The gang over at POPSCI have made a MakerBot. Awesome!
It sounds like the promise of an ad in the back of a PopSci issue from the 1950s. Build your own replicating machine! Make anything you desire in your own garage! But that’s exactly what veteran hacker Bre Pettis and his pals offer with their CupCake CNC kit: a computer-controlled 3-D printer that can whip up almost any object of less than four inches on a side from two kinds of plastic. The company’s goal is to make home manufacturing cheap and common.
They mention that it’s hard to use the software. I wish they’d had the latest version of ReplicatorG when they did the article. Printing has become a lot easier since then!
I had a chance to go back and forth with John Carnett who put it together and not onlly is he an awesome photographer, he’s a totally legit tinkerer who’s done some cool stuff!
For custom parts fabrication, we chose the MakerBot Industries CupCake CNC Deluxe 3-D printer ($950), which can print objects out of plastic. Five years ago, a machine that could quickly turn a CAD file into a physical object would have cost five times as much. Using simple tools like Google SketchUp, Gambina can spec out gear for his planes and tap into the large MakerBot community for ideas.
You can check it out online, on an iPad, or even on actual paper at your newstand!
I was in the studio talking with Shelly Palmer Tuesday morning showing him the MakerBot in Action. He’s a guy who is obsessed with technology and he totally gets 3D printing and quickly extrapolated the possibilities of personal manufacturing!
One of the things he brought up is the cultural change that’s coming as digital designs become commonplace. Personal manufacturing is a real experience for the more than 1600 MakerBot Operators in the world who design and download and print 3D objects!
The next time you have friends round, and the bottle opener goes missing, consider how impressive it would be if you could say: “Don’t worry. I’ll just print off another.”
For $980, you can purchase what may – if enthusiasts are to be believed – be the next step in a revolution that has already given consumers the ability to print high-quality photos at home: highly customisable 3D-printing.
The ‘Maker Bot’, the brainchild of a 12-person team based in Brooklyn, New York, ‘prints’ 3-D objects out of plastic by rendering a series of 2-D layers, one on top of another.
The contraption, which measures about a cubic foot, works by receiving a series of instructions from a small, micro-controller known as an Arduino, which the owner can program.
As each layer is printed, a thin tube of plastic is funnelled down through a sewing machine-like mechanism on to a metal base – heated to 230 degrees – which moves so that the correct shape is ‘drawn’. A bottle opener takes about 20 minutes to print. Among the other objects available in a giant, online collection of designs known as the ‘Thingiverse’, are jewellery, tools, small toys, even an outline of the head of Thom Yorke, the lead singer of Radiohead.
The Maker Bot – 1,200 of which have been shipped worldwide – is just one example of what was referred to at an internet conference in New York this week as “pluggable culture”, a world where, increasingly, consumers are able to build things using simple interfaces to technologies that would previously have been out of their grasp.
Becky Stern, a US artist, for instance, recently used an Arduino she programmed herself to embed a flashing display in a bag – and made the code available on the web.
Just to keep it real, the MakerBot is $950 and there are 1562 in the wild right now.
Read the rest on the Times site! Registration required.
MakerBot is in the New Scientist. I love this magazine!
Over the next few minutes, this “MakerBot” will do something I can only dream of doing: it will create a spare part of itself as an insurance against future mishaps. Staring at the Heath Robinson-style kit before me, it is hard to believe that it – and a few hundred other devices – are paving the way to an era of desktop machines that can make just about anything, including copies of themselves.
Ars Elektronica gives out awards every year to celebrate the cyber arts. In the digital communities category the MakerBot Operators got an honorable mention for “Sharing Digital Designs on Thingiverse.com to Create Real Things.”
This is the first time that the MakerBot community has been recognized with an award and so to all the MakerBot Operators out there in the world that are making things and sharing. Congratulations!
(Also of note: CCC won the main prize in this category. Very cool!)
We are a runner up in the Next Gen 2010 Metropolis Competition:
CUPCAKE CNCMakerBot IndustriesBrooklynThey call it “the cutest rapid-prototyping machine ever.” It also happens to be the cheapest. The Cupcake CNC, by the Brooklyn tech collective MakerBot Industries, lets architects, designers, and DIY enthusiasts manufacture their own 3-D curios on a desktop printer vaguely reminiscent of a robot-armed teddy-bear picker—for less than $1,000. Standard 3-D printers run around $10,000 and up. The key: build it yourself. The Cupcake CNC comes as a kit that can be assembled with household tools in about four days. Then it’s ready to print models dreamed up in CAD or downloaded from www.thingiverse.com, a resource of free digital-design ideas that includes a Gothic cathedral and—upping the nerd quotient here—a trophy from Settlers of Catan. Objects print in ABS or PLA, a biodegradable plastic made of Nebraska corn. Soon, an extrude feature will make it possible to squeeze out almost any imaginable material: silicon, clay, frosting. “Everyone should be able to create things inexpensively and on their desktop,” says MakerBot’s Bre Pettis. “It lets ordinary people become innovators.” All-frosting cupcakes, here we come!
( Will Langford, an intern at MakerBot Industries, printed out this three-by-five-inch logo, made of ABS plastic, on a MakerBot 3-D printer.)
