MakerBot
URL = http://www.makerbot.com/
Definition
"The MakerBot CupCake CNC is a kit and can be printing things out after a weekend of assembly with a friend.“ Along with commercially distributing the MakerBot assembly kit, the founders of MakerBot also run a platform for sharing and exchanging 3D designs – Thingiverse."
Bre Pettis:
“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.“ (http://issuu.com/openp2pdesign/docs/cis.doc_open-design)
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)
History
"The MakerBot lineage is descended from RepRap (see "The replicant") - the first machine designed to replicate parts of itself and brainchild of Adrian Bowyer, a mechanical engineer at the University of Bath, UK. In 2006 he started the project with two goals: to create a 3D printer that anyone could make and use, and to make it capable of self-replicating. Most importantly, it would have an open-source design to encourage anyone to modify and improve it.
At the moment, RepRap can build about half of its own parts, including joints and casings. Some components, such as steel rods and microprocessors, are beyond its capabilities as yet. Still, Bowyer's mechanical progeny reached a major milestone in November 2008, when Canadian Wade Bortz announced he had used his RepRap to create all the parts of a replica that it was possible to print - the first time this had been done "in the wild" outside Bowyer's lab. It was sold online a few months later for a case of beer.
Bowyer's first design, called Darwin, has since been replaced by Mendel, which is smaller and more reliable. "Mendel can, if you discount nuts and bolts, print 50 per cent of the machine's parts in under three days," says Bowyer. Mendel can make about the same proportion of its own parts as Darwin, but Mendel is a simpler, smaller and more reliable machine. It can also make much larger things than Darwin can.
Since then, tens of others have made mothers out of their machines, sometimes selling their offspring for hundreds of dollars to other enthusiasts keen to get a machine of their own. This has led to a veritable ecosystem of RepRap-type machines - an estimated 3000 exist - and while Bowyer is now focused mainly on making Mendel more robust and user-friendly, the RepRaps in the wild have begun evolving into different forms.
While exploring the RepRap forums, I come across one with the potential to be more self-replicating than any before, and it is provoking some excited comments. The poster, Frank Davies, based in Houston, Texas, is the proud owner of a RepRap ingeniously built using parts salvaged from a dot matrix printer and a Xerox photocopying machine, and he is now working on making his RepRap totally printable." (http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20627621.200-rise-of-the-replicators.html)
Interview
Interview of Bre Pettis :
"In a interview with cnn, you where talking about democratizing manufacturing - could you describe what you mean by that?
Our mission with MakerBot is to bring the tools of manufacturing to the masses. We‘re dedicated to supporting creative people so they can make anything. We got started hacking on 3D printers so that we could afford to have a 3D printer and then we decided to make it so that everyone could have one.
Makerbot is a huge success - who is buying this machine?
It‘s a mix. It‘s mostly programmers, engineers, tinkering moms and dads, and regular folks that want to live in the future.
How do people use it in their business - or do people create new business opportunities by using a Maker-Bot?
Most people use a MakerBot for their own satisfaction and to make the things that they need but there are a bunch of people using a MakerBot in their business.
My favorite is when people come up with a product and sell it. I‘ve seen everything from camera accessories to iPod docks. People also use it to make parts for other 3D printers like the RepRap and then sell those parts on eBay. Also, when used in design shops it gets used to make prototypes for mass manufactured things."
(http://issuu.com/openp2pdesign/docs/cis.doc_open-design)