A hacker-friendly sea change of little CupCake CNCs
MaximumPC Magazine has unleashed its expose on MakerBot Industries online! If you’ve been wondering about the origins of MakerBot, or are exploring how to take a design from idea to printed object, this is a fast orientation with the links you’ll need. The MaximumPC guys talk about their build- from design, to the output of a branded 3D product. Somehow they lucked out and were in the BotCave the exact time Webca released his printed MakerBot on Thingiverse, so there’s a quick telling of that event, and some other stories about MakerBot. Thanks to MaximumPC for coming to the BotCave and a cool article!
I’m excited to announce MakerBot’s first artist-in-residence which means for the next two months, he’ll have access to our 3D printers and as much plastic as he wants to make the things he can imagine. Marius makes wonderful generative artwork. If you haven’t seen his work check out his site and if you like what he does, you can even sign up for his workshop to learn more about how to create and 3D print your own models from processing.
As part of his residency, Marius will be sharing some models. I love the first 3 in the series! We printed out 20 of these for him last week to demonstrate the power of the MakerBot Botfarm.
Marius has some great ideas for where he’s going with his work.
My goal for my MakerBot residency is to produce a set of models for my upcoming exhibition at ROM for Kunst og Arkitektur in Oslo next month. As part of that process I will be developing a new Processing library for 3D model building, to be released as Open Source along with a series of models I’ll publish on Thingiverse (see thingiverse.com/watz) in the MakerBot spirit of openness. You can already get a preview on Flickr, I can’t wait to add more!
This is going to be awesome. We’ve already got our second artist lined up, but we’ll be looking to have other artist-in-residences. If you’re interested in being one, send us a note with some links to some examples of your work and some ideas about what you’d like to get done with 2 months of unlimited access to the MakerBot Botfarm and we’ll get back to you!
I’ve had to sign off on 55 pages of terms on my iPhone twice in the past month and I know that these things are mostly just clicked through. Here at MakerBot Industries, we’re getting to the point of seeing all sorts of scenarios play out, it’s time for us to get professional and have a terms page and an updated customer support page. This is one of those milestones that we’re encountering as a company and before starting MakerBot, I would have scoffed at these documents. At this point, we’ve officially gone too long without having these things being explicit.
Lately the support department has been getting some requests that are, well, interesting and despite our good intentions, can be hard to carry out. We had one where someone who ordered their bot in 2009 was just putting it together and needed parts that we don’t stock anymore. We hooked them up with some stuff from our junk bin of old parts, but that junk bin is not very full these days. For example, we’re out on x and y rods that shipped with the first 200 cupcakes, you can still order from the supplier, but we can’t replace those anymore.
We will always work with folks to help them their bots up and running, but we’ve also had people want to return fully assembled machines, which we just can’t do. Once we’ve shipped a bot and you’ve put it together, we can’t resell it. We need you to check it out and decide that you want it before you buy it. (sounds obvious right?) It also gets difficult when we get requests for support from the person who wasn’t the original purchaser of the machine. Who knows what happened to it as it passes hands? We recommend that you if you tire of your MakerBot or you want to upgrade it, you donate your MakerBot to a school or try and sell it on eBay.
Because of the flurry of odd requests lately, we’ve updated the customer service page and created a terms page. These pages are a mashup of Adafruit’s and Sparkfun’s documentation and are a starting point until we can get our lawyer to look at them. It’s a document that can be updated in the future. For example, I’m still looking for a way of saying, “You’re in charge of your own safety and use your MakerBot at your own risk.” I’ll be getting some help from a lawyer to get that part together, but my point is that there will be revisions.
The goal here isn’t to be annoying, but to get folks to realize that we need you to get your bot together so we can help resolve any issues right away and to put some clear limits on what we can do. We’ll always do our best to help a MakerBot Operator, but these docs add some structure to what we’re can actually do. Check them out. Shake your fist at them and if you have any better examples, point us to them in the comments.
And we even recorded it this time! Some good stuff this week about finishing techniques, a bit about the process of making the Thing-O-Matic coin, a preview of the Botfarm, and an important message about Molex Y-splitters on your bots. Check it out!
When you order your MakerBot Thing-O-Matic, it says 7 week lead time. That means that it’s our goal to ship it out within 7 weeks. Because there are more than 200 different types of parts from a massive amount of suppliers, operations at MakerBot are challenging and the operations team here at MakerBot works hard to get things here on time and sometimes our suppliers meet their delivery dates and a lot of times they don’t. We’ve had issues where we order something and the first batch is perfect and the second batch is junk that we have to send back and start over with another supplier. Also, sometimes we go back to order more of something and find that there aren’t anymore and we have to get them manufactured from scratch. This isn’t a new phenomena, we’ve been dealing with this from the beginning. At about the 800th bot, we ran out of stepper motors that had shafts that would fit the pulleys we had on the cupcake and because we had thousands of pulleys already, we had to get those motors made custom from scratch. This coincided the new year and we had a backup of something like 12 weeks at one point. Ugh. We emailed everyone who had ordered a bot to let them know, but it sucked for us and for Operators waiting for their bots. Nobody likes to order something and wait.
MakerBot is 25 people now but demand continues to grow. The thing is, we keep getting orders and we’re still working to scale up to meet demand. A year ago we were 5 people and everyone was doing everything including packing boxes. Just because we have more people now hasn’t slowed the pace. We’re still pushing the limit of the minimal amount of sleep to get so we can work hard to get MakerBots into the hands of creative people around the world.
One of the things that’s changed since we’ve started scaling up is timing. It takes us more time to put things into production. We were able to prototype the Cupcake in two months (and 2 cases of ramen and countless bottles of caffeinated club mate) and bring the first batch into production in one more month after that because we were only pulling together 20 kits. Now we have a much more challenging math problem allocating resources and trying to make predictions on how much of something we should buy and how much we think we’ll sell. It’s tricky. When we launched the MakerBot Unicorn Pen Plotter, we ordered parts for 250 of them. I love this kit, it’s a great way to turn your MakerBot into a sweet plotter, but it’s sold much slower than anticipated, partly because within hours of launch in the store and the sharing of the source files, there was a printable clone available. In retrospect, being obsessed with open source and having awesome operators, we should have planned for that! We’re getting better at making predictions, but things like getting slashdotted can change our gameplans at the drop of a hat!
I’ve seen a bunch of sadfaces on the internet about the cupcake being out of stock and that there are only 250 of them left. We’ll have these back up in the store in spring when we get some parts that are taking forever to get made. I’m proud of the cupcake, we launched the cupcake and later added a heated build platform and then an automated build platform and then we added the MK4 and then the MK5 and all these things pulled more power which started burning out the mosfets and we switched over to including a relay board with the kit. We modified the cupcake as much as we could and have done as much as we can to create an upgrade path for folks. User improvements like the z-rider mean that folks may be able to continually upgrade their cupcake, but for us, we’ve been really happy to move on to the Thing-O-Matic with MakerBot Generation 4 electronics and a cantilevered z-stage. When those last 250 cupcakes go up for sale in the spring, I’ll be happy that folks can get a great 3D printer for cheap for a limited time.
What’s coming up that’s got me excited? I’m super psyched for the next release of ReplicatorG and our front room is transforming into the MakerBot Botfarm™ with all the MakerBots we built for CES back in Brooklyn getting set up to print things out all day! More about that when it’s all set up!
I walked around and took some snapshots after writing this and put up a slide show so you can see a little window into our life at the MakerBot Botcave.
The MakerBot Cupcake is currently out of stock as we wait on a few parts to be custom manufactured before we sell the last 250 Cupcakes. Being from the internet, I’m trained that when I need to buy something, I go online and it’ll arrive on my doorstep a few days later. Manufacturing things doesn’t always work like that. Sometimes we buy all of the things in the world and then have to get it custom manufactured which takes time and that is what happened to us in this situation.
When we get it back in stock, we’ll have a little sale on it to celebrate the last 250 cupcakes! In the meantime, I’d suggest setting your sights on the Thing-O-Matic if you need a 3D printer!
We’re a fast growing robotics startup and we’re looking to add motivated production and shipping technicians to our team. Here is the scoop on the open positions:
Duties & Responsibilities:
- Manual assembly of small products and kits
- Picking, Packing and Shipping customer orders
- Maintaining accurate inventory counts in our computer system
- Restocking supplies from warehouse
Requirements:
- Detail oriented. You pride yourself on getting it right every time.
- Self-motivator with a strong work ethic, and able to work in a fast paced environment
- Rock solid computer skills (e.g. Windows, Office, Internet)
- Experience using UPS Worldship shipping software or equivalent
- 2-5 years experience picking, packing and shipping customer orders
- Able to lift 35 lbs
Bonus Qualifications:
- Experience using different types of shipping software (e.g. DHL, Endicia)
- Past experience or interest in robotics and 3D Printing
- Experience in shipping products for a large company
This position is full time 40 hours per week, the pay is $12/hour.
We offer a fun working environment, a steady paycheck and the opportunity to be a part of the next manufacturing revolution.
If you’re interested, please email us your resume along with a brief explanation of why you want to work with us and how your qualifications & experience will add value to our company. hiring (at) makerbot.com
We started shipping Thing-O-Matics this week, and the team at MakerBot Industries has been meticulously documenting every aspect of it to get operators from boxed MakerBot to first print as quickly as possible. Thing-O-Matic hardware has been getting a lot of attention at the Botcave, as every new product gets its own photo shoot.
You can find a full set of assembly instructions on our website. We are continuing to update them and improve them on a daily basis.
It’s been an exciting week here at the BotCave. We have begun to ship out our much-anticipated Thing-O-Matic kit. We’ve already shipped out the first hundred kits or so, and that means that some of you will begin to get your boxes.
And that means that it will soon be time for some early adopter to start building their bots. If that’s you, point your information browser to: http://wiki.makerbot.com/thingomatic
Thank you all so much for your orders and excitement. We really appreciate having the best customers in the world, and we hope that you’re as excited as we are!
