MakerBot Industries

Engineer Nick Starno was working with some test plastics today and needed to open a filament spool box. Luckily, there happened to be a plastic wrench within reach – made by one of our own MakerBots!

You can see just how dirty the MakerBots got at Maker Faire from this photo of the top of Adam’s machine. The clean square there is the outline of a MakerBot sticker he had placed there.

Despite the dust and grime, the MakerBots kept printing away for two straight days. It was amazing to go down the line of ‘Bots and see MakerBot after MakerBot after MakerBot printing and printing and printing.

This wasn’t the first time that MakerBots survived – and kept printing – in extreme environments. Last year some MakerBots underwent impromptu environmental testing in the deserts of eastern Washington state, where the hacker’s convention Toorcamp was held.

Yep. MakerBots = desert proof. Of course, after a good dusting it’s probably a good idea to clean and lubricate your MakerBot’s metal bits (proper MakerBot maintenance is always a good idea). Technically, they are not really desert proof, but last weekend at Maker Faire we definitely saw the MakerBot Botfarm take some dirt, and keep printing through the dust.

A few months ago, Armando Mendez had never heard of a MakerBot. As soon as he did, he bought one, and has been an avid MakerBot Operator ever since. He even started a lab automation consultation business, with help from his MakerBot. As a field support engineer for a pharmaceuticals research company, he is an expert in robotic machines that do things like handle liquids. Now that he has a MakerBot he can build broken or missing robot parts for his clients.

Armando has generously donated his time (he’s in-between jobs) to help prepare the Botfarm for the upcoming NYC Maker Faire. He has learned a ton since getting his own MakerBot, and is happy to be volunteering at the Botcave. “I believe in what’s going on here,” he told me.

This afternoon Armando was troubleshooting the temperature control system on one of the MakerBots. He’ll be volunteering a few days this week and at Maker Faire on Saturday. Thanks, Armando!

Robot armies for peace

Unfortunately, I have never been to the ‘Botcave, MakerBot headquarters, or the general vicinity of either.  So, I learned about MakerBot’s Botfarm comprised of sixteen MakerBots at the same time you did.  Sixteen MakerBots!  After reading about the MakerBot build party at NYC Resistor, I figured they might have plans for a four ‘bot farm, maybe five.  Eight if they were going to be ridiculously extravegant.  But sixteen? ¹

Perhaps most cryptic and ominous was Bre’s tweet on Tuesday:

Thanks, stay tuned! RT @kwiens: @bre Wow, you guys are on a roll! That’s my two biggest requests knocked off in two days.

Clearly they have some designs for such production capacity in the form of Makerscanner kits.  But they don’t need sixteen ‘bots with automated build platforms cranking out parts to meet the entire world wide demand for Makerscanner parts.

Sixteen!  What hubris!  For $20,000 you could get one commercial grade 3D printer or you could have a ‘Botfarm sixteen strong equipped with MK5 plastruders and Automated Build Platforms.  The largest internal build volume for any commerical 3D printer I can find online is about 6000 cubic cm.  A MakerBot has about 1300 cubic cm of build space. Thus, a ‘Botfarm sixteen strong has about 22% of the commercial printer.

Importantly, that’s not the only metric.  I don’t know how fast a commercial printer is, but let’s assume for the sake of argument it is twice as fast as a MakerBot. ²  That still means a ‘Botfarm could crank out parts eight times faster than a commercial printer.³⁴

What in the world could they need that kind of raw production capacity for?  I don’t know what they have planned for the ‘Botfarm, but it is either going to be awesome or apocaplytic.

1. Photo courtesy of camerondaigle [↩]
2. I suspect a commerical printer using FDM tech isn’t going to be that much faster than a MakerBot, but I’ve got nothing to support this guess. [↩]
3. Not to mention at about 1/5 the cost of plastic. [↩]
4. For those of you interested in such things, imagine their ‘Botfarm churning out all the parts for a RepRap every 90 minutes. [↩]

As I wandered around the Botcave last Monday, I noticed a heart-warming trend in the décor:  puppy and kitten calendars everywhere. This is my photo essay about them.

Next to Widget’s workstation, where he is checking the levelness of some rods, two golden retriever pups snuggle with each other, on the verge of a nap.

Near an area where Bot Farm-bound Cupcakes are getting a final check to prepare for the upcoming Maker Faire, where sixteen of them will print full-time, a calendar shows two black labs posing in a grassy field.

Behind a desk where Sam and Marisol were discussing a recent shipment, an inter-species friendship seems to have formed between a floppy-eared pup and a silvery kitten. The furry friends sit together in a high chair.

Attached to a post in the shipping area where MakerBot Kits are gingerly hand-packed packed atop a conveyor belt, a calendar shows a pug-nosed pup nibbling at someone’s jean cuff.

What is the connection between MakerBots and the dogs and cats calendars? Some investigation has revealed that one of the MakerBot suppliers has the option to get calendars as a bonus gift with big orders. When faced with the choice between a gym bag and kittens and puppies, MakerBot will always choose the cute kittens and puppies!

(video source)

The MakerBot Cupcake has been described in various places as a machine that can “make anything you desire.” Well, we are putting more and more thought into what might be done with an army of such capable, affordable bots working in tandem. (By analog, think of last year’s news about the low-cost PS3 supercomputer, only desktop fab-edition.)

From this idea we invented the “bot farm,” the personal fabrication equivalent of the render farm model in use in the film/animation industry to network scores and scores of computers to crunch through endless calculations necessary to accomplish tasks like hanging the right shadow off of Buzz Lightyear’s nose. We are spending September putting our first bot farm together and running it through its paces, and to help build the army of robots needed we have been drawing on the local army of MakerBot Operators to help us out.

Last week we had a great turn out at the MakerBot Build Party. A dozen people came to NYC Resistor and collectively built four bots in one night. Thanks go out to all the builders and those behind the scenes who made this happen.

Attendees ranged from experienced MakerBot operators to a new visitor who had not heard of MakerBot until the morning of the build party. It was a friendly bunch, sharing tips and tricks across the work table as we enjoyed each other’s company — everyone walked away knowing more about building and printing on the MakerBot than they did before they arrived.

We are tempted to throw another one of these events the next time a window for it opens up — perhaps with pit teams and time trials. We’ll keep you posted on the MakerBot blog.

The bot farm army gained four new members…..

Makerbot veterans (owner of bot #117 traveled from Connecticut) and fresh MakerBot Operators alike gathered Wednesday evening to answer these questions and help Makerbot Industries imagine the Makerbot of the future.

Do you want it to look like a Camaro, a Cadillac, a VW bug, or an antique BMW? An old radio? A shiny robot?

Where would you keep it? Your office, the garage, the kitchen, or your man cave? What color should it be? How big would it be? What does it look like? Is it more important to make it cheaper or have better resolution?

Everyone responded that reliability is both priority 1 and 2 and that tinkering is fun, but sometimes it’s just nice when something works perfectly when you want it to.

Do you like having to tweak the machine? Or would you rather just have it work out of the box? How would you improve it?

If you could make anything with your Makerbot – anything at all – what would you make?

The most interesting topic of the evening was whether the Makerbot looks more like a Mercedes Unimog or Volkswagen Thing.

What do you think? There are a lot of ways you can make your voice heard right now. There are comments on the blog, emails to contact@makerbot.com, the google group, and then there is the brainstorm page and now the MakerBot idea torrent!

Unimog photo courtesy of Wikimedia/Stefan Flöper

VW Thing photo courtesy of Wikimedia/Bull-Doser

The answer is “better than the original.”

Better than the original

I had first seen Ian Johnson‘s Soap Dish on Thingiverse months ago, thought “cool,” and moved on.  A few days ago I stumbled upon Ian’s Flickr photostream and finally got the full story.

This is the original soap dish from Pottery Barn. It rests in a fixture attached to the wall, from which it has fallen many times and broken. It can’t be replaced because the line has been discontinued, but I want to continue to use the fixture, since the pedestal sink doesn’t really have room for a soap dish.

Ian designed a replacement soap dish in halves, so it would fit on the MakerBot print platform and asked Will Langford to print the parts for him.  He then glued the two halves together with black ABS drain pipe cement from the hardware store, dipped the dish in an ABS cement/acetone bath to smooth out the texture, sanded it smooth, painted it with his ABS dip to give it a glossy finish, and then gave it several coats of white liquid plastic.  For more information on Ian’s exact process as well as his photos of the intermediate stages, check out his photostream.

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.

Nirmal Thapa, pictured above working away at the MakerBot Botcave is going to be with us this summer helping on the blog and exploring ways to get more MakerBots in the hands of teachers and students. I’m looking forward to his posts!