Kent and Lucas Weakley stopped by our booth at Maker Faire and shot some video. MakerBot made it into their great video!

Charles Pax and I were up late and explored the world of sanding down the kapton tape on the MakerBot heated build platform. Charles found that sanding added a lot of “tooth” to surface which increases the amount of surface area and makes the plastic adhere to it with more constancy.

Charles wrote it up on his blog:

After an initial bit of frustration with the heated build platform I sanded the surface with 220 grit sand paper, increasing the surface area significantly, thus increasing the adhesive force. Since doing this I’ve had fewer failed prints, most of which were due to the Kapton being too cool.

The heated build platform greatly reduces warping of prints and so if you’ve been wanting to make bigger things on your MakerBot you should get it!

Bubblegum Pink ABS has arrived!

Hi Everybody-  Some good news for all you people who love printing in color on the CupCake CNC!  You can now get our full selection of colors in 1 pound rolls!  We know that some people just don’t love red, or blue, as much as they love yellow, so now you don’t have to deprive yourself ever again!  Buy all the colors, and then round it out with a 1 pound or 5 pound roll of delicious looking PINK ABS.   For the first week we are also offering a special reduced price to get them out to you on the cheap!

It’s Bubblegum Pink ABS time!

We are always trying to make working on your CupCake CNC easier,  so after some requests,  we have made available the Trifecta of Plastruder Washers!

(ok fine, some are called wheels, or retainers, but they are all round with a hole in the center!)

Furthermore, they are all cut from futuristic materials with the use of a LASER.

Drumroll please!

They are the Metal Retainer Washer:

The Acrylic Insulator Retainer:

And the Acrylic Idler Wheel!

Now available for order individually from the store!

Open Source Hardware is hardware that has an open license. You can copy it, develop it, and even sell it yourself. You must provide attribution to the designer and you must also release the derivative source files under the same license. This applies even if you use a proprietary program for your designs.

Sometimes an individual or a company makes a derivative of an open source project, goes to market with it and then doesn’t share their derivative designs with their changes. This is not only against the license, but it’s also not ethical. It is a dead end for the innovation and development which is the heart of the open source hardware community.

Right now there are some folks on the RepRap forums that are selling a derivative of our electronics. They’ve stated that they’ve modified our designs to make them more compact. There is absolutely nothing wrong with creating a derivative and selling it as long as you provide the source files.

The problem is that they have not published their source files. They have promised to publish a PDF of a picture of the boards, which isn’t sufficient and that promise was made a while ago. If you modify an open source design, you are required to release your source files. If you believe in the power of open source and community innovation, you’ll release them in the preferred format for modification. A PDF of the boards is not a format that invites modification.  Although gerber files, which are the files generated for manufacturing electronics, aren’t easy for the community to build on, they would have shown the community what changed and been a step towards sharing source files.

What would have been awesome is if they had used our designs, improved on them, and then published their source files. Just copying the design doesn’t bring much innovation to the community and it’s not the classiest move, but it’s within the license for anyone to copy us and manufacture identical boards. If they were to share the design files, we could see what they did to make them so tiny and the community could learn from that. Not only does this impact us financially, but most importantly it slows innovation within the community and sets a bad example for all.

It’s theoretically possible that they have released their source files and I couldn’t find them. If they exist, please comment below so that if we are wrong, we can get the story straight!

Note: See the update above. The documentation process is in process.

At MakerBot, we take open source seriously. It’s a way of life for us. We share our design files when we release a project because we know that it’s important for our users to know that a MakerBot is not a black box. With MakerBot, you get not only a machine that makes things for you, but you also get an education into how the machine works and you can truly own it and have access to all the designs that went into it! When people take designs that are open and they close them, they are creating a dead end where people will not be able to understand their machines and they will not be able to develop on them.

Open source hardware relies on ethics to work. It’s possible to legally chase down folks who break the terms of a license but in most cases the community will usually take care of it by confronting derivatives and not buying from individuals and companies that are building on others work and not releasing their source. I wish there was a public service announcement that would let people who are buying open source electronics to make sure that the design files have been published.

The door is still open for them to make this right. From the tone of their forum post, they are having trouble posting their files, which is something that should have been done before they started selling their derivative electronics kits. We invite them to send us an email at contact(*at*)makerbot(*dot*)com with their derivative files and we’ll publish them. If we have any updates, we’ll post them here.

Got an opinion? We’d love to hear it in the comments!

Photo credit – Creative Commons Share Alike: gfpeck

Bre is in Zurich, Switzerland tonight and if you’re in town, feel free to meet him for a beer around 9PM at Total Bar. He’ll have some Makerbot stuff to giveaway!

If you organize your own MakerBot Meetup make sure to drop a note and we’ll do our best to blog about it!

UPDATE: It was awesome hanging out with the Swiss MakerBot Crew!

Nick McCoy has solved one problem by coating the PLA with oil as it goes into the extruder. He’s put a piece of cotton and soaked it with oil so that it coats it as the filament goes into the extruder. Cool! We haven’t tried this out at the Botcave yet, but it’s refreshing to hear a cool solution! Learn more about PLA on the MakerBot wiki.

I am using engine oil, 10W-30, I believe. I bought the wrong stuff for my car once and so I have a quart of it lying around. I thought about using vegtable oil, but I think it would smoke at my working temperatures and I don’t need my reprap smelling more like waffles than it does just running PLA.

via A little oil makes PLA move. « Code Errors.

MakerBot needs you to make pulleys! We’ve done this before, but now we need your help again!

The 50 boxes for batch 7 are filling up and getting ready to be shipped out. Batch 8 is going to be 100 machines, our biggest batch yet. We need even more pulleys to support the community with MakerBots. The parts that go out in batch 8, could be your parts.  If you’ve been looking for a way to make some money with your machine, this is it.

All you need to do is download the production file, test it with a bearing, and then crank them out and we’ll give you a for each one! You’ll be printing money! Besides making money, you’ll also be giving new MakerBot operators their first thrill when they open up their boxes and they find that they can make something just like the pulley you printed for them!

If you’re in, read this post, check out the production code and please email zach@makerbot.com to let him know  you are going to be on Team Pulley and we’ll hook you up.

I heard you like front pages so I put a front page on your front page. What do you think? Let us know in the comments!