MakerBot Industries

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

Bre explains the MakerBot in minute 33 of this video about 26C3. (Shot with a 5D MK2 – Want!)

Projectmovie 2009 on Vimeo on Vimeo

More Botmade stuff on Etsy made with a MakerBot by former MakerBot intern Will Langford. These look great!

3D printed bracelet from the future by BotMade on Etsy.

Polylactic Acid (PLA) is an extremely awesome polymer for many reasons. First, it is bio-friendly. It is made from corn, which is a renewable resource. Secondly, it is bio-degradable which means it will break down in a landfill. Third, it is clear which makes for gorgeous crystalline prints that absolutely scream for LEDs. Last but not least, it has an extremely low shrinkage factor which means it resists warping, even at very large print sizes. All-in-all its a very exciting new filament.

The PLA should print very well at standard ABS settings, but we will be releasing updated settings very shortly that will allow you to get the very best out of your MakerBot with PLA.

The particular variant of PLA that we use is Ingeo 4032D. For full technical specs, check out the PLA datasheet.

We are getting this started off right by offering a special introductory price of $60 for 5 pounds of PLA ($12 a pound). When the sale ends on Monday January 11th, it will go up $80 for 5 pounds ($16 a pound). We want folks to get it and make with it ASAP and we want to give the early adopters a nice discount. Get yours now!

MakerBot and NYCResistor were featured on Motherboard.tv. Check it!

Yo, MakerBot is at CES. We’re telling the world that the time has come to get a 3D printer on your desktop! We’re scrappy, we’re clever, and we make a machine that can make almost anything.

We’ve got the simplest press kit ever! Here’s our One Pager, Photos, Videos, and Other Press!

You may notice that we kept this simple for easy file acquisition. No HTML even!

We’re at CES! Last year we won a the NY Tech Meetup Startup Battle and we’ve just arrived. We’ll be setting things up tomorrow and then Thursday the show begins. We’ll be printing stuff, showing off the MakerBot watch, and giving out a few thousand stickers.

Here’s the map! Click on the map to make it big!

Bonus points and lots of stickers if you’re at the show and you can find us and say, “Yarr, MakerBot is the future!”

Note: Want to check out the press kit? Link!

Robert Bowdidge is documenting his work with a MakerBot to create HO scale buildings and he’s tweaking skeinforge to make it happen!

I made two changes: first, Keith’s blog suggested playing with the Carve setting’s “Extrusion Width over Thickness”. This controls the thickness of each layer, and determines how much the stream of plastic get squished into place. By changing this value from 1.9 to 1.5, the occasional gaps between the extruded plastic disappears, and the surface starts looking more like a flat surface with board texture. Second, I added some “trim pieces” to the top and bottom to cover where the fill path curved back. This final piece looks much more realistic (except that the “trim” over the window has a gap because it’s 4.5 extrusions wide; reducing that size a bit would get rid of that gap.

The third building face still isn’t suitable for close-up viewing, but it looks decent at a distance and in shadow. With this print, I’m starting to believe I could use the Makerbot to build HO buildings.

via Makerbot 216: There’s a Skeinforge Setting for That….

Inspired by Nophead’s excellent work, I decided to do my own testing. I had the folks up at Najet make me a prototype and pitted it against the existing timing belt pulley from SDP-SI. As with Nophead, I found the worm-gear style pulley to be much superior.

My process was pretty simple. We’re testing the pull strength of the extruder only here, so it involved hooking up the filament drive portion to a force meter (fish scale) and running it until it either stopped or failed. Here’s my setup.

Force Meter
A fish scale 50lbs / 23 kg. I couldn’t figure out how to make it do metric. FAIL! It still worked reliably, and I got a rough sense of what forces were involved. Now that I know my range, I am purchasing a much nicer digital force meter. (Its held down by capa / shapelock… I know, I should really have printed that part)

Filament Harness
Since we’re measuring how hard the extruder pulls on the filament, we need a way to hook up the filament to the force meter. I ended up bolting the filament between two washers and then looping that over the hook. I only rarely had problems after that.

Extruder Drive System
No need for the hot end or anything like that for this test. I laid the electronics to the side. Then I just clamped it to the wood, making sure to clamp in the middle of the dinos and not too hard. The bolts dug into the wood after a bit and made it snap right into place.

Then I just did a bunch of test and measurements. The fish scale did not have a very fast update rate at all (5 seconds?) It also did not have a peak weight or anything like that. I just watched it and tried to remember the highest number. This was a big deal because sometimes the filament itself would either break or elongate and deform. There readings could be slightly low because of that. It was also a bit chilly in the Botcave (its late december but I’m not going to go that deep on ya.

Here are the results as a google doc:

As for the extruder pulley, yes we will have these eventually. No idea on the timeframe, but having to wait is the price we pay for being as open as possible. I also made the silly mistake of making the diameter of the threaded parts different from the diameter of the current pinch wheel teeth. Its not much of a difference, but I’d like it to be a drop-in replacement. Its a really daunting thing to go into production on a part without a prototype, so it means I’ll probably need to get a new one made. I might have a few other variants made and see how they match up with the results from this one.