MakerBot Industries

Scan of a lighter

While there are already a number of open source scanners out there.  There’s the MakerBot 3D Scanner which uses structured light, the milkscanner which uses a little tub of milk to detect the outline of an object as it sinks into the milk, the chess board and laser level scanner, and now Mark Moissette has invented a way to use his own 3D printer as a limited scanner.

As best as I can understand, he’s using a laser line with some cheap optic electronics to turn his print head into a light emitter and sensor.  Even if the scan area is relatively small and the resolution limited, it’s an incredibly cool idea.  It also sounds like with some know-how, some custom software, and cheap parts (€5.00 or about $6.61) this is a reasonable solution for low resolution scans.

I'm sorry Captain, that's just impossible...

Scotty is the engineer on the first Star Trek series. Friday afternoon I was chatting with a friend about what it means to be the kind of person, like Scotty, who fixes things.  These are the rules we arrived at:¹

• Scotty Rule #1: Telling people it’s impossible, and then doing it anyhow is always a good idea.
• Scotty Rule #2: You’re the only one who can wear a red shirt and survive.
• Scotty Rule #3: People appreciate fixes more when you speak with a Scottish accent.²
• Scotty Rule #4: You can always tweak the tolerances to +/-5%. The warp drive will always give you just a little more even when you say, “I’ve given it all I’ve got”. She’ll hold.
• Scotty Rule #5: Real engineers don’t work in cubicles.³
• Scotty Rule #6: You only absolutely need to get the job done enough to rescue everyone and fly home.

1. Image property of Paramount Pictures [↩]
2. Or when they can’t understand what you’re saying. [↩]
3. May there never be cubicles in space! [↩]

Today was a big day for the MakerBot Support Team, with the debut of our live streaming Q&A show – ROBOT HOSPITAL! We will be doing this weekly starting today, so tune in next week and hopefully we’ll have a smoother start and all new topics- Check out the BotCave Store opening on the next show!

Hey everybody!

Here at the Botcave, we recently decided to “up our game” as regards customer service.  As you can see, there is now more than one person answering emails here.  So now, when you send email to support@makerbot.com a veritable team of highly-qualified technicians will respond to your requests.

From left: Isaac, our team leader, is an electronic music enthusiast who is known to have a collection of highly valuable (?) comic books.  Ethan once worked in the wine industry and tutors Latin.  Matt’s background is in film and creative writing.

Even more exciting, this afternoon, you’re going to have the chance to talk to all of us, LIVE and IN PERSON on the MakerBot UStream feed at http://bit.ly/dv23P3

We are starting a new event, tentatively titled called “Robot Hospital.”  In addition to taking questions over live chat, we are going to do a roundup of support-related issues over the past week, or whatever cool, robot-related stuff you need to see.

So, dial us up and send us your questions!  We’re here to help.

As many of you are aware, for various reasons, the Cupcake CNC Ultimate kit has evolved over time to become the dynamic, amazing robot that it is today.  We’ve recently gone through the documentation and made some changes to make building it easier and eliminate some guesswork.

The Ultimate builder has a few challenges that he or she needs to address in their build.  First and foremost, the MK5 Plastruder doesn’t have a place to mount the extruder board, unlike the MK4.  This means that our builders need to find a new place to mount the board.   We recently added this page to the instructions on the wiki to help out, in response to a few folks who were having trouble because of the missing instructions.

Most people are now aware that they might have to drill a few extra holes somewhere to accommodate the MK5. Are there some other issues you’d like to see documented a bit better?  Let us know in the comments or send us an email at support@makerbot.com

Shooting for 300

Josef Průša is giving a talk at the TedX event in Prague on November 20th.  You may recognize his name from his contributions to the development of the next generation RepRap printer, the Mendel.  Josef has been working to simplify the parts and reduce the print time for the parts necessary to create a RepRap printer.  In order to demonstrate the possibilities of DIY 3D printing, Josef is looking to give away 300 printed whistles at this event.

As of yesterday, Josef still has 250 more whistles to go.  Can you help Josef spread the word by sending him some whistles to give away?

Printed bearing, nearly 608 size

This weekend I tried printing Rayraywashere’s ball bearing with mixed success.  The plastic spheres inside we pretty well fused to the sides of the bearing, which made for a difficult cleanup.  Although it got better with time, it was a laborious process.  Ultimately, printed bearings that rely on printed balls may not be the way to go for everyone.  Even if you can print it without fusing the balls to the bearing, there’s no guarantee the balls would be sufficiently spherical to work properly.

That ball bearing design got me thinking – if I could find a reasonably ubiquitous and cheap alternative to small printed spheres, I could make the entire design much smaller and probably significantly more reliable.  The photo above is rough draft/proof of concept for a printed bearing only slightly larger than a traditional 608 bearing.  Rather than printed spheres, it uses plastic pellets of the sort typically used as stuffing in craft projects.  I sorted through a lot of these and used only the most nearly spherical ones.  However, there was still a lot of variation that lead to the bearing getting jammed.

Later I emptied the plastic pellets and tried out small spherical 3mm plastic beads.  These have worked really well in this printed design.  To improve upon this design I intend to move the “bead filling gap” to the interior ring or change the ring system so that two rings will snap together and cover the filling gap.  Overall, I am very happy with this result.  I’m looking forward to actually installing a slightly smaller version into my Cupcake 3D printer in place of a 608 bearing to see how well it works.

I spent $4.00 for 1700 identical plastic beads, silver in color, 3mm in diameter.  It takes about a dozen of these beads to fill the bearing.  The potential savings are pretty self-evident.  The per-unit cost for each bearing is probably only about $0.05 or so in plastic and beads.  That’s pretty good compared to $2+ for commercial bearings.  The real test will be how smoothly they work, how well they work at high speed, how quickly they might wear out.  However, I think I may be on the right track here.

Any suggestions?

A 3-D printer did not print out this Schulich I solar car that has raced thousands of miles in the Australian outback, U.S. and Canada. However, one of its team members, Thingiverse user silby101, said it would have been awesome to have a MakerBot while designing the Schulich I to rapidly prototype his ideas on a small scale.

If you’re designing a new type of car or just like to play with car models, here is some inspiration from Thingiverse:

Yellow Lamborghini designed by Thingiverse user twotimes.

A red Lamborghini printed by Thingiverse member gpvillamill (people love printing this car).

Leesa’s car designed by Thingiverse member imaterialise.

Toy car -with moving wheels – by Thingiverse member kparanya.

Rep Rap action car designed by Thingiverse member wizard23.

This is the 3D model of the Schulich I that is available for download from Thingiverse. If you print it, be sure to upload a picture of your print to Thingiverse.

Okay, so the MakerBot will probably not be making a full-size operational vehicle like the Urbee – an Urban Electric Ethanol car – anytime soon. The team that created the first-ever 3D-printed car, Kor Ecologic Inc., collaborated with high-end 3D printing companies Stratasys and Dimension. Those printers start at $20,000, whereas you can get a Cupcake 3D Printer for $649.

So what would it take to make an actual car with a MakerBot? Post your ideas to Thingiverse and tag them with “car.”

To Victory!

1. Choose a topic. This Halloween I chose the “Dalek To Victory!” propaganda poster from “Victory of the Daleks“
2. Grayscale and Posterize. I prefer using GIMP – it’s fairly user friendly, has lots of features, well documented on the interwebs, and is free and open source.  Making it grayscale and posterizing the picture will reduce the number of colors for which you need to account.  After all, our pallet is limited – from a bright yellow to a dark orange/red-ish.
3. Print. Print out the picture on a size appropriate for your target pumpkin.  For the pumpkin above I chose a standard 8.5″ x 11″ sheet.  It was a big pumpkin.
4. Wash, Open, Hollow. Wash the outside of the pumpkin to get any excess dirt off.  Hollowing out the pumpkin can go very quickly if you’re doing it right.  I have one of those sinks that has two large sections – one for the sink and one for the garbage disposal.  I could actually fit the pumpkin into one side.  Stab around the stem and lift off the top.  I like making jagged cuts, circles are fine too.  I used a heavy ice cream scooper to hollow out the inside.  It had enough heft that I could really whack away at the inside of the pumpkin and the seeds and guts would just fall away.  I keep a plastic bag on the other side of the sink for collecting the pumpkin guts.
5. Tape. The pumpkin may still be wet, so use duct tape to affix your posterized printout to the pumpkin.
6. Score. I first tried using a pushpin to poke holes along the lines I wanted to cut.  However, this was taking a really long time and leaves you staring at a bunch of dots afterward.  In the end I started using a utility knife and paring knife to score along the lines in the picture.  I would recommend scoring the pumpkin at the really large lines and outlines first.  If your picture disintegrates after that, well, you’ve got a starting point.  My picture remained intact until I peeled it off the pumpkin.
7. Remove picture. Peel off the remains of the picture.  If you didn’t score the skin of the pumpkin deep enough, this is the time to check.
8. Trace. I found it very helpful to trace the major lines with a black washable crayon.  This let me quickly see what I was working on and compare it to the nearby picture, rather than have to peer closely at the pumpkin to make out the score lines.
9. Peel. Peeling away the pumpkin’s skin was the most time consuming part.  For this I traced the lines again with the utility knife and then used either the utility knife (for finer control) or the paring knife (for big areas) to peel up the pumpkin’s skin.  I started with the large areas since that gave me the most sense of accomplishment as I proceeded.  Peeling the skin, rather than carving all the way through, allowed me to have picture details that would otherwise be impossible – such as the lightning bolts or text.
10. Carve. I actually did very little carving on the above Jack-O-Lantern.   The lightning bolts from the gun and antenna/blinkers were the only areas on the pumpkin’s surface that are cut all the way through to the inside.
11. Ventilate. Since there were so few holes in the pumpkin surface I had to make large air holes in the pumpkin “lid” around the stem.
12. Illuminate. Insert candles, then light.
13. Display! To victory!

USB flash drive guts

The idea behind this morning’s post about USB flash drives struck me last night/this morning on a whim.  Through absolutely no coordination whatsoever, I noticed the appearance of a photopool series on Flickr  with every photo labeled “Dead Drops.”  From the photos in the pool it appears someone¹ is going around New York epoxying and cementing USB flash drives into public crevices. ²

A dead drop is, according to Wikipedia, “a location used to secretly pass items between two people, without requiring them to meet.”

Now, for the questions:

Who is doing this and why?  Why those locations?  What are on these drives?  Where are they?  Is someone mapping them?  Are they read-only? ³ And, how long before someone sitting on a park bench or leaning up against a phone booth scrapes themselves on one of these?

I’m not sure about the answers to those questions…  but I suspect this man may know…

Mystery computing

1. Perhaps the photographer Aram Bartholl aka agoasi? [↩]
2. In a way, I suppose this is a public service – sealing cracks in walls and buildings. [↩]
3. I don’t see a switch on the one in that photo above [↩]