When I was a kid, I was really interested in how bicycles worked. Eventually, that morphed into how other things worked and hacking, which is really about how things work and being able to do what you want with them. A toaster doesn’t have to be just a toaster. There is not much of a difference between fixing bicycles and being obsessed by how everything works. If you’ve ever fixed anything, there’s a rush you get at the end when you have fixed it and it works. It makes you feel like the object really is yours and you can understand it.
What is the MakerBot?
It’s a 3D printer that takes a digital three-dimensional design — maybe it is a character that you thought up in your head or a part for your car — and prints it out in plastic. The plastic is like spaghetti, and it feeds into an extruder that heats it up to 200 degrees Celsius and squeezes it out. The machine then moves around to build the object you designed. The plastic is real-ly strong, like the stuff Legos are made out of. Basically, the MakerBot can make anything you can imagine.
Why is the MakerBot so special?
Before the MakerBot, for a decent 3D printer, companies have to spend anywhere from 25K to a quarter of a million dollars. We basically figured out a way to do it for 750 bucks. It’s a kit that you put together yourself, and you can make pretty much anything that you can imagine up to 100 millimeters by 100 millimeters by 100 millimeters.
What’s the craziest thing MakerBot has created?
Beside plastic, people have made it extrude frosting to decorate cupcakes. People can do amazing things with it, and that just inspires more people.
Now to be totally clear, the MakerBot isn’t just my invention. Zach Smith and Adam Mayer designed it with me and it builds on a lot of the research that the RepRap community has created.
The day we’ve all been anxiously awaiting will soon arrive. We’ve been busy little bees the past few months gearing up for this awesome event. For me, Maker Faire is pretty much like heaven. It is filled with all sorts of interesting people who are all there because they love doing. After slaving away for months in our collective workshops, we all take this chance to come out and share our progress, our stories, and our friendship. Every time I go, I take a way a lasting inspiration to work harder, do cooler things and to make more stuff.
This MakerFaire is going to be very special for me. I’m going with Bre and Adam and we’ll be demoing the robots that we’ve been working so hard to build for years now. We have 3 fully functional machines and we’ve been printing out things like crazy the past week in order to have schwag to hand out to people. Our plan is to have the machines running and printing all weekend, so if you have a 3D printable design, come on by and we’ll print it out for you.
Starting today, we have a new rule at MakerBot Industries. Every new visitor gets photographed with a MakerBot! Our first portrait is of Linda, a photographer for the Daily News, the 5th most circulated paper in the USA. She came by to take our picture for an upcoming article and we turned the tables and got her to pose with two MakerBots in production
We’ll make sure to put all these photos in the MakerBot Flickr Pool, which if you haven’t visited that yet, you should swing on by and see the latest photos of MakerBots in process and making things in the wild.
Now that people are building their machines and people are starting to print, I think it’s time to turn up the heat. Oh yeah, I’m talking about the MakerBot Hall of Fame. This is where you can show the world just how awesome you are. You spent a week (or two!) soldering tiny parts, bolting together 200 M3 screws, and burning your fingers on your extruder. Now, we’ve come up with a bunch of different categories, so there is something for everyone. Here they are:
Tallest Print
Biggest Volume
Longest Print
Most Complex
Best Replication
Biggest Overhang
Highest resolution (layer density)
Most Awesome Print Ever
Here are the rules:
You must print your model on an authentic MakerBot
Modifications to your machine are encouraged, but not required.
To enter, upload your model to Thingiverse and then email us.
Oh, and what’s a contest if you don’t award yourself a victory. Here’s my entry for tallest print. I guess I win by default since Bre never posted his tallest object to the wiki.
The gang over at Willoughby and Baltic are rocking a really sweet looking MakerBot! Check out the flickr photo set. They’ve also set up their own wiki page which is awesome!
Just one noteworthy item — I meticulously lined solder paste on every IC pad, and then during the “soak” period of reflow (also known as “the time it takes my 500W heater to creep the plate up to 185°C”) the paste all slumped together anyway. (Forgive the poor focus in the picture; my camera’s not very good and that’s the best I could get.)
When the solder paste reflowed, surface tension pulled it all into nice little fillets anyway.
Lesson: Don’t bother tracing every IC pad with solder paste; just run a bead perpendicular to the leads and trust surface tension.
Also, I had one solder bridge during reflow. I took a small screwdriver and poked it between the leads, breaking the surface tension and the bridge. Nice trick, and a quicker (and cleaner!) fix than anything you can do after the solder cools.
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!
