Calling all Thingiverse Citizens, MakerBot Operators, and Engineers around the world!

Fact: The Deepwater Horizon Unified Command (DHUC) is inviting alternative technology responses to stop the spill either at the spill or the source level.

Fact: The current oil spill in the Mexican Gulf is threatening or killing thousands of wildlife everyday.

Fact: Many Thingiverse citizens think of creative solutions to problems on a daily basis.

Junior Tan contacted me this last week. He had put together an idea for plugging up the oil flowing into the Gulf and he had submitted it to BP and didn’t get a response. He emailed me willing to give $100 the person who could design something that might get a response with the hope that an idea from the Engineers of the world might just be the right thing to solve the problem. I told him that MakerBot would put in $100 as well and so the total is now $200 for someone who can get a response and, not even joking here, save the world.

This is a two week all-hands-on-deck-ideas-fest call to action! Let us instead focus our minds on saving the world.

We are offering a bounty of US$200 to the following:

1. The first person who actually gets a response from DHUC specifying interest and/or requesting more information, or
2. Even if there is no response from DHUC, we will hold a judging exercise on June 20th when the two weeks are up based on the following criteria:
-       simplicity of solution (is it easy to build, deploy and maintain?)
-       viability of solution (can the solution be feasible considering the high fluidic pressures, depth of the water column and the extreme low temperatures at depth?)

Call for volunteer judges:

While some of us here are comfortable working with ABS, PLA and M3 socket bolts, we may not be totally familiar with fluid dynamics or Young’s modulus. We would like to open a call for volunteer judges. Catch is, as a judge, you cannot qualify for the bounty even if you win. Please contact MakerBot should you wish to help verify the first response from BP or figure out who to paypal the money to if BP doesn’t respond.

Call for bounty pledges:

The bounty here is a mix of volunteer pledges from Thingiverse citizens as well as Makerbot Industries. So even if you don’t solve the problem of fixing the oil leak, you can throw down and pledge to throw more moolah in the pot to make things more interesting, drop a note in the comments and when it’s all over, we’ll send you the winner’s paypal address and those pledges can be paypalled. Yes, you can still join the Call To Action, and qualify for the same bounty! We can’t be sure everyone who pledges will pony up, but the $200 is real money!

You can start at the DeepWater Horizon response page and you can submit your designs to BP here. Remember to upload them to Thingiverse too! (Tag: deepwaterhorizon). If you want to contribute to the bounty, just drop a note in the comments and we’ll shoot you an email shortly after June 20th.

Update: According to the comments, the bounty is up to $1100!

$100 Junior Tan
$100 MakerBot
$100 Gl33p
$200 Ponoko
$100 Jerri Chou
$200 ifixit
$100 David Ten Have
$100 Frank of Monochrom. (Pledged via twitter)
$100 Matt O’Rourke Pledged via Twitter

Wow, just wow! Christian Arnø has made a MakerBot with a MakerBot and has achieved MakerBot self replication!!! SO MUCH WIN!

The reprap is not the only 3d printer that can replicate itself, now the Makerbot can too.

This Makerbot is made out of approximately 150 individual pieces that is printed on , (yes you guessed it) a Makerbot.

My Makerbot worked hard everyday for about a month straight to finish this project, and i am immensly happy about the end result

(The pictures doesn’t do it justice one bit, but it really is a thing of beauty)

Make sure to check out the MakerBot made by a MakerBot page on Thingiverse to look at all the pictures! WOW!

At MakerBot Industries, we want to get the MakerBot into the hands of young people in schools, colleges, and universities. We’re starting by creating the MakerBot Educators Group for folks who are students, teachers, professors, and folks who just think that actually doing things and making things should be an integral part education.

We figure that students can put theory into practice and get practical manufacturing experience with a MakerBot. We want students to be able to make their imagination real by exploring the world of 3D design and fabrication while exploring manufacturing in a tangible, personal way.

We imagine a utopia where students get hands on access to 3D printing in a room full of happily buzzing MakerBots and share their designs on Thingiverse where there are already 1000’s of models that are ready to download and print!

A lot of you are already either teachers, professors, students or are involved in education in some way. So this group is for you all to share your ideas and resources! Join in the conversation!

So how far are we along this path? It is early days. Probably a little too early to declare that atoms “are” the new bits. But progress has been rapid and it feels distinctly as if we are at the cusp of rapid acceleration. For a geek like myself it is impossible to look at the Cupcake CNC from Makerbot and not think of it as the Apple I of personal manufacturing. At the same time as other 3D printers cost $100,000 or more, the Cupcake comes as a kit for $750. That is two orders of magnitude cheaper. Yes, there is some assembly required (Bre jokes that it’s at the level of IKEA furniture) but it is easy to extrapolate to an Apple II, which will be the Makerbot in a box. In the meantime, there is a growing list of things that can be printed with a Makerbot that can be found at Thingiverse.

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!

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. =)