MakerBot Industries

The November issue of the MakerBot Newsletter which we launched last Friday morning offered a very special set of coupon codes, valid for “Black Friday” until the end of “Cyber Monday” (Nov 28th). A coupon, in fact, that we’ve never been able to offer before:  tremendous discounts on our flagship MakerBot Thing-O-Matic fully-assembled and user-assembled kits. This discount was so popular over the weekend, that we have decided to extend it to all of our community, even those who have not yet signed up for our newsletter.¹

MakerBot Thing-O-Matic Newsletter Discount

For a $1999.00 fully-assembled kit: use coupon code TRYPTOPHAN.
For a $999.00 user-assembled kit: use coupon code TURKEYSTUFFER.

While the coupon codes were created solely for those who signed up for the newsletter, these codes will work for anyone who uses them in the coupon code part of checkout in our online shopping cart. This deal is only valid until midnight EST (“New York”) time, so those interested should jump on this now before these discounted kits sell out or the window on the coupon code closes. Feel free to share these coupon codes as widely while they still function! We want everyone possible to take advantage of this extremely unusual discount.

While you are at it, take a glance at our November newsletter!

1. We encourage you to sign up here so that you can be informed about our discounts and breaking news in the future. [↩]

Buy all 3 of the brand new MakerBot Projects today and drive your own 3D printed RC car, generate electricity, and conquer the world with your windup robots!

Today we’re launching MakerBot Projects with 3 fun projects. The MakerBot Wind Up Walkers, The MakerBot Dynamo, and the MakerBot Botmobile Remote Control Car. (Store Link)

MakerBot projects is an ongoing collection of kits to make everything in your world with your MakerBot printer. We’re on a mission to give every MakerBot owner the parts and instructions for making everything in their lives.

The MakerBot Botmobile is the first open source remote control car. MakerBot’s own designer Michael Curry, took everything he learned from creating the Turtle Shell Racers which were featured on the track at Maker Faire, and created the Botmobile kit. All you need to do is get the kit, print out the parts from thingiverse and you’ll have your own RC car. It’s got a great 12 volt motor, a 2 channel radio controller, a tiny servo for steering, rubber racing tires; all rolled into a a ready-to-go kit. The BotMobile kit requires no soldering, all the parts snap together – It really is a perfect weekend project. The body design is a slick dune buggy – and it’s already on thingiverse (link), ready to be printed. You want to change it or customize it? The design files are open source and are ready for you to turn it into a hot rod.

The MakerBot Dynamo is a wonderful project that shows how hand motion is converted into electrical energy. The kit comes with a toy motor, 3 metal screws and 3 large bright LEDs – you print the big gears and a handle on your MakerBot (thingiverse link). Simply put it all together following our assembly instructions to make a simple science project that showcases some basic principles of engineering and energy production. We can’t keep our hands off this thing at the office, and have put in 100s of hours of electricity generation while fidgeting in meetings.

The MakerBot Windup Walker was inspired when Bre declared: “everything on Thingiverse should be able to walk”. The Windup walker pack comes with 5 barebones windup feet, ready to start walking. They’re cool, but they’re mostly soulless and require your creativity to bring them to life. Need a robotic posse? Fire up the MakerBot and start printing them out! Elliot Cohen here at MakerBot modified R.Maker for you to get started (thingiverse link), but we expect a flurry of windup walker designs to start popping up on thingiverse as soon as you start designing the next greatest wind up toy.

Today and through end of day Monday we are offering a limited time special deal. Buy the Botmobile and the Dynamo, and get the windup walkers for free (Store Link) – We know you’ll like them as much as we do!

best,

John D.

We’re cleaning out our inventory at the Botcave! We’ve put together a of grab bag of great parts that you can pick up at a fraction of their cost for your own projects – We’re selling each bag for only $9.99! Most of these parts are from the cupcake – so this is a chance to stock up on some extra parts for veteran MakerBot operators, but but it’s really just a great deal that makes sense. Some of my personal favorites in this kit that I know are a great deal include the USB to TTL cable from grab bag #1 which usually retails for $20, and that big collection of thermistors.

In the spirit of crazy grab bagness, we don’t guarantee items and quantities in each bag, but we do guarantee an incredible deal on each one (10 Bucks!). It’s a fraction of the cost! So pick up one in the store today: grab bag#1 and make your parts drawer all that much happier.

Annelise made an awesome  video that showcases fun things she’s done with sugru in the last few days- we can’t wait to see what our users come up with!

We are very pleased to announce that we have received a shipment of Rob Giseburt’s ingenious 5d shield for the Cupcake/Gen3 motherboard.  If you’re not familiar with the project, have a look here or here for full details.

This is small board that adds another stepper axis to the Cupcake/Gen3 motherboard so you can more easily add a stepper-based extruder to your setup.

This community-supported project is a great way for advanced users to add new capabilities to their Cupcakes.  Check it out on the store!

We’re excited to announce that we’ve started carrying Sugru in the MakerBot store. This air curing rubber is just plain fantastic! It feels like modeling clay, and you simply hand mold it into the shape you need – that’s pretty much it. It cures in under 24 hours, taking on the characteristics you expect of rubber – it’s soft, flexible, grippy, waterproof, and can withstand extreme temperatures. It’s a fantastic way to improve everyday items in your life – The first thing I did was fix my fraying laptop power cable.

But that’s just the tip of what’s exciting – it’s all about what happens when you attach Sugru to one of our favorite filaments. It turns out Sugru bonds particularly well to ABS, making the two completely inseparable buddies. Want proof? Check out the video at the bottom.

We have a lot of cool ideas for tricking out Makerbot Prints with Sugru – In fact our very own Annelise has kinda fallen in love with the possibilities, so she’s been making all sorts of fun things that we’ll show you in the next few days.

We’re also planning on hosting a Thingiverse design challenge to see what kinds of interesting uses for Sugru our talented community can come up with. I have no doubt awesome things will happen with Sugru and Makerbots. Basically Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Sugru comes in large pouches of 12 minipacks in multiple colors for $18 or black and white for $20 on our store starting today.

A quick update from the Botcave stockroom: we’ve just had a delivery of ABS plastic and we are pleased to be able to offer some MK7-compatible 1.75 mm plastic.  Small-filament ABS has been a hot commodity since we first announced the Stepstruder® MK7, so don’t hesitate if you’re in the market for a few spools!

We’re also pleased to announce for that we can offer silver ABS in 3 mm filament for the first time, for those of you printing with MK6 and earlier extruders!

That’s right kids!  The glow is back in 3 mm, and, is now available for the first time in 1.75 mm!!

If you’re like us, you love using your MakerBot for decoration, and this is the sine qua non for all your Halloween-related prints.  Why print a ghost when you can print a glowing ghost?  Or isn’t a glowing skull better than one that, you know, doesn’t glow?  And best of all, now you can print glowing objects with your Stepstruder® MK7!

We are seriously excited that this shipment is here in time to get it to you by Halloween — grab it now and have the scariest, glowiest Halloween party on your block!

Look at the pictures above and then make your choice.  Do you want the Red LED strip or the Blue LED strip?  If you choose the Blue LED strip, the story ends, and you wake up in your bed and believe…wait.  Wait…scratch that.  I’m going to blow your mind in a completely different way.

You don’t have to choose!  The pictures above are of brand new product — a color-changing RGB LED strip! Just use the MaxM RGB led controller or wire up an Arduino to control the cycling, strobing, or pulsing colors any way you want.

Just make sure you keep a firm grip on reality when confronted with all these possibilities.

It has come to my attention that our original blog post didn’t show off the non-silver colors very well; while silver has sold out, the light and dark brown, tan, and even this electrifying yellow (3 mm anyway) have not fared as well.  So if you’re not blinded by the solar brilliance in the photo above, click through to see some gorgeous spool photos.

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