SMT soldering.

We’re big fans of open source here at MakerBot. Not only are all of our designs are open source, but we use many open source tools to run and build the machines. So when we heard about a conference about Open Sourcing everything, we were really psyched! After all, thats one our big dreams: that people will use MakerBots to build open source physical objects! We even created a website called Thingiverse to make it easier for people to do just that.

Anyway, if you’re interested in this sort of thing, its going to be really fun. Also, the more people that show up that are interested in MakerBot, the more likely it is that we can convince the other conference attendees that we should hold a session on open source hardware in general, and open source 3D printable objects in particular. We’ll be bringing our latest CupCake CNC machine, and it should be a really fun day of printing.

Here are the details:

1. Make sure you register! The deadline to register is by noon tomorrow. Sorry about the short notice.
2. Its at the UNICEF headquarters in Midtown. Directions are here.
3. It starts promptly at 8am. So don’t go out partying the night before.
4. Let us know if you’re going to stop by. We’d love to say hi and chat.

The past month has been a flurry of activity over here at MakerBot. Since we launched the prototype design we spend about 2 weeks working day and night to perfect the CupCake CNC design. Then we had to transition to production, as well as document the whole thing in its entirety. That whole process is very involved, and to be honest a bit boring. Creating detailed parts lists down to the last nut and bolt, writing docs, re-writing docs, taking pictures, re-taking pictures to get a better shot and all that stuff really pales in comparison to actually sitting down and printing stuff out.

Luckily we’ve managed to find time to chill out and print some stuff under the guise of ‘fine tuning the print parameters’ and ‘debugging the code’. The happy folks over at Thingiverse have been very productive lately and have been cranking out cool designs for us (and you!) to print. These are some gears that we printed. We’ve also been working on a secret model that we’re printing. We’ll be blowing your minds soon with that, don’t worry. Anyway, I’ll stop blabbing for now. Here are the gears!

These gears were made by by a Blender script that generates gears. You can check out some of its models in Thingiverse. This awesome script allows you to generate all sorts of gears, including gear racks and such. really rad! We printed a few of them and they mesh very nicely, and the ABS they are printed on is very strong. I like them alot.

Interesting side note: once you have solid 3D positioning hardware and a solid extruder, then its all about the software. If you look closely these gears are both pretty much exactly the same. They even have the same defects, which means that if we improve the software to not cause those defects then the printing quality is improved. Ya gotta love being able to download improved software to improve a physical device.

Oh, and if you’re wondering: the CupCake CNC kit will be shipping this Wednesday the 15th. We have 5 presale kits left. As a special bonus to people who order the presale, we’re including the bonus toolkit with all the tools you need to build it (stuff like solder paste, an avr programmer, hex keys, PSU, plastic, etc, etc.)

Some say that necessity is the mother of all invention, and I’d have to agree with them. When we decided to start MakerBot and launch a complete 3D printer kit for under a grand I knew we had a lot of work cut out for us. Transitioning the RepRap technology from a research project to something that is more of a product presents many challenges. One of my main tasks was preparing the Plastruder MK3 for production.

I had been developing the 3rd generation extruder as part of RepRap for a while and it worked great. However, there were parts of the process that just weren’t suited for a DIY kit at all. The main problem was attaching the nichrome wire and thermistor to the heater barrel so you can accurately control the temperature. For years (literally) we’ve been attaching the nichrome wire to the heater barrel with some form of high temperature cement: first JBweld, then with fire cement and stove cement. The latest revisions for doing this all work, but I didn’t like them.

Why? Because they are horribly messy. Stove cement is an awful, black compound that stains and is probably toxic as hell. Fire cement only comes in 55lb bags. Stove cement only comes in giant 5 oz tubes. All you need is a tiny amount of this stuff to insulate and bond the nichrome. Plus, it is a very delicate process to wrap the nichrome and then apply the goop the whole time hoping that you don’t jiggle it the wrong way and have everything fall apart. If some of it gets in your extruder nozzle? Game over. Oh, did I mention that you have to let it sit OVERNIGHT to fully cure? You’re all fired up to build your extruder and WHAM! Instant timeout.

So, what did I do? Well, aside from the intial panic, I decided to try about 10 different techniques and go with the best one. I tried all the various forms and techniques for dealing with high temperature cement when I stumbled upon this blog entry by Limor Fried of Adafruit fame. Something there sparked my eye: it was here use of the Kapton tape. Up until now I had not even heard of it, and maybe its the same for you as well.

After doing a few hours of research on it and realizing it was PERFECT for what I wanted, I quickly ordered a tiny little roll from McMaster for $4. As soon as I got it, I built a heater barrel assembly from it. It took me 15 minutes and I was able to use it right away. It was the fastest and easiest extruder build I had ever done. Usually when I built extruder barrels, I had to use some sort of tape to hold down the leads while I build it anyway. With Kapton tape, I didn’t have to remove them and they simply became an integral part of the extruder itself.

Wow, that turned out to be longer than I thought. I managed to find a good supplier of Kapton tape so you can get it from the MakerBot store, and it will be a part of our upcoming Plastruder MK3 Kit which will start shipping Monday.

With the recent release of the Arduino MEGA, I’ve been getting quite a few questions about the differences between the various boards. The differences are actually pretty simple, so I figured I’d write a post about it to make it clear.

Basically, from a purely capabilities standpoint, its like this:

Arduino < Sanguino < Arduino MEGA

If you’re going from a price perspective, its more like this:

Sanguino w/o USB to TTL cable < Arduino < Sanguino w/ USB to TTL cable < Arduino MEGA

If you’d prefer to get into the nitty gritty, here’s a table with the various functionalities of the boards broken out:

Of course, each board serves its own particular niche: If you need a simple, easy, small board for a basic project, the standard Arduino is usually more than enough. If you need just a bit more memory/space/pins, then the Sanguino could be right for you. If you want to have the most powerful, or you need a ton of pins, or you just like awesomeness, then the Arduino MEGA could be right for you.

Have you made your decision? If so, you’re in luck, since we’re the only store in the world that sells all three! We have the Arduino Duemilanove w/ atmega328, the Sanguino, and the Arduino MEGA in stock. Grab your favorite, or collect all three!

Long live open source hardware!

Finally, there’s probably something I left out or got wrong, so please feel free to correct me if I messed up.