MakerBot Industries

Apologies for the delay in the Halloween charm challenge announcement.  I was in Washington, D.C. this past weekend showing hundreds of children how to fold paper airplanes for the USA Science and Engineering Festival and did not have a free moment!

Thanks to everyone who submitted Halloween inspired designs. There are now dozens of spooky 3D printer projects up on Thingiverse. There were many creative entries, and choosing a winner was not easy.

We have two winners!

Onneksi Olkoon PaSuTX:lle ja sen Bat Mobile. That means “Congratulations to PaSuTX and his Bat Mobile,” in Finnish. The Thingiverse user is from Finland, and I happen to know a little big of the language and I always love any excuse to use it. PaSuTX submitted several awesome designs, which is interesting considering they don’t celebrate Halloween in Finland. But we appreciate the Halloween spirit! Actually, in Finland Easter is sort of like Halloween because little kids dress up like witches and do a form of trick-or-treating. So there’s some bonus trivia for you about Finland. We hope to see this Bat Mobile printed in glow-in-the-dark ABS very soon.

The other winner is nicholasclewis, creator of the parametric spider web. We love that it’s fully configurable, and it prints very nicely.

Congratulations to the both of you. Please send along your shipping addresses for your free glow-in-the-dark ABS! Happy Halloween and keep posting your Halloween projects to Thingiverse.

Check out Matt Griffin's Poe Portrait on Thingiverse: http://www.thingiverse.com/image:23744

Getting in the spirit of the season is so much fun with open source robots! If you need some help, take some inspiration from Edgar Allen Poe. Get yourself a Unicorn and print yourself your own Poe. The design was uploaded to Thingiverse by Matt Griffin. Nobody sends Halloween cards. Why is that? I would love to get one. My suggestion: hand print your own Halloween cards. Put Mr. Poe on the front, and put this quote inside:

Deep into the darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.” -Edgar Allan Poe, The Raven

At the New York Maker Faire a few weeks ago we announced the launch of our newest addition to the MakerBot family: the Thing-o-matic. It is, quite simply, THE top-of-the-line, do-it-yourself, open source 3D printer. The kit comes with all the latest hardware we’ve worked so hard to develop, such as the MK5 Plastruder and Automated Build Platform, which allows you to continuously print as many parts as you have plastic with one stroke of the “Enter” key.

This is what’s included in the Thing-o-matic parts kit:

• The lasercut parts to assemble a Thing-O-Matic CNC machine.
• 3 x NEMA 17 motors
• The hardware to assemble it.
• Belts and pulleys
• Smooth Rods and Drive system components
• Pre-assembled 4th Generation Electronics
• a USB cable to talk to it
• cat5e and rainbow cables to wire things up
• a standard ATX power supply
• a tools kit with all the hex keys, wrenches, and other bits you need to construct it.
• SD card to buffer your prints
• 1lb of MakerBot ABS Plastic to print with

Less than a day after we launched the Thing-o-matic, it was already winning awards. Those three blue ribbons adorning it in the photograph are the Maker Faire Editor’s Choice awards. It got a record three. We’re so proud!

Andrew and Ezra in the dome via http://fabricating.tumblr.com/

The geodesic dome is complete! The goal of the folks at spaceframe was “an experimental investigation into spaceframe systems from a fabricate-it-yourself perspective.” They invited people from all over the world to print connectors for this 3 meter tall dome. Now they have the first-ever geodesic dome fabricated collaboratively.

Of course, this was all before we released the Automated Build Platform. It launched MakerBots into the future of do-it-yourself automated 3D printing. Whether you upgrade your Cupcake CNC with one, or get get a Thing-o-matic, you can now print dozens of dome connectors without having to fiddle with your machine. Admittedly, constructing a dome collaboratively lets you meet more friends than doing it all on your own. Maybe the Automated Build Platform could enable construction of an even bigger dome. Instead of sending in one geodesic dome connector, MakerBot operators with Automated Build Platforms could send in a dozen. Then they could build a mega geodesic dome. Just a thought.

For those of you who just got a Thing-o-matic or Automated Build Platform, all that 3D printer power may be daunting at first. Now that you can print anything you want all day long, what should you print?

Check out our Top 10 List of things to print with your automated build platform. Keep your MakerBot busy printing a chess set, jewelry, a city or my favorite: a barrel of primates. Or print some Halloween-themed objects to decorate for your upcoming costume party.

The winner: twotimes' Mendel-inspired x and y carriage lowrider

Thingiverse user twotimes won pattywac‘s contest a few weeks ago on the best 3D printed object requiring bearings. Users submitted more than a dozen proposals on how to get 3D printed objects moving with bearings!

These were the guidelines:

1. Needs to be printable on a MakerBot
2. Needs to use bearings in some way
3. Post submissions on Thingiverse by 5pm cst Sunday, Oct 3
4. Post a comment to this thing with a link to your submission
5. Seriously anything that uses bearings in some way…..

Congratulations, twotimes! According to pattywac:

He didn’t win my vote because it was a replacement and improvement part for the Makerbot, but because he made something that people really liked (average rating is 5/5) and because of the dedication he showed in revising the design so many times to make sure it was 100% usable.”

Check out all the incredible designs users submitted, and print them out yourself on your Cupcake CNC or Thing-o-matic.

Mark de Vinck's cat Chester helps install the X and Y stage

Did you just get your Cupcake CNC in the mail? Is it sitting in your living room, unopened, waiting for your attention? Are you a little nervous about opening it and putting it together?

Have no fear, Make Magazine is here! Mark de Vinck has completed his 13-part series on how to MakerBot. Comments and questions are encouraged and welcomed!

• Part 1: Introduction & background
• Part 2: Unboxing
• Part 3: Electronics
• Part 4: Update & burning the bootloaders
• Part 5: Pulley & enclosure finishing
• Part 6: Building the enclosure
• Part 7: Building the Y-stage and adjusting the Z-stage
• Part 8: Building the X stage
• Part 9: Installing the X & Y stages
• Part 10: Building and installing the Z stage
• Part 11: Building the plastruder & testing
• Part 12: Installing the electronics & software
• Part 13: First print!

Thanks for this excellent series, Mark! All we need now is a how-to on the Thing-o-matic…

Hitchcock cookie cutters by Matt Griffin

You have until 11:11 p.m. Eastern Standard Time tonight to get your Halloween designs up on Thingiverse for an opportunity to get some free glow-in-the-dark ABS!

Get in the spirit of the season and design something spooky to 3D print on your MakerBot. Check out the spooky Hitchockian designs by our own Matt Griffin. And, no, he’s not eligible to get any free glow-in-the-dark plastic, but we appreciate his contribution!

The Halloween design challenge champion will be announced later this week. Stay tuned and thanks to everyone who has uploaded something to help us get in the mood for H-A-LL-O-W-EE-N with our 3D printers.

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[Photo Credit: oskay's Flikr photo stream

To celebrate the season, and our glow-in-the-dark ABS, we want you to submit things we can make for H-A-LL-O-W-EE-N with our MakerBots! Monday, October 18th at 11:11 p.m. is the deadline to get your designs in for our Halloween design challenge!

We already have a bunch of new Halloween-themed designs up on Thingiverse. Keep ‘em coming for an opportunity to get some free glow-in-the-dark ABS!

A reminder of some guidelines:

1. Must be .stl file uploaded to Thingiverse and tagged with “Halloween”
2. Must be a new design as of 8 October, 2010
3. Deadline is Monday, October 18th at 11:11 p.m.
4. Must be innovative, spooky, and and printable with a MakerBot
5. Bonus points for requiring the Makerbot 3D Scanner v1.0 Kit , Unicorn, or Automated Build Platform

We will announce our favorite next week!

Also, if you’re looking for things to print for Halloween with your glow-in-the-dark ABS, check out MakerBlock’s Top 10 list.

It worked for Moritz Bappert. His essay “How Personal Fabrication Might Change the World” helped land him a seat at Stanford’s Summer Session, where he took courses on programming and astronomy, and had the opportunity to meet Mark Zuckerberg.

Bappert envisions a world where people skip shopping entirely and instead rely on their own DIY 3D printer to make their own custom products. Of course, no essay on the 3D printing revolution is complete without a quote from one of its DIY pioneers:

“It’s a really great time to subvert the dominant paradigm of centralized corporate manufacturing.” -Bre Pettis

How do you think at-home 3D printing can democratize manufacturing? What are ways that cheap 3D printers are changing the world right now? Do you think there will be a day when every home has its own 3D printer? What would an average day be like for someone in this 3D printing utopia?

Write your own essay about 3D printers and regale the college admissions committees. If you end up publishing it on your blog, tell us about it!

For those of you lucky enough to attend Maker Faire a few weeks ago, you may have noticed one of the Bots off to the side making noise but not in fact printing anything. That noise was actually music, and the music was a 28 hour performance of Erik Satie’s 1893 “Vexations,” performed by Armin Fuchs in Dresden in the year 2000.

We named the robotic musician “Gidget” to celebrate his status as our 2000th MakerBot. Gidget is a Cupcake CNC assembled by Widget live last month. Gidget’s impressive performance may have been the most underappreciated event at Maker Faire. His programmer Matt Griffin said, “For some reason, it was extremely easy to make this MakerBot perform it – this particular one – with its really loose belt.”

Coincidentally, the New Yorker featured an article on John Cage the following week, and mentioned the inspirational influence of “Vexations” on him.

Matt made a lovely video of Gidget performing the piece, and plans to upload the code to Thingiverse so you can program your own MakerBot to sing you to sleep. Also, look for an upcoming blog post by Matt where he explains how he made this musical magic happen.