MakerBot Industries

Robert W. Lucky over at IEEE has written about MakerBot as the precursor to teleportation. Check it out!

Teleportation: Finally, a Little Science Behind the Science Fiction

Will we look back on the MakerBot as the beginnings of teleportation?

BY Robert W. Lucky // March 2010

Teleportation has been an enduring dream of science fiction. We’re nowhere near the ”Beam me up, Scotty” stage, but there are already hints of teleportation today. It started, in fact, in the 1970s, when—first with facsimile and then with computer networking—we began to reproduce paper documents at a distance by scanning, transmission, and printing. For all practical purposes, the document has been teleported. Now, what about physical objects?

Transmission of the information necessary to reconstruct an object is not a problem; what we need are 3-D scanners and printers. I’m not sure there are any 3-D scanners, but there is a fascinating open-source effort going on now to develop a 3-D printer, called the MakerBot. The MakerBot works like a computer-controlled hot-glue gun, squirting melted plastic onto a platform moved by stepper motors. Under software control, it can reproduce plastic objects up to about the size of a small milk bottle.

You can buy a MakerBot kit for about the cost of a typical personal computer. When assembled, it looks like a trap for small animals made with an Erector set. No one would confuse it with a consumer product, and I get the impression that it takes an engineer to run it. But then, so did the first personal computers (remember the Altair and Heathkits?). Engineers should find the idea intriguing. When I saw a recent demonstration, one attendee cried out, ”I’m really excited, and I want to buy one, but I don’t know why!” I thought that this perfectly encapsulated the experience.

There is already a dedicated group of experimenters out there assembling MakerBots, using 3-D modeling software to describe objects, and using the MakerBot to create teakettles, Darth Vader heads, custom Lego blocks, ornaments, model railroad buildings, and more. While this sounds like a cute hobbyist toy, what it portends for the future could be very significant.

The last piece of the teleportation puzzle is a 3-D scanner that generates data in a form that the MakerBot can use. Such a scanner doesn’t seem impossible. In the meantime, the early adopters are sharing their modeling data; there is a growing library on the Internet of designs for MakerBot objects. These libraries are an inevitable step along the way to widespread use, just as they were in the programming world. (Think of the journey from assembly language to scripting.) Others gradually come up with improvements, which are shared as well. The result is hardware upgrades via e-mail. Eventually, there will come a time when there is little point in crafting your own object models. Someone out there will have already done whatever it is you need.

All this in itself is startling, but looking to the future, there are some fantastic possibilities.

The first possibility is recursion. It is a word that we apply in mathematics and programming, but couldn’t it describe a property of hardware? In other words, couldn’t a MakerBot make a MakerBot? Obviously, we can’t yet render the motors and electronics, but the physical structures of the MakerBot could be made by the MakerBot itself. So you buy one for yourself, and then give duplicates to your friends, who could then make more duplicates for their friends until it becomes a viral MakerBot infection. (Of course, commercial versions of the MakerBot will probably come with industrial-strength copy protection.)

Let’s let our imaginations run even wilder. With modular construction, we could use a MakerBot to make a bigger MakerBot, which in turn could make a bigger MakerBot. The electronics could, of course, stay the same while the physical world grows—or shrinks, for that matter.

As MakerBots proliferate, will they evolve? I imagine they will—not just planned mutations but random ones as well. We might see survival of the fittest, whatever ”fittest” means in a MakerBot world. The possibilities are endless.

But enough dreaming—reality is exciting enough. Beam me up, Scotty! Or if not me, at least a plastic doll.

This article originally appeared in print as “Almost Teleportation.”

via IEEE Spectrum: Teleportation: Finally, a Little Science Behind the Science Fiction.

If you speak German, this Elektrischer Reporter video about MakerBot and Thingiverse will make sense, but otherwise you should still watch this for the expert use of stock footage and fun green screen effects!

English Translation of Elektrisher Reporter Link

Priya Ganapati wrote a great article about the spider/lego/makerbottable contraption over on the Wired blog.

Weller, a machinist and technician at the McCoy School of Engineering at Midwestern State University, combined milled plastic pieces with the basic Lego Mindstorms set to create a robotic spider that can crawl and turn.

“I wanted to open students’ minds to go beyond ‘let’s put the parts together and program the robot,’” he says. “This project is more than sticking the wheels on a Lego set.” The school uses Lego Mindstorms to introduce freshman students to robotics.

The spider robot’s legs are based on a concept called the Klann linkage. A single leg has a six-bar linkage with a frame, crank, two rockers and two couplers connected with pivot joints. This transforms rotating motion into linear motion.

Weller says he created the spider’s legs from 3/8-inch plastic sheet stock on a 3-axis CNC mill. But it can also be made by a 3-D printer such as Makerbot and RepRap.

As the video shows, the robotic spider moves with grace and turns around with flair, even on a smooth surface. Weller has posted the details of his Lego spider project and says he hopes 3-D printing enthusiasts will try it out.

via Robotic Spider Melds Legos and 3-D Printing | Gadget Lab | Wired.com.

MakerBot is on Mark’s Citizen Reporter podcast!

Bre Pettis envisions a future where people don’t just go out and buy things when something is needed or breaks. He envisions a future where people will once again make things themselves, at home. During one of our legendary breakfast sessions during the 26C3 in Berlin on the last day of 2009, we talked about his vision and his company – Makerbot Industries.

Give it a listen! (mp3 link)

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!

Joseph over at the replicatorinc blog caught the elusive Adam Mayer on video. My favorite moment is when Adam warns you, if you were a time traveler, not to go back in time and confuse Wozniak by trying to explain bit-torrent to him before it exists.

Joris over at shapeways interviewed Bre. Make sure to read far enough to get to the time-traveling antique hunters.

Joris Peels: What’s a Makerbot? Bre Pettis: A MakerBot is an affordable, open source 3D printer.

Joris Peels: And a Cupcake is a Makerbot?

Bre Pettis: Yes, the Cupcake is our flagship personal fabrication device! It makes things that are a little bigger than a cupcake!

Joris Peels: Who is the team behind Makerbot Industries?

Bre Pettis: Adam (Adam Mayer) has his head in the software, Zach has his hands on production, I’m making waves and we all start prototyping at 6pm when we stop answering emails, packing boxes and taking care of business.

What was the first thing you 3D printed?

A shot glass. Promptly filled with a deadly Scandinavian concoction.

Your favorite thing so far?

Everyday I wake up and check out what’s new on Thingiverse and I’m never let down. Lately there has been a trend to make tools to do other things with a MakerBot like the MicroLathe. When folks are using the tools we design to make other tools to make other things it gets me excited. We make things that make things that people use to make things that make other things that make things. Try saying that 3 times fast.

Who came up with the idea for Makerbot Industries?

Zach (Smith aka Hoeken) had been obsessed with 3D printing for a while and infected us with the personal manufacturing bug. Making things that make things is fun so it’s contagious.

How long did it take you guys to get the company going, to get the first bots out the door?

We started on Jan 17. Had the prototype done by Mar 17, and then had the first batch of MakerBots out the door on April 17th. There wasn’t a lot of sleep in those months. We actually ate 2 cases of ramen in those months so we wouldn’t have to go out and eat. That was a bad idea. Don’t do that, it’s not healthy.

What are the differences between a Cupcake and a RepRap (Open source 3D printer project)?

The main difference between a MakerBot Cupcake CNC and a Reprap is how much time it takes to make one. The Reprap project is an academic research project and it can take a few months to gather the materials and then put a reprap together and then a lot of experimentation to get it to print. The MakerBot CupCake CNC is a kit and can be printing things out after a weekend of assembly with a friend.

Are you really going to try to tackle 3D scanning too?

Yes. Having a MakerBot 3D printer and MakerBot scanner is the washer/dryer combo of replication. Who doesn’t want to print out portrait sculptures of their family and friends?

And what new materials will you introduce?

We just launched PLA, PolyLactic Acid, and it’s flying off the shelves. It’s clear and it’s made from corn. It smells a bit like butter when you print with it. We’re finishing up prototypes of the frostruder which is a syringe based extruder that can print with frosting and anything squishable like UV curable silicon. And clay! We’re in the market for a kiln so we can fire our own MakerBotted tea set.

What is a typical Makerbot customer like?

A lot of our customers are time traveling antique hunters which brings up all sorts of shipping problems. Most people think that all MakerBot customers are seriously geeky, but the truth is that even though lots of designers and architects and engineers buy them, most of our customers are just clever people who are sick of waiting on other people for their jetpack.

Will everyone have a desktop 3D printer? If so when?

When the Altair came out, people criticized it and said there wasn’t a need for more than 10 computers in the world. We’re in that same kind of place with personal manufacturing that personal computing was back then. MakerBots will be an absolutely totally common thing to see on a desktop within 10 years.

Why is Thingiverse important?

We built Thingiverse because we needed a place to share our designs so we wouldn’t lose them and so our friends could make what we had made and then modify those designs and make them better. The community is amazing and supportive, and it’s also a lot of fun. There is no other place that you can share a design for a physical thing and people around the world will make their own copies within minutes (NB: mmm we might need to do some more work in promoting our 3D parts database). It’s that kind of sharing magic that makes Thingiverse the closest thing to teleportation that we’ve got in this solar system.

What are the mayor challenges for you guys?

It can be hard to find time to eat and sleep. There is way too much stuff to do in this world right now. If you’re bored in this day and age, you’re doing it wrong. Turn off the TV, pick a ambition and start spending your free time working on it. Besides 3d printing, there are all sorts of open source collaborative hardware projects to work on.

A while back you had an experiment in crowd sourced manufacturing with having people produce parts for Makerbots for you. How did that work out? Will you be doing this more often?

We were the first company to ever do crowd sourced manufacturing and it worked out great. It was so cool to have MakerBots in the wild making parts for unbuilt MakerBots. We’ve got some ideas to do this again that we’re going to announce later this year.

How important is your community to you? What do they do for the company?

The MakerBot community is awesome. Because we’re open source and the community is so smart, we’ve seen a lot of participation in the research and development sector. For example, MakerBot Operator Tim Myrtle ripped the guts out of our temperature control code and replaced that section of code with some serious PID math which made the temperature of the nozzle much more stable. Because we’re open source, our users know that the code and designs are theirs to hack on. They also know that if they improve their machine, they can share their improvement and everyone in the community benefits.

Can I download a Makerbot and print it out using Shapeways?

Go for it! There was talk a while back on the MakerBot Operator google group to replace all the lasercut parts with printable parts. Progress is being made and already there is a printable extruder!

Are Makerbots going to be able to self replicate?

One step at a time. Self replication is cool, but our first step is actually to get the machine so that it can be an autonomous manufacturing factory. I want to be able to go to sleep and wake up to a pile of MakerBotted things next to my MakerBot!

Why did you guys start Makerbot Industries?

We felt compelled. We decided to live the dream. We followed our hearts.

Shouldn’t you guys be making the next YouTube or something (Bre used to work for Rocketboom, Etsy & MakeZine as their video producer)? Why 3D printing?

We love the internet, but web apps are very 90’s. Personal Manufacturing the new black. We see the future and it’s full of flying cars, replicators, and moon colonies. You can watch videos of the MakerBot Operators popping our collars from the moon colony on youtube when we get there.

You used to be a teacher, is that still kind of your job? To ‘teach’ 3D printing?

My mission in life is to be able to develop infrastructure that lets humans be creative. I feel that very tangibly inside my self. When I taught school that’s what I did. When I made tutorial videos that’s what I did. Adam, Zach and I are taking creative infrastructure to a new level by putting the tools of manufacturing into the hands of creative people. Everyday, even the long days packing boxes, we get excited about empowering people around to world create amazing things with our machines.

MakerBot gets a nice mention in the latest Wired Magazine and they made a video with both Chris Anderson and a MakerBot in it! (Check out the CC sticker on the model airplane in the back!)

It all starts with the tools. in a converted brewery in Brooklyn, Bre Pettis and his team of hardware engineers are making the first sub-$1,000 3-D printer, the open source MakerBot. Rather than squirting out ink, this printer builds up objects by squeezing out a 0.33-mm-thick thread of molten ABS plastic. Five years ago, you couldn’t get anything like this for less than $125,000.

During a visit in late November, 100 boxes containing the ninth batch of MakerBots are lined up and ready to go out the door (as a customer, I’m thrilled to know that one of them is coming to me). Nearly 500 of these 3-D printers have been sold, and with every one, the community comes up with new uses and new tools to make them even better. For example, a prototype head delivers a resolution of 0.2 mm. Another head can hold a rotating cutter, turning the printer into a CNC router. (CNC is short for computer numerical control, which simply means that the machines are driven by software.) And yet another can print with icing, for desserts.

Out of the box, the MakerBot produces plastic parts from digital files. Want a certain gear right now? Download a design and print it out yourself. Want to modify an object you already have? Scan it (a researcher at the University of Cambridge has developed a technology that will allow you to create a 3-D file by rotating the object in front of your webcam), tweak the bits you want to change with the free SketchUp software from Google, and load it into the ReplicatorG app. Within minutes, you have a whole new physical object: a rip, mix, and burn of atoms.

Steven Leckart of Wired stopped by to check out our booth at CES this year! Check out this awesome video they made! Via: CES 2010: Open Source 3-D Printer Turns Designs Into Objects.

Challenger Brand News wrote us up as a company that challenges the status quo!

There are printers, and then there machines designed to manufacture parts. It’s hard to imagine a device that encompasses both, but MakerBot Industries creates a product that does just that: a 3D printer. As stated by the founder, “We make robots that make things.” The company’s goal is “to make it cheap and easy for anyone to fabricate digitally-designed 3D objects.”

The 3D printer works much like a hot-glue gun – plastic is fed into the top of a machine, heated and dispensed in spaghetti-like strands. Using programmed instructions, the machine lays down layers of plastic in the appropriate shape, much like the way a printer distributes ink, until the desired object is formed. To see the device in action, watch this video.

via Here’s a Challenge: Make Your Own…Anything