We like Fabbaloo. They get us.
The buzz over MakerBot, the budget 3D Printer is clearly intense. Sufficiently intense that demand for their amazing device has almost outstripped their manufacturing capacity.
However, being an inventive crew, they’ve come up with a pioneering solution that we don’t think has been attempted before. They are crowdsourcing a portion of their manufacturing. Even better, they are crowdsourcing to existing MakerBot printers. In other words, they are asking the clients themselves to help make more printers. And those printers will make more parts for even more printers, and so on…
It’s not the entire printer, but it is one specific part (the “608 Idler Pulley”), and MakerBot will pay you USD$30 for a batch of 30 operational pulleys. Why this part? Simply because it’s on their critical path and the barrier to larger scale production. But where else might this lead?
In a mind-bending twist, they’ve invented the embryo of a self-replicating client base; something the marketeers have dreamed of for millenia!
What will they do next week?
In ReplicatorG 005 support was added for controlling multiple MakerBots from the same computer. On Windows and Linux it just involves opening more instances of ReplicatorG and assigning them to their respective serial ports but on a Mac it’s a little bit trickier.
The other day Adam showed me this cool trick for running ReplicatorG from the source in terminal and today I documented it on the ReplicatorG wiki. I’ve been using this trick the past few days to pump out pulleys for batch 5. It’s an awesome feeling to be surrounded by lots of MakerBots all humming away as they print out tons of parts for you. Yay for MakerBot threesomes!
We’re going to open up the pod bay doors on the MakerBot BotCave on Friday August 14th from 6PM to 9PM. You’re invited to come by and say hi and hang out. If you need some fine tuning help on your MakerBot, bring your machine over! Please view the invitation and RSVP!
We will probably end up going round the corner for drinks afterward!
Kristen Taylor interviewed Bre Pettis about Jansen Walkers, MakerBots and Modular Electronics. Check it out!
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ReplicatorG 0006 is now available for your replicating pleasure! (UPDATE: The Mac OS X release is now available too!) This release should make life a little easier for those of you who have been having serial port configuration issues. Other fun enhancements include:
- Per-axis motor inversion (requires v1.2 firmware)
- More reliable build aborts
- An optional in-build temperature readout (disabled by default, but can be turned on in the preferences)
Download it here! A more detailed changelog follows after the cut.
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Problems are opportunities
At MakerBot, we have a problem of production. You see, our CupCake CNC is made of a variety of components: electronics, lasercut parts, machined parts, and printed parts. To be specific, there are 4 idler pulleys that are printed by the machine, for the machine. Currently, we produce all of the idler pulleys on our own bank of MakerBots in our Brooklyn factory. This worked smoothly when we were shipping 20 bots a month. Lately, demand is increasing so fast that we’re ramping up production to be able to ship 50 to 100 bots a month. Our next production bottleneck is printing enough pulleys for the kits. We could switch back to lasercut pulleys, but we’d rather not have to.
Crowdsourced manufacturing
In the conversation about cheap, ubiquitous 3D printing, people talk a lot about distributed manufacturing The concept is simple: instead of having a centralized factory that produces parts and then distributes them to the people that want them, individuals have the tools they need to build the things they want and distribute them without a central hub. Here at MakerBot, we fully support this vision of the future–we’re actively building tools that support this revolution. We want to take a first step toward that future by starting crowdsourced manufacturing, where production is distributed, but distribution still uses the hub model.
That is where you, the MakerBot Operator comes in. If you have a MakerBot, then you have the means of production. We want you to take part in our grand experiment in crowdsourced manufacturing. We want you to use your MakerBot to produce the next wave of MakerBots. In essence, we want to distribute pulley manufacturing to you. Since this is just the first step, we want to make it easy and simple. You build the parts, we handle distributing them.
Be a part of it
We will pay $1.00 / pulley for 608 Idler Pulleys. Download the linked file for the 608 Idler Pulley and print it out. When you have at least 30, mail them to us and we’ll either send you a check or pay you by Paypal. When we make them, the bearing press fits into the pulley and yours should too! Don’t forget to check the pulley for bearing fit before sending them off, because we certainly will! We need 150 of these pulleys before September 3rd and if this experiment works out, we’ll ask for folks to print out 625 Idler Pulleys too!
This is a new and exciting adventure for us. As far as we know, crowdsourced manufacturing is just something people have talked about, not actually done. We’re looking forward to the results, and we hope that you will take part. If this whole thing goes well, then it means we will be able to crowdsource other parts as well, and gradually turn our MakerBot design into a 3D printable design and fulfill the RepRap dream of a 3D printable 3D printer.
Being able to collaboratively create MakerBot kits with the help of MakerBot operators is going to be an awesome future, and we want you to be a part of it.
Hey, intrepid Makerbotters! The v1.2 release of the generation 3 firmware is now available on SourceForge. This release features bugfixes and enhancements to the firmware on the both the motherboard and the extruder. You can download it here. Be sure to check the Readme.txt for installation hints! The changelog is after the cut.
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