We got black ABS plastic into the MakerBot store. Now you can make black or white objects with your MakerBot. We had this plastic custom manufactured and it’s beautiful, extrudes great, and has a really nice silky sheen to it. Marius and Philipp of the Metalab in Vienna take responsibility for this wonderful robot stunt. They have been visiting and they set up the MakerBot named Martha Vader to sing the imperial march and make a Darth Vader Head. The sound is coming from the stepping of the steppers. Each step of the motor creates a square wave and when you line them up at the right speeds, music is possible!
What time is it? It’s MakerBot time! I really like my realfakewatch, but I’ve misplaced it and missed having it on my wrist.
To MakerBot it, I went through a pretty straightforward process.
I modeled it in Sketchup, a 3D modeling software owned by Google. I used the free version and then fired up the trial pro account and exported it as an OBJ file.
I imported it into Blender, an open source 3D modelling software and scaled it to the right size and rotated it so the bottom was on the bottom. Then I exported an STL file.
I imported the STL into Skeinforge, an open source program for slicing and dicing 3D models. It sliced it up and outputted a GCODE file. I brought it into ReplicatorG which took the GCODE file and told the MakerBot what to do with it! It heated up the extruder nozzle to 200 degrees Celcius and then built up the watch, layer by layer!
Once it was done, I spraypainted the ABS plastic with silver spraypaint. It looks good. I cut straps off my backpack and sewed them into a watchband and now I’ve got a great conversation piece.
If you want to make your own, you can download the original files on the digital design sharing website that Zach and I created called Thingiverse!
I’ve been on a kick lately of finding cool, useful things to print with my MakerBot. The current way of running a print is to tape on a square of foamcore. Well, that can get tedious and it sucks to have to use another consumable in addition to the foamcore. Well, I dreamed up a design for a clip to hold the foamcore down so you can print. It turned out pretty nice, and I’ve been using it to do prints.
There are a few catches though:
1. You can’t print large objects (>80mm) as the head will hit the clips. Use tape for those jobs
2. They don’t play well with endstops on the Y axis. I don’t use endstops because I’m tough, but if you use them just beware.
It’s really trivial to print off 4 of them using Skeinforge’s multiply feature. If you lose them, you can just print out more. Awesome!
Nobody likes waste, and here at MakerBot we don’t either. One of the cool things about using a 3D printer like ours is that there is no waste: you use exactly the amount of material you need to print something, and no more. Unfortunately with subtractive processes like lasercutting, you have waste material. With our CupCake CNC designs, there is a large amount of negative space, which leaves us with these big, rounded squares of wood. They had been stacking up at the lab and we didn’t know what to do with them.
Enter Andreas Ekberg, one of our friends here in NYC. He stopped by NYC Resistor one night to hang out and chat and do cool things with us. Well, he spotted the stacks of blank wood and wondered if we had any plans for them. We didn’t and he ended up taking a whole stack of them home with him to screenprint on. The results are gorgeous.
Zach and I had a great time at the Maker Revolution event at Microsoft Labs in Boston over the weekend. We didn’t know it, but it turns out that sitting around a table with folks while the MakerBot Cupcake CNC is puttering away and doing its thing and making objects appear where there were none before is really a great community activity! One of the gatherers mentioned that it felt like a geek campfire and it did!
We printed airplane wings, dodecahedrons, and chess pieces. Then I gave a talk about rapid prototyping. We met cool people who are doing cool things. Big thanks to everyone who shared their passion with us at this event.
If you have an event that might benefit from having a MakerBot at a table and listening to a talk about the future of rapid prototyping and manufacturing, feel free to give me a shout at bre@makerbot.com. We’ve talked at Microsoft Labs in Boston and we’re going to be giving a talk at Google later this month and it’s likely we’ll be talking at the NY Tech meetup in June. We’re also gearing up for Maker Faire in San Francisco where we’ll be bringing some machines and showing people how to make stuff with them.
To print out an object you need an STL file. You can create your own or download one from Thingiverse, or even scan one if you have a 3D scanner (WANT!)
Once you’ve got an STL file, you’ll need to get it to the right size. Watch the video to learn how. To do this you’ll need Blender, the open source 3D creative software. It’s great and it’s free!
I’ll be making more videos like this to walk you through the process of slicing the STL file with Skeinforge and sending the gcode from ReplicatorG to the MakerBot.
So I was printing some tweezers I downloaded from Thingiverse the other day, and they turned out really nicely because it was basically one big outline with very few starts/stops of the extruder. Playing with them, seeing how strong they were, and also looking at the cool profile they made got me thinking: Wow, this sort of looks like the profile of a wing! That idea got into my head, and I decided that I absolutely needed to try and 3D print wings of some sort.
Unfortunately I’m barely a n00b at 3D modeling, and I don’t know the first thing about wing design, so I hit up the Thingiverse Community to see if anyone had any models or experience. It turns out that a few of our members are avid RC plane hobbyists and were quick to post a few wing designs here and here. Their passion about this technology was really refreshing, and it was cool to collaborate digitally on a physical object.
The wings themselves turned out really nice. The grains are all in the direction of flow, and they are really smooth. If they don’t outright work, it would be a very simple 5 minute sanding job to get them absolutely perfect. I havent weighted them, but they are strong and light-weight. They are 70mm long, but I’m going to try and print ones that are 120-130mm next (current max build height) The only problem I have is that I don’t have access to any sort of wind-tunnel or RC plane to test them on. Does anyone want samples to play with?
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. =)
I used to be someone who used imperialist machinery parts. I gave those up when I started designing the Cupcake CNC and I’ve never looked back. For working on projects, metric is so much easier. Ever try and figure out imperial bolt types? It’s not easy. With metric bolts, an M8 x30 means that the bolt threads are 8mm in diameter and the threads are 30mm long from the base of the head to the end of the bolt. Easy peasy. Another thing that basically makes the whole metric thing a shoe in? Black. The hardware comes in black.
Did I mention that they come in black? Besides the color black, it’s much easier to design in QCAD and Blender using metric measurements.
So, when you are embarking on making building your Cupcake CNC, we encourage you to make the shift to metric. Do yourself a favor and invest in a good metal ruler with millimeters on it and a pair of digital calipers that can switch to metric units.
Now, I will concede there is one good thing that imperialism is good for and that’s measuring the distance of objects from yourself by eye that are less than 100 feet away. When I was in the film industry, all the focus pullers, even the ones from metric countries, agreed that feet are a better unit for estimating short distances. So, unless you’re looking for a career where you’ll be judging how far away Keanu Reeves is from the lens of a high end camera, do yourself a favor and switch to metric. Your future projects thank you in advance.
