MakerBot Industries

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

Our designer, James Provost, came up with these initial designs. James came up with this awesome set of style choices and we didn’t go with any one of them, but you can really see the way we were going and what he was thinking. James is a great designer and was flexible and driven enough to come up with the way the name MakerBot would look and designed the site for us.

A year ago we started making the first MakerBot prototype. It didn’t work, but isn’t it cute?

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.

The gang who does the Radar series over at Babelgum came by the BotCave and made this video. They used Nikon d90’s and it turned out beautiful! Go to their site and check it out big.

One of our goals when we started MakerBot and designed the CupCake CNC was to automate one of the most tedious things of all time: frosting cupcakes. This incredibly difficult task has plagued mankind for centuries, but at long last we have found a reliable way to automate the process.

Our original design for a frosting extruder followed in the footsteps of Fab@Home’s paste extruder. They have a fairly elegant solution that uses linear actuators. Unfortunately, the linear actuators themselves cost more than our target price for the entire kit, so we attempted to come up with an emulated design that uses standard motors, lasercut gears, and some threaded rod to create a motorized plunger.

Well, this worked up until a point, but it was a pretty error prone and bulky solution. The gears were difficult to attach. The threaded rod based plunger required a design at least 2x the height of our desired syringe (60cc) and basically was heavy and didn’t work well. It was certainly an interesting design challenge for Bre, Will, and I that saw about 7-8 iterations and a failed appearance on TV, but ultimately it was fruitless. There’s a reason we never released the MK1 for sale.

Not only that, but the motorized piston based solution is an inherently flawed approach: The extrusion of a material is based primarily on the pressure, viscosity, and nozzle diameter. There’s not much you can do about viscosity and nozzle diameter, so we’re mucking with pressure. In the motorized piston approach, the pressure builds up gradually as you push the plunger down, and releases as the material either leaves the syringe or you back off the plunger. The result is that you either have extremely slow start/stop times or you have to deal with massive ooze problems.

Which brings us to the MK2. I was musing over the design failures one day when I had the idea that instead of trying to create the pressure in the syringe mechanically using a plunger, what if we directly applied pressure using air. I reasoned that we could use a commonly available air compressor and electrically controlled solenoid valves to push frosting out of a syringe tip. I had this idea for about 6 months, but it had to sit on the backburner for a while until I had a chance to work on it.

My first experiment was with some thick, chocolate frosting that you can find in nearly any grocery store. I simply wanted to see if it was possible to use air pressure to extrude frosting, so I wired up a solenoid to a switch and used that solenoid to turn the air pressure on and off to the syringe. I was using a 21GA (0.53mm) needle and a standard 60cc syringe. I hooked it up to the air pressure and opened the valve. Nothing happened right away, but I gradually turned the pressure up until about 50-60 PSI I started getting a frosting extrusion. I kept turning up the pressure to about 80 PSI where I got a really nice, very fast frosting extrusion that was about 0.5mm wide. Success!!!

Well, it wasn’t a total success: when I closed the valve, the syringe was still pressurized and continued to extrude. Obviously that is a problem, so I went back to the drawing board. I came up with the idea of adding a 2nd valve that would act as a relief valve and release the built-up pressure to the outside world. I grabbed a second valve and went back to the garage to experiment. The result was phenomenal! I was able to start and stop the extrusion at will, with zero oozing problems. This was excellent news. I soon had an Extruder controller wired up to the solenoids and a tester gcode script that would cycle the valves every 10 seconds. It was amazing to see a stream of frosting coming out and stopping every 10 seconds. I ran to get Bre and Adam to celebrate and we danced a frosting dance.

So: fast forward a few weeks and we’re gearing up for the Yahoo Hack Day in Times Square. We really didn’t have a solid game plan for what to do, but we knew we wanted to have fun and stay up all night hacking. I was really into the new frostruder design, so I brought it with us along with a portable air tank and a bike pump. We spent all night hacking on the frostruder and trying a variety of edible materials (frosting, peanut butter, and jelly). We ended up winning the Best Hardware Hack category with our New York Toast entry. It was a fun, fun hacking adventure.

For more info, check out Thingiverse and the MakerBot wiki.

One of the nice things about being an open source hardware based company is that we don’t need to keep our R&D efforts under wraps. Infact, we do all of our R&D out in the open. Our public facing subversion repository (http://svn.makerbot.com) is where you can find the latest developments that we’re working on. As all of our hardware designs are based on digital files, its easy for us to post them for all to see.

The reason behind this post is two-fold. First, I’d like to start blogging regularly about new developments. Things like new prototypes, new ideas, and stuff like that. Some of these things will probably be failures and would otherwise never see the light of day. Others may work but not be practical or useful. Some lucky ones will work great and fit with what we want to do and get turned into products. All of this information is useful and valuable the community and should be shared.

The second reason is that I’d like to give a bit of a ‘behind the scenes’ look into MakerBot, how we operate, what we’re thinking about, and perhaps show ways in which the community can participate in the development of our shared technology. If it shows that we’re not some faceless MegaCorp of just 5 people, well thats a nice bonus too. To start, I’d like to give a tour of the various resources where development is taking place:

MakerBot Subversion
URL: http://svn.makerbot.com
This is the main repository where most of our development takes place. This is where our electronics, cupcake cnc, plastruder, frostruder, and many other things are stored. Each of us also has our own personal directory where we do more experimental work. Here’s a few useful directories:

http://svn.makerbot.com/trunk/ – this is where the main development happens. we try to keep it stable, but dont assume things from this folder work. this is where the latest and greatest stuff is though.
http://svn.makerbot.com/tags/ – this is where we ‘tag’ the releases once they’re ready for public consumption. you can get it from here or our google code project.
http://svn.makerbot.com/users/ – these are our own personal directories where Bre, Adam, and I do our hacking. We usually put stuff in here that is highly experimental that may or may not work. Sort of a playground for hacking, if you will.

Github
Url: http://github.com/makerbot

We are trying out Github as our repository for the Firmware and ReplicatorG. Github and git in general are really great for distributed development. Since people are more likely to collaborate with us on the code side of things, we wanted to make it as easy as possible for them. If this experiment works out, we may switch over our entire repository to Git. Who knows?

http://github.com/makerbot/G3Firmware – this is where the latest 3rd generation firmware resides.
http://github.com/makerbot/ReplicatorG – this is where the latest ReplicatorG code resides.

Community
Of course all the sourcecode in the world is meaningless unless you have a community. Most of the Makerbot community resides on the MakerBot operators group. There’s also a growing dev list for ReplicatorG. If you’re interested in helping out… just dig into the source and see what you think. Hit us up in the makerbot operators group with any progress you make!

Update: Here’s the statue of liberty model!

If you are a regular of the makerbot soup or the flickr group, you may have seen the MakerBot Liberty Prototypes hiding in the background of photos.

Folks had been asking about a bigger machine and so I mocked up the Liberty to extend the build area to 100×100x300mm, which makes for a pretty tall machine.

The good news: it works.
The bad news: it needs a lot more improvement to work well.

My first print of this ended at 150mm because it fell off the XY stage. In the second print, as soon as it got above 150mm in hight, the weight of the liberty made the platform start shifting. There is a little tolerance in the bearings and with all that weight pushed around on the platform, it started rocking the platform back and forth. This resulted in very wobbly lines which isn’t super awesome. Total build time was almost 6 hours.

In future prototypes I’m going to address this by making a wider XY stage and finding an alternative to magnets that will hold the build platform to the base with more strength.

I had hoped that I could just put out an upgrade kit with a new front, back, sides, and long z-stage rods, but I’ve got to go back to the drawing board with the xy stage. My hope is to have this out as an option in 2010. Stay tuned!

Want to see the designs? Here they are. This DXF is best viewed in QCAD.

We put an ad up on craigslist. Here’s what we had to say! (Pictured above is Will, one of our summer interns)

MakerBot Industries is a fresh company that creates and sells affordable open source 3D printer kits. We are currently looking for interns who can come in two days a week. As an intern you will assemble electronics kits, run a bank of six MakerBots, blog, and do a wide variety of tasks that need to be done around the BotCave.

An interest or obsession with machinery, electronics, and open source are expected with applicants. Please include a letter stating your interest, the days you would be available, links to your website if you have one, and a copy of your resume.

If you have time to learn, work, and earn your way to your own MakerBot, give us a holler at hiring@makerbot.com.

We get threaded rods in 1 meter lengths and then we cut them in thirds using this angle grinder. It works, but we’ve had the grinding wheel get destroyed during the process and send bits of the disk everywhere. We need a better solution.

So we’re asking you, because you might be an expert on this thing. What is the best tool for this job?