MakerBot Industries

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.

If, 10 years ago, someone from the future told me that you’d be able to download videos, music, and objects but not books I’d have called them crazy! James Vasile is changing all that with his Book Liberator.

The Book Liberator need your help liberating books! We designed a machine for scanning physical volumes. This machine is cheap and simple to build (you could do it with a hacksaw and a screwdriver), uses off-the-shelf parts, and gobbles books at a rate of 600 to 900 pages an hour. Freely licensed plans and post-processing software are avaiable!

Our next step is dead-simple kits and a refined design. I drew a 3D-printed camera mount in openscad that clamps to the machine and holds your digicam to take nice, consistent shots of your book. I need some help refining the design from somebody willing to print prototypes so we can tweak/print/test until the thing is perfect.

The mount is on thingiverse. If anybody with a MakerBot or RepRap is interested in jumping in, we’re eager to collaborate.

If anyone can help this project out, it would be great!

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.

Last month I gave a presentation at Gnomedex, a technology conference in Seattle. They recorded it and it’s on youtube so you can watch it here!

Problems are opportunities

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.

When we set out to build MakerBot, we wanted to build a cheap, affordable 3D printer that we could build using commonly available parts and to make the rest of the parts using Digital Fabrication techniques. Since we had one laser cutter and zero MakerBots at that time, we pretty much had to make everything with the laser cutter.

One of the tricky parts to make is the idler pulley. These are pulleys that serve to tension the various belts in the system and they need to run smoothly. Buying a commercial part that does this would have been a few bucks, minimum. So, one night at around 2AM, I decided to see if it was possible to lasercut them. That presented its own unique challenge, since the pulleys needed to be flanged to keep the belt on the pulley.

After about 3-4 iterations, I came up with a design that used stacked layers of wood that you glued together to build a pulley. This was very tricky, and required assembling parts before you could even use them. Furthermore, the inner rings were very thin and broke easily. We were worried that they would not hold up to shipping, so we shipped extra parts. Also, being constrained by the thickness of the wood was a pretty tough challenge, and the pulleys sometimes come loose on the pulley. Not a big deal, but not elegant.

The whole reason I got into digital fabrication was because of the RepRap project, and the idea of a machine being able to make improved parts for itself. So, fast forward a few weeks and we now have 4 functioning MakerBots here at the lab. I sat down and decided to try and see what parts I could print, and the pulley stuck out like a sore thumb. I went through about 3 iterations before I landed on a nice design. The 608 bearing press-fits into the pulley and it rides like a dream. No gluing parts overnight, it just works.

If you have a MakerBot, you can download this design and print it out to upgrade your machine. How awesome is that?

This is certainly just the first in a string of printable parts that will make up the MakerBot design. We’ll be shipping these as part of the 2nd batch of CupCake CNC kits that will ship on May 1st. Hold onto those wooden pulleys, they’ll be relics someday. =)

Cory Doctorow wrote a story in 2006 imagining a future of contraband 3D printers. In the story these MakerBot-like machines become illegal because they can make trademarked and patented objects and get around the whole centralized manufacturing process. It’s 2009 and the 3D printers of the future are here. The MakerBot launches us into a new future filled with digitally designed and personally fabricated objects. The future that Cory predicts in his science fiction story where 3D printers are common place is now officially fact. You may not be getting a rocket-pack anytime soon, but we’re delivering on the dream of a machine that prints out the things that have had to stay locked in your imagination. In the near future, you’ll be sending your kids to college and making sure they have a MakerBot on their dorm room desk.

There are other 3D printers out there, but they are either very expensive or have a long and twisty path to existence. When designing MakerBot, my friends Zach Hoeken Smith, Adam Mayer, and I have taken all the research on making 3D printers work and and spent a ton of time finding the cheapest way to get a super precise (to .085mm) machine. Then we designed this machine to look good because we want you to be able to get it, use it, and care enough about it that you can hand it down to your grandchildren and they’ll be able to use it.

This MakerBot Cupcake CNC machine is the Model T of 3D printers, blazing a trail to make 3D printers available to the masses. You solder it and put it together yourself. Unlike $250,000 printer, you have to make it from a kit, just like with the first Apple Computers. By making it yourself, you also get the pride of knowing exactly how it works!

If you are a citizen of the future and you have any interest in 3D printers and MakerBots, then take 5 minutes right now to read Cory Doctorow’s story titled, “Printcrime“. Since it’s licensed under Creative Commons, you can read it here after the jump. If you’re inspired, buy a MakerBot now and become one of the proud citizens of the digitally designed future.

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Our buddy Allan C. Ecker, AKA, Masked Retriever, is blogging up a storm over at Thingiverse.

The truth is that nearly everyone does something that’s almost unique. We’ve all got a quirky hobby, a specific habit, or something we do that only a small percentage of people share. This is the area where I think personal fabrication will really change lives. I don’t think personal fabrication will replace our plastic forks and lawn chairs. Everyone’s need there will be similar enough that, in the long run, we’ll settle for a fork that doesn’t have our personal stamp on it.

And in the process, make our lives not only easier but a bit more FUN.

Make sure to go check his writing out, it’s the stuff of the future! – Link