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.
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.
At MakerBot, we celebrate whenever someone orders a machine. When a group of friends gets a machine, we get even more excited because we know the possibilities for awesomeness are directly related to collaboration. When a hackerspace gets a machine, the excitement level goes off the charts!
Ghent is awesome-town, we all know that, but without a Hackerspace it isn’t complete. This workshop was the first meeting of people that are interested in founding a Hackerspace in Ghent. A lot of tech people and artists joined the party and gave the Hackerspace@Ghent idea a boost. As from January we will meet on regular basis. First at TimeLab, later at our own space.
These past two weeks, I’ve been honored to run an intensive MakerBot workshop in lovely Lisbon, Portugal. The goal was simple: build two MakerBots, and print print print print print. We achieved goal #1 over the course of two evenings. Grand total of about 8 hours for 10 people to build 2 makerbots. It was really awesome.
Of course that left us with 12 days in which to design, print, and learn all there is to learn about how to do 3D printing on a MakerBot. Many wonderful things were designed, printed, and shared with the world. In no particular order, I’d like to present some of the interesting results of the workshop
Radiohead’s Thom York
This one was done by Tiago Serra and turned out great. He also managed to get reblogged on a bunch of other sites too. Click the image to view the model on Thingiverse.
Experience
This piece, entitled ‘Experience’ by Sónia Moreira was a great bit of art and very interesting to hold in your hands. I believe this was her first time using 3D modeling tools and was made using Wings3D and Blender. Click the image to view the model on Thingiverse.
Servo Suspension System
This design was very cool and very practical. Created by Guilherme Martins, it is a servo mount with integrated suspension system intended for use in a robot. Very cool! Click the image to view the model on Thingiverse.
PS3 Eye Support
Another really nice, really practical item was this custom support for a camera. It was designed by Sergio Ferreira for use in an art installation involving ants (also really cool!) Click the image to view the model on Thingiverse.
Pink Panther Woman
Last, but not least, we have this provocative model by Pedro Januário who is a very talented 3D modeler. He did many interesting models, but this was by far the most impressive. While printing this piece, he shattered many records, most notably the Longest Print, clocking in at 4+ hours. Click the image to view the model on Thingiverse.
Of course there were many, many other things designed and printed during the course of the workshop, and these are just a sample of the cool stuff that was done. Congratulations to all the participants and keep on rocking the 3D world.
I asked him some questions about MakerBotting and he wrote his answers all up on his wiki!
You got a MakerBot. What were you thinking?
I was fortunate to be going through university in the early ’90s right when Linux was making the rounds – Math and Engineering, Control and Communications Systems program at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario. (Cool! There wasn’t a Control and Robotics option back then.) That box of a hundred-odd 3.5″ floppies landed on my desk and I was plunged into the second emerging wave of Open Source software – the first being the BSD origins of UNIX. With healthy wiki, forum, google group and twitterextended participation (to name a few channels), the RepRap+MakerBot+Thingiverse projects feel like they could be leading a third wave of open source innovation and community.
ShopBot was a possibility, but even the small model would have taken up sizable space in the garage. With small children in the house, noise was a significant factor; subtractive CNC is rarely quiet. A laser cutter would have been cool, but I couldn’t justify the cash with a service like Ponoko at hand with a broader range of materials and community experience to pull on. They do steel too!
I watched Desktop Factory development make progress and start taking pre-orders but couldn’t bring myself to pull that trigger. There were too many unknowns for me around input material which made it feel too much like the old 2D printer ink/toner game; we’ll sell you the printer cheap and make money on the proprietary ink/toner cartridges. Also, with an opaque development process it’s hard to grow a community beyond the hard-core, existing (ab)users of the tech.
I’ve been a closet Industrial Design (ID) enthusiast for years. The local ID school (http://id.carleton.ca/) recently started a Masters program, but what with parental obligations and startup-style work schedules there’s little time left to entertain that sort of additional commitment. My Makerbot provides me with an outlet to explore the whole design process at my own pace. Perhaps one day I’ll enroll… At least by then I’ll have something in the way of a portfolio!
No matter what happens in the future, since all aspects of the hardware and software are open sourced, my MakerBot will always have a repair and upgrade path. It’s very much about reconnecting with the materials around me. My tools are extensions of me, the cyborg me if you will.
What was it like building it?
It took many short morning and evening sessions over the course of two months to get my MakerBot operational – unboxed on May 5th, 2009 to first-print on June 27th, 2009. Such is life with parental obligations and a day-job that pays well.
On the other hand, my Basement Isolation Booth took from August 31st, 2006 to February 24th, 2007 to reach a useable state. Slow build-time is relative.
Figuring out how to do SMD for my first-edition cupcake was worth the price of admission. Looking back on it, I can’t believe I waited that long to gear up for that skill!
What excites you about the future?
I’m watching RepRap Mendel intently, particularly the bit about it making its own electronics. Being in the microelectronics and by extension MEMS industry, coming up with ever-smaller makerbots using the previous generation is a most intriguing proposition. It’s now a question of how long will it be until – not if – we will have home atom-pusher replicators? Closed-cycle fabrication. All that is old shall be remade anew. I’m saving up all my spent rafts and trimmings for this part.
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).
The liquidware gang stopped by to do some co-hacking at the BotCave on Saturday. They make extremely beautiful electronics. If anyone has said that electronics are sexy it’s probably because they have seen the liquidware boards.
Today we asked folks on twitter to give us some witty sayings to put on MakerBot stickers. Here’s what they came up with! If you’re not following @MakerBot, now is a good time to do so!
We’ve been printing tons of pulleys recently and have started to notice that little delays, like waiting for the test extrusion, really start to add up.
Some very quick GCode modifications can seriously up the production capabilities of your MakerBot. All of the sudden pulleys that would take 20 minutes pop out in 15. Checkout the write up on the wiki and start pushing your bot to the production extremes!
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.
