Inside Makerbot: the Future of 3D Printing?

Posted 02/01/2011 at 1:48pm | by Quinn Norton

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Is the MakerBot a hacker-friendly version of My Little Cupcake or a harbinger of a major sea change?

We are in a warehouse near downtown Brooklyn dubbed the Botcave. We’re talking with MakerBot Industry founders Bre Pettis, Zach “Hoeken” Smith, and Adam Mayer, and we’re contemplating a future where we can all instantly download, distribute, and manufacturer anything, anytime, anywhere. The implications are mind-boggling.

The MakerBot is just like any other printer, except it prints with plastic in three dimensions.

The road to utopia begins with a much cruder and smaller realization of this vision, however. The MakerBot guys hook up our laptop to the Cupcake, a $900 build-it-yourself 3D printer made of etched wood that is painted and lined with blue LEDs. It glows like something from a steampunk novel. We load up a design and start a print job. The gears and motors on this homegrown 3D fabricator sing. The extruder lays down string after string of hot, red plastic. Ten minutes later, Bre Pettis snaps a small toy violin off the building platform. “There,” he says, “the world’s smallest open-source violin.”

Like the MakerBot machine itself, the Botcave is recursive. It is quite literally a factory that makes and sells desktop factories, with the intent of evolving modern-day hacking to far more ambitious levels. In the following pages, we’ll examine the dreams, the technology, and the future of this forward-thinking invention.

How MakerBot Began

“Bre and I actually started Thingiverse before we started MakerBot,” Hoeken explains. The two noticed that whenever they tried to explain their vision of the future—where objects exist as software, and you can download whatever you need and print it out—people responded enthusiastically. “They’d say, ‘Oh that’s great, I’d love to do that, where do I go?’,” says Hoeken. But he didn’t have an answer. “So, we created Thingiverse (www.thingiverse.com) as a place where we could share our stuff.”

Thus far, the MakerBot factory—dubbed the Botcave—has sold and shipped 2,600 MakerBot machines all over the world.

At the time, the 26-year-old Hoeken, whose claim to fame also includes making a pair of keyboard pants for a 2009 New York fashion show, was involved with RepRap (www.reprap.org), an already-established 3D-printer project. Hoeken wanted to build a simpler version of the RepRap machine that anyone could use. With this in mind, he, Pettis, and cofounder Adam Mayer used the resources, including a laser cutter, at a hacker collective named NYC Resistor to build the first MakerBot prototype. Eventually the trio quit their day jobs to work full-time on this new 3D printer. “Zach said, ‘Quit your job and build robots with me’,” says Mayer. “I don’t think you’re allowed to say no to that.”

Making the MakerBot

Let’s be clear: The MakerBot isn’t Ikea-easy to assemble, but a Maximum PC reader should enjoy the 8–12 hour build. This is definitely an RTFM project. Both the Cupcake and Thing-O-Matic versions of the machine (the Cupcake can print things about the size of a cupcake; the newer Thing-O-Matic prints slightly larger objects, about the size of a kitten) use a standard ATX power supply and a series of boards connected by Ethernet and ribbon cable.

That’s where the similarity to PC building ends. Thankfully, detailed step-by-step assembly instructions guide you through the process of putting together pulley systems, belts, and rods, as well as screwing together the wood and plastic panels and hooking up the stepper motors and the electronics.

Once completed, the MakerBot is about the size of a microwave standing on its end. It prints recyclable ABS plastic‑acrylonitrile butadiene styrene—the same material Legos are made from—and biodegradable corn-based PLA (polylactic acid). The beauty of the MakerBot is that, like its hereditary predecessor the RepRap, all the software and hardware the device uses are open source, so theoretically you don’t even need to buy a kit from MakerBot to build one. But it’s definitely cheaper and a lot easier to put together this way.

Using the MakerBot

Fabricating objects with the MakerBot entails a few different steps. You start manufacturing an object one of two ways: You design it yourself using a 3D modeling program, or you download a pre-existing object from the Thingiverse. We love Maximum PC so much that we designed our very own object and loaded it into the Thingiverse for others to enjoy. Here’s how the process worked.

We started with Google’s free SketchUp 3D software package (sketchup.google.com), and designed a circular object with an opening in the middle. It could be a cable organizer, or for our more formal readers, a large and sturdy napkin ring.

To the left: twin MakerBot Cupcake machines. To the right: a bigger Thing-O-Matic model, which is capable of printing kitten-sized objects.

SketchUp is easy enough to use that we were quickly able to visualize and build our object in three dimensions. Unfortunately, it does not save projects in the proper data format for Thingiverse. For this conversion, we turned to Blender, a powerful General Public License 3D software suite. (You could also use Blender to build your object, but it’s much more complicated than SketchUp.) We converted SketchUp’s .dae file format into a .stl file and saved it to www.thingiverse.com as “Maximum PC Round Thingy.”

This .stl file needed to be translated into data the MakerBot can use to print a 3D object. We used a series of Python scripts called Skeinforge to chop the solid model into “slices” corresponding to the thickness of the layers of plastic that are extruded, and calculate the infill necessary to connect everything. Skeinforge also allowed us to set variables such as density and solidity, as well as the speed and position of the build.

Not surprisingly, printing an object requires some user tuning, and often takes a few tries to generate the exact piece you want. And, just like PC parts and technology, component-specific variance, inconsistent voltage, and heat/humidity can all affect the outcome of your projects.