MakerBot Industries

Quinn Norton wrote an awesome article for the Irish Times that mentions MakerBot. Read on!
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We’re very excited to announce that our Extruder Controller v2.2 and RepRap Motherboard v1.2 kits are now also available as pre-assembled boards!  You can order them today from the MakerBot Store.  These boards are pre-programmed with the Arduino/Sanguino bootloader, so you don’t need an AVR programmer to use them– you can upload code with the Arduino software over a standard USB-TTY serial cable.

Unfortunately, we don’t offer pre-assembled stepper drivers just yet. We hope to make them available sometime in late August.

Thanks for bearing with us– I know that these have been eagerly anticipated.  Happy hacking!

(Also, please don’t actually throw out your soldering irons!  Soldering irons are handy and awesome, especially nice old Hakkos like this one.  If you really want to get rid of your soldering iron, donate it to your local hackerspace instead!)

Read Hydraraptor! Nophead does serious science and his blog dives deep into the wonderful world of 3D printing!

With every batch, we increase our batch size with the idea that we’ll sell a good chunk of the batch and then have some left over to have in stock. This has never happened because we always sell out before the end of the month!

We’re stepping it up again. Batch 5 (sold out) is planned to ship out on August 10th and Batch 6 will is planned to ship on September 3rd. So if you’ve been waiting to get a MakerBot Cupcake CNC, now is the time to order to get yours shipped to you in September.

There are a few options for making your own MakerBot Cupcake CNC. You can buy the Basic kit or the Deluxe kit. If you’ve got a power supply and the tools, you’ll want the Basic kit and just go over the list and order the things you don’t have already. If you want to set yourself up with a MakerBot tool kit, you’ll want to get the Deluxe kit kit.

The biggest upgrade ever arrived with Batch 5 and continues with Batch 6. All the electronics come pre-assembled!

Beautiful photography credit to Wizard23 who customized his machine to look like a giraffe!

We had a few people over on Friday to celebrate the move into our factory and we set a MakerBot to print out Walt Disney’s head. I wasn’t watching it, so I don’t know if someone messed with it or what happened, but the printer’s Y stage got backed up a few centimeters and yet kept printing. Looks pretty cool huh? Sometimes, mistakes are awesome!

Photo Credit Jason Scott

Allan Ecker, AKA The Masked Retriever, continues to rock the Thingiverse blog. Go forth. Read!

The Hydraraptor is a CNC with an extruder head on it. Recently he printed out a set of RepRap parts. Beautiful!

Barcode Scanner Ninjas also considered.

MakerBot Industries is looking for a talented, motivated individual to grab our warehouse by the horns and kick butt shipping MakerBots to the most innovative people around the world. If your childhood dream is to run a gigantic factory, then look no further. MakerBot Industries is a scrappy startup based in Brooklyn (3rd ave and Bergen) and we need someone to help us keep up with orders. What we do is make and sell the future. To be more specific, we make and sell open source 3D printers as well as all the accessories and supplies and things that make them go. If you would like to learn more about MakerBot, visit our website at http://www.makerbot.com

Your job is helping us build MakerBot kits, which consists of putting parts in bags. Once the kits are made, we need you to fulfill the orders by placing the finished kits into boxes and then shipping them all over there world. It is hands-on work and the type of work that makes you feel like you’ve accomplished something at the end of each day. You will also get to experience the joys of intern wrangling and customer support (basically shipping out the occasional missing part, nothing technical). The physical work required is pretty minimal. Our main kit weights about 25lbs and there are some occasional heavy boxes, so you need to lift up to 50 pounds.

You’ll have the opportunity to play with some cutting edge technology, including 3D printers, laser cutters, and PCB fabrication. The pay is $15/hour and we have about 30 hours / week of work right now. This job has huge potential for growth as our goal and dream is to kick-start the desktop manufacturing revolution and put a MakerBot on every desk in the world. This means we have many scaling challenges ahead of us in production, warehousing, shipping, etc. If you have a desire to be a rockstar in those areas, we would love to have you on our team.

To apply for the job, please send an email to hiring@makerbot.com. Include a resume, cover letter, and 3 references.

Job Duties
* Order fulfilment
* Kit packing
* Inventory management
* Receiving and sorting incoming packages
* Customer support
* Quality control
* General warehouse maintenance

Nice to Have
* Communication skills
* Being organized and clean
* Attention to detail
* Ability to accept and fix mistakes
* An interest in robotics

Long Term Growth Opportunities
* Manage future shipping employees
* Purchasing and sourcing components
* Manufacturing and sourcing skills
* Implement automation technologies

After a long wait, ReplicatorG 0005 is finally available for your printing and simulating enjoyment.  Most of the changes have been stability fixes and tinkering under the hood, but there’s also a bunch of changes that should make your life a bit easier (especially if you were using 0004):

• ReplicatorG is now much smarter about serial ports.  When you select a machine type that uses a serial port, it will automatically scan all available serial ports to try to detect a working machine.
• You can now explicitly tell ReplicatorG which serial port to use.  There’s a “Serial Port” submenu in the  “Machine” menu that allows you to select any available port.  If you forgot to plug in your serial cable when you started ReplicatorG, you can just select “rescan serial ports” after you plug it in and the port should appear in the list.
• You can now run multiple instances of ReplicatorG on the same machine and have them connect to different serial ports.  This means you can now run several 3D printers simultaneously from the same computer!  (Pretty handy if you have to, say, print out three dozen pulleys in a hurry.)
• There’s been a little bit of consolidation of the status displays; we’re down to just two separate status bars on the main window now. 
• The “stop” and “pause/unpause” functionality is now more reliable.  However, a word of caution: a stop or pause is not guaranteed to halt the extruder as well; a fix for this will be in the next firmware update.
• There should be far fewer situations where the program blocks; for example, you should be able to exit normally after hitting the reset button on the machine.

You can download ReplicatorG 0005 from googlecode.

Be sure to leave a comment and let me know how 0005 works out for you, and let me know about any changes you’d like to see in 0006.

Adam Cecchetti has made an awesome machine! I really like the green accents! What case mods are you making for your MakerBot or what mods do you have planned? Drop a note in the comments!