MakerBot Industries

Could the Makerbot one day print human organs?

NPR interviewed one of the developers of the first commercial 3D Bio-printer, the “NovoGen” .  Really fascinating stuff!

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=124674635

There is a big demand for Gen3 Electronics and everytime we put them in the store, we increase the amount we put in the store and they still sell out very fast! Right now we have some in stock and I’m sure that shortly after I post this, they will all be gone.

How will you know when they will come? As soon as they ship, we’ll send you tracking information!

We’ve got 1500 sets of Gen3 on order and they’ll be delivered as they are manufactured. To make things fair, we’re putting them up for pre-sale so that you can get in line without having to check back everyday to see if they are for sale again! Keep in mind that if you order other items from us with in the same order as the Gen3 electronics that the entire order will be sent out when the electronics arrived. Having pre-sales will also help us understand demand for these so that we can continue to keep these in stock.

The cool thing is that with every Gen3 electronics sets, we know there is another CNC machine or RepRap machine being born. Up until January, we rarely sold Gen3 sets, but this year, things are really taking off, and we’re excited to get them to you to do amazing Gen3 electronics projects!

You can find the Gen3 electronics in the MakerBot store!

Do you have a unique project that you’ve got planned or have built with these electronics? Drop us a note in the comments. We’d love to hear more about what people are dreaming up!

Pictured above: Charles Pax created a custom lasercut case for his MakerBot that holds all the Gen3 electronics in bottom of the machine!

NYCResistor is having an art show this weekend and if you’re in the NYC area, you should come and visit! Included in the show will be the original arduino and lots of other projects by artistic arduino superstars!

MakerBot is built on the work that Arduino has done with microcontrollers and there are actually two Arduino derivatives in the MakerBot. One on the Motherboard and the other on the extruder! We love Arduino and we can’t wait to check out this show! You can reserve tickets by clicking here!

@NYCResistor
March 27th, 2010 8-12pm
87 3rd Avenue, 4th floor
$10

Update: The source files have been documented and that documentation can be found here. They are PDFs for now, which is a first step towards publishing the source files. The original files are still not there. If you’d like to see the original files these are derived from to compare, you can find the motherboard here, the stepper driver here, the extruder controller here, and the endstop here,

Open Source Hardware is hardware that has an open license. You can copy it, develop it, and even sell it yourself. You must provide attribution to the designer and you must also release the derivative source files under the same license. This applies even if you use a proprietary program for your designs.

Sometimes an individual or a company makes a derivative of an open source project, goes to market with it and then doesn’t share their derivative designs with their changes. This is not only against the license, but it’s also not ethical. It is a dead end for the innovation and development which is the heart of the open source hardware community.

Right now there are some folks on the RepRap forums that are selling a derivative of our electronics. They’ve stated that they’ve modified our designs to make them more compact. There is absolutely nothing wrong with creating a derivative and selling it as long as you provide the source files.

The problem is that they have not published their source files. They have promised to publish a PDF of a picture of the boards, which isn’t sufficient and that promise was made a while ago. If you modify an open source design, you are required to release your source files. If you believe in the power of open source and community innovation, you’ll release them in the preferred format for modification. A PDF of the boards is not a format that invites modification.  Although gerber files, which are the files generated for manufacturing electronics, aren’t easy for the community to build on, they would have shown the community what changed and been a step towards sharing source files.

What would have been awesome is if they had used our designs, improved on them, and then published their source files. Just copying the design doesn’t bring much innovation to the community and it’s not the classiest move, but it’s within the license for anyone to copy us and manufacture identical boards. If they were to share the design files, we could see what they did to make them so tiny and the community could learn from that. Not only does this impact us financially, but most importantly it slows innovation within the community and sets a bad example for all.

It’s theoretically possible that they have released their source files and I couldn’t find them. If they exist, please comment below so that if we are wrong, we can get the story straight!

Note: See the update above. The documentation process is in process.

At MakerBot, we take open source seriously. It’s a way of life for us. We share our design files when we release a project because we know that it’s important for our users to know that a MakerBot is not a black box. With MakerBot, you get not only a machine that makes things for you, but you also get an education into how the machine works and you can truly own it and have access to all the designs that went into it! When people take designs that are open and they close them, they are creating a dead end where people will not be able to understand their machines and they will not be able to develop on them.

Open source hardware relies on ethics to work. It’s possible to legally chase down folks who break the terms of a license but in most cases the community will usually take care of it by confronting derivatives and not buying from individuals and companies that are building on others work and not releasing their source. I wish there was a public service announcement that would let people who are buying open source electronics to make sure that the design files have been published.

The door is still open for them to make this right. From the tone of their forum post, they are having trouble posting their files, which is something that should have been done before they started selling their derivative electronics kits. We invite them to send us an email at contact(*at*)makerbot(*dot*)com with their derivative files and we’ll publish them. If we have any updates, we’ll post them here.

Got an opinion? We’d love to hear it in the comments!

Photo credit – Creative Commons Share Alike: gfpeck