MakerBot
URL = http://www.makerbot.com/
Description
1. Chris Anderson:
"It all starts with the tools. in a converted brewery in Brooklyn, Bre Pettis and his team of hardware engineers are making the first sub-$1,000 3-D printer, the open source MakerBot. Rather than squirting out ink, this printer builds up objects by squeezing out a 0.33-mm-thick thread of molten ABS plastic. Five years ago, you couldn’t get anything like this for less than $125,000.
During a visit in late November, 100 boxes containing the ninth batch of MakerBots are lined up and ready to go out the door (as a customer, I’m thrilled to know that one of them is coming to me). Nearly 500 of these 3-D printers have been sold, and with every one, the community comes up with new uses and new tools to make them even better. For example, a prototype head delivers a resolution of 0.2 mm. Another head can hold a rotating cutter, turning the printer into a CNC router. (CNC is short for computer numerical control, which simply means that the machines are driven by software.) And yet another can print with icing, for desserts.
Out of the box, the MakerBot produces plastic parts from digital files. Want a certain gear right now? Download a design and print it out yourself. Want to modify an object you already have? Scan it (a researcher at the University of Cambridge has developed a technology that will allow you to create a 3-D file by rotating the object in front of your webcam), tweak the bits you want to change with the free SketchUp software from Google, and load it into the ReplicatorG app. Within minutes, you have a whole new physical object: a rip, mix, and burn of atoms." (http://www.wired.com/magazine/2010/01/ff_newrevolution/all/1)
2. New Scientist:
"It could be a revolutionary age. MakerBot is one of a range of desktop manufacturing plants being developed by researchers and hobbyists around the world. Their goal is to create a machine that is able to fix itself and, ultimately, to replicate.
To find out how close we are to that goal, I have come to the London Hackspace, a communal workshop where Russ Garrett, a software developer by day, keeps his MakerBot. Like 900 other enthusiasts, Garrett bought a mail-order kit from MakerBot Industries of New York for $750, and built the machine himself.
MakerBot and most of its kin are essentially a cut-price reinvention of the 3D printer. While professional machines still cost upwards of tens of thousands of dollars, a coalition of academics and tinkerers has created versions that do much the same thing for much less. Anyone with a few hundred dollars and some spare time can build their own 3D printer from a set of plans distributed free on the internet." (http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20627621.200-rise-of-the-replicators.html)