We are just added a new kit to the store. It’s a Laserless Kit. There is some finesse to lasercutting and we are really proud of our lasercut parts for the MakerBot, but we know people with lasers and they want to buy all the parts minus the lasercut parts and create their own MakerBot-style 3D printer for their own personal use.
You want your machine made out of antique plywood you found in an old barn? Or maybe you want to have Ponoko custom cut you a body out of bamboo? We understand the power of DIY and we know that the easy way is not always the best way for everyone and so we offer this laserless kit.
We’ve spent a lot of time and energy doing research to uncover the best parts that work really well for this machine. You can go out and buy these from 20 different suppliers, but the great part about this laserless kit is that you get all the components and subkits that come with a MakerBot, but no lasers were hurt in the process of putting together this kit!
If you’ve done lasercutting, you know that you may not be saving anything by lasercutting it yourself, you’re going to take some time to get the kerf right with your machine and you’re going to end up doing it a few times to get it all just right, but you are doing it yourself and you have a lasercutter, so damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead.
This kit comes with these sub-kits, all lovingly wrapped and packed with sweetness at the MakerBot BotCave.
- Drive system kit
- Hardware burrito
- Gen 3 electronics
- Motors
- Plastruder MK4 (hardware only)
- A pound of natural ABS
Keep in mind this is the basic kit and does not include a power supply, cables, cords, and tools. We sell these separately so you can stock up on what you need before you checkout.
Again, just so there are no surprises. There are no lasercut parts in this laserless kit. You are going to be cutting your own lasercut body kit, plastruder parts, and build platform. Check out the wiki for the links to all the files.
We won’t be providing support from problems that arise from you lasercutting your own parts. If you wanted it to Just Work, you’d be buying the full kit!
One of the problems we’ve had for a while with the Gen3 extruder firmware is the naive temperature control algorithm. Since the firmware had been simply turning the heater on or off depending on whatever temperature it was seeing at the thermistor at the moment, we’d often end up with wild temperature swings, with the temperature at the nozzle overshooting by as much as 20° C. Implementing proper PID control has always been pretty high on the list of things to do.
Yesterday, Tim at BotHacker coded up a patch which implements PID on the heater. The result is much, much better temperature control, yielding a smoother extrusion and less finicky extruder. The patch has been applied to the svn repository, so you’ll see the results in the v1.6 firmware*, coming later this week.
One of the great things about an open source project like this is that lots of features that might otherwise take a long time for a traditional project to implement are often contributed by users, or already implemented in other open source projects. For example, we recently rolled in upstream changes in Roland Riegel’s great SD/MMC card library that provided us with improved support for FAT32 and SDHC cards.
To help facilitate this sort of collaboration, I’ve created a Google group for discussing firmware development. If you’re interested in contributing to development or just want to keep an ear to the ground, subscribe to the list and drop us a line!
*What happened to v1.5, you ask? It was packaged up last week, but we were close enough to v1.6 that I didn’t end up announcing it.
Recently the Design Glut gals were at the BotCave creating some really cool stuff! They wrote it up on their blog and here’s what they had to say:
We were invited to repurpose Joby’s products for the upcoming Joby Inspired pop-up shop and gallery. What a fun challenge! After playing with their tripods for a while, we were inspired to designed toy parts that interlock with Joby’s bendable structure. Once we were happy with the design, 3-D printed them out using a MakerBot. Watch the video below for a more in-depth explanation of the project.
If you’re in San Francisco, make sure to check out the show in-person. It opens tomorrow – details here).
