MakerBot Industries

Today MakerBot Operator Will Langford is on the front page of his school’s website at tufts.edu with a MakerBot. Will was our first intern ever here at MakerBot Industries!

Will Langford, who runs the Tufts Robotics Club, had a nice article about robots, people, engineering, and MakerBot on his school’s blog. Cool!

Looking at engineering on a broader level, Langford says it’s the responsibility of engineers and product designers to “to situate their solutions within the context that it’s needed for.” He’s getting some of that real-world experience through an internship with MakerBot Industries, a Brooklyn-based start-up that uses computer-aided design software to produce 3-D pieces like his dorm room coat hook.

The way the printer works is both simple, and slightly magical. Using a small, heated platform, plastic tubing is fed through the top of the printer and slowly melted and cooled. Currently limited by the platform size, which is between four and six inches in diameter, the printer is great for building smaller scaled pieces, from salt shakers to earrings.

“Their whole aim is to make these 3-D printing machines that usually only universities and research institutions have, because they cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and make them available to a lot more people for a thousand dollars,” he says.

Having purchased a MakerBot printer himself, Langford says he is excited by the ease of assembly, which will make it more accessible to not just DIY-ers, but also the average consumer.

“It’s Ikea,” Langford says with a laugh. “A lot of people just want to be able to design their own things and have them now and not have to just accept whatever design Sony or whatever huge corporation determines is best.”

And Langford continues to make more things: glasses to share on the digital design site Thingiverse.com, or 3-D printed jewelry to sell on Etsy, an online storefront.

“I’m pretty sure I don’t want to be stuck in the normal engineering setting, designing normal things,” he says. “I want to be testing assumptions. I want to fully physically realize my ideas as much as possible.”

via Tufts E-News: If You Build It….

Sometimes I have to travel for a day and I tend to end up in hackerspaces in evenings. On Monday I was in Seattle and ended up hanging out at Metrix!

It’s an awesome place to hang out. If you live in Seattle, I heartily recommend that you become a member. They have a laser cutter and MakerBots that you can rent time on! There are regularly smart folks hanging out and coding and making things. I even ran into my pal Eric Butler who was “just there.” There were many new friendships made at Metrix that evening! Old friends stopped by too!

Matt runs the place like a coffee shop with tools. Normally there is a robot that makes coffee, but it’s broken and everyone seemed to be in withdrawals about that. (It’s Seattle, the entire city is coffee powered!) Have no fear, they have mate!

I got to hang with the LearnMakeCupcake crew from the UW which is an awesome class research project where the students are both learning how to make a MakerBot and researching the process of collaborative innovation and developing infrastructure for community creativity. Very cool.

I got to meet Mark Ganter, one of the heros of 3D printing. He even gave me some 3d printed glass objects. Awesome. I must learn more about microwave foundries.

3ric showed up with a massive and beautiful array of programmable lasers and I also got to meet the Masked Retriever, of Thingiverse blogging fame.

Needless to say, it was a great evening full of magic and wonder!

Vandebina found a way to turn MakeBotted objects into gold… well at least covered in gold! She did it at Miss Baltazar’s Laboratory at Metalab in Vienna. I asked her how she did it and this is what she said!

I demonstrated four different types of gilding a surface. The one with the makerbotted cup is a kind of oil gilding. You have to coat the surface with varnish or an oil-based gold size (oil/resin) that will dry and develop a tacky surface. The oil that i use is known as Mixtion. After the drying time (12 hours) you just have to apply the gold leaves. To protect the surface it can be painted with some acrylic finish, or whatever you want.

There are also other ways to gild the surface —> gilding milk as clay, it takes just 10-15 minutes to dry. The next weeks i will try to gild makerbotted things with galvanic method, the first tests failed. But i’m on it. heh!

Thanks Vandebina! Keep us posted with future experiments!

Zach and his botcave made slippers

Adam and his botcave made slippers

Nothing can stop us! Soo what!!! there is some wicked slush outside that completely gets into what ever footwear you have on- here at the botcave we have an invention for everything.

Introducing: The Botcave Slippers v1.0 & v1.1

v1.0 Includes: 2 pieces of 14″ stylish Salmon colored foam (Zach is modeling this lovely version)

v1.1 Includes: The same as v1.0 but also adds a bit more support to the foot with 4 12″ x 12″ x 12″ pieces of bubble wrap (Adam is modeling this lovely version)

We will begin taking orders soon

Check out this video featuring HotProceed!!!

Also, this is my first blogpost on the MakerBot Blog.

YouTube – Tokyo HackerSpace MakerBot Workshop.

2-Dominic-Muren-Part-1 – Dorkbot Seattle Feb 3, 2010 from christopher prosser on Vimeo.

3-Dominic-Part-2 Dorkbot Seattle Feb 3, 2010 from christopher prosser on Vimeo.

Dominic Muren is an occassional contributor to the Thingiverse blog and he gave a great presentation on personal manufacturing at the Seattle Dorkbot! This is very much worth the watch! Check it!

Marc de Vinck is bringing it with the next stage of his Cupcake building documentation! It’s great!

via Make: Online : CupCake CNC build, part 8: Building the X stage.

Joris over at Shapeways is on an interviewing spree! He interviewed Bre and has now interviewed Clothbot!

How do you like your Makerbot?

Loving it!  I had been tracking Fab@Home and RepRap projects for a while but the barriers to entry (sourcing materials, tools and availability of my time) were such that I didn’t jump into them right from the start.  When MakerBot Industries appeared with all the pieces in a convenient kit form, I pounced and landed up with MakerBot Number Nine (see http://clothbot.com/wiki/MakerBotNumberNine) from the first batch.  It’s been particularly fun being involved in bootstrapping the community from the beginning. As each new batch has come online the former-newbies have been pitching in answers to the more common FAQs and taking on wiki editing roles, leaving those of us early-batchers with more time to take deep dives into the larger set of reprap development activities.  In the larger ecosystem of rapid prototyping technologies, I think of my Cupcake as a “bone maker”.  It’s great for prototyping ideas and making the scaffolding around which to wrap skins with more finish. Being able to take a design from drawing to prototype in less than a day is awesome!  When the raw material costs are so low though, being able to tweak and reprint a design ad infinitum can be a bit of a curse.  It takes time to learn when good is good enough.  Using Shapeways has helped impose some discipline on my own design process.

Make sure to check out the whole interview here!

What is Bruce Sterling making?

First, I rip the cables out of the bubblepack. One USB2TTL cable to talk to all my new machinery. Various cat5e cables to wire the fabricator system, and to enable me to screen a galaxy of global video entertainment through poorly-policed peer-to-peer sharing services.

One standard ATX power supply, made in China; its lavish carbon-footprint will also serve me as my hotplate.

A toolkit with a glittering host of aluminium tongs, tweezers, spanners, hex keys, and Ikea-knockoff assembly tools. These items will double as my cutlery, since I’ll be living mostly off ramen noodles from the local Korean grocery, when not grabbing a tasty plate of feijao maravilma over at the “Favela Chic” Franco-Brazilian bar and techno niteclub.

I also possess three NEMA 17 stepper-motors to drive my fabricator. This nifty Tyvek bag contains all the nuts, bolts, belts, pulleys and bearings. These gleaming rods are high-quality precision-ground steel shafts for the X and Y axes.

This device also boasts pre-assembled 3rd-generation electronics from the vengeful wreckage of the Ivrea interaction-design school. These bearded techno-intelligentsia were once harmless left-wing Italian academics, but now they are fully prepared to crush the planet’s entire industrial order through methods even the Chinese can’t comprehend.I have a pinch-wheel plastruder to melt my giant reel of plastic cable. It extrudes that molten plastic as solid, durable, slightly warped and drippy consumer objects. I mean fruit bowls. Forks. Lampshades and hat racks. Most anything Deirdre might have found while leafing through her overpriced shelter magazines.

These pale, gormless extrusions of the formless will have no copyrights, no branding, no consumer cachet, and no Walter Benjamin “aura”. They will just work, they will function practically. They will function in the same mute, ugly way that a prison shiv will work for some east London hoodlum locked up half his lifetime for knife-crime. You may imagine there’s some vast class chasm between this old-school knife-waving wide-boy and me, a bespectacled, hypermodern Web geek – but let me confide this to you: he’s my landlord.

via Bruce Sterling: The Hypersurface of this Decade | ICON MAGAZINE ONLINE.