PechaKucha Night

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Contents

Pecha Kucha Night

Scratch space for assembling my March 31, 2010 presentation for Ottawa #2 - PechaKucha Night

Title

  • Anatomy of a MakerBot
    • A Brief History of Fabrication Made Personal

Possible Talking Points

OpenSource

Software origins

  • Original UNIX - BSD
  • Linux ecosystem

Licenses

  • Proprietary
  • GPL
  • Creative Commons

Content Sites

  • Flickr
  • YouTube
  • Thingiverse
  • Instructables
  • USPTO
  • Museums and Science Centres

Hardware Foundations

  • Arduino embedded computing platform.
  • Off-shelf mechanical and motor parts.

Paying the Bills

  • AdaFruit
  • DIY Drones
  • EMSL
  • Lulu.com
  • SparkFun

Value of Community

Forums, Wikis, Mailing Lists

  • Source for new developments
  • Heated Build Platform
  • Replacement parts
  • Improved extruder designs
  • New materials

Design Flow

  • 2D Software
    • InkScape
    • QCad
  • 3D Software
    • Google SketchUp
    • Blender
    • OpenSCAD

Services

  • Ponoko
    • 2D Laser-cut designs
    • Cloth, wood, plastic, fabric, metal
  • Shapeways
    • 3D Printed designs
    • Plastic, alumide, bronze-infused stainless steel
  • Etsy
    • Quickest way to set up shop.
  • PayPal
    • Buy and sell with a degree of separation from direct bank and credit card access.

Personal Fabrication

Technology shift from rapid prototyping with a view to mass production, to personal fabrication with some extra consumables thrown in Ikea-style.

Tired: Injection molding millions Wired: Rapid prototyping one.

How many other technologies sit neglected because they wouldn't scale to Industrial Revolution factory floors?

Rapid Prototyping

  • The 'Mainframe' model
  • Foundational patents expiring
  • Follows the 2D printer model - proprietary inks/materials

RepRap Project

  • Founding University project
  • Machines that reproduce themselves from raw materials
  • Challenge to source all parts locally

MakerBot Industries

  • RepStrap kit
  • Addresses challenge of pulling all the pieces together to build a functioning 3D printer
  • Not unlike the original Apple Computer kit only based on OpenSource developments from the start.
  • Used to make next generation RepRaps locally

Materials

  • Recycling technology
  • Bioplastics
  • Open3DP
    • ceramic
    • glass powder

Models

  • RepRap Wiki
  • Thingiverse

HackerSpaces and FabLabs

  • Using current tech in new ways and a-typical applications
  • People who enjoy making things, sharing in the process.

ModLab at ArtEngine

  • Small group of individuals gather every other week.
  • Work on personal projects.
  • Access to non-traditional tools
    • MakerBot on order
    • Long-term
      • Laser cutter
      • CNC mill
  • Fusion of art and tech

Slides

Title Slide

Anatomy of a MakerBot - Slide 1

  • APP_01
  • Anatomy of a MakerBot
    • A Brief History of Fabrication Made Personal
  • Talking Points
    • Rapid Prototyping technology has been around for decades.
    • Substractive methods
      • lathes and multi-axis mills
      • laser cutters and water-jet cutters
    • Additive methods more recent
      • Stratasys - fused deposition modelling (FDM)
      • Object - powder+binder

What is a MakerBot?

Adam, Bre, Zach and MakerBot Cupcake - Slide 2

  • A little over a year ago, Bre and Zach showed up at SXSW 2009 with their prototype MakerBot in tow.

The Extruder - Slide 3

  • This is the business end.
  • A close cousin of the hot glue gun, you feed long filaments of 3mm diameter plastic in one end and a 0.5mm diameter noodle of 220C plastic emerges the other end.

Laser Cut and Off Shelf Hardware - Slide 4

  • It's assembled Ikea-style from a mix of laser-cut acrylic, laser-cut wood and off-the-shelf nuts, bolts and threaded rods.
  • In keeping with open source principles, the design files have been available under the GPL since the first cupcake shipped.

The Laser Cut Pulley; Just Because You Can - Slide 5

  • On the first few batches they went a little over-board with the laser-cutting.
  • While being able to laser-cut a pulley is interesting in principle, it doesn't scale as quickly when you have to get hundreds out the door.
  • In later batches they experimented with crowd-sourcing by placing a bounty on printed pulleys. It had similar issues of not being able to scale quickly enough.
  • Most recent batches make use of old-school injection-molded parts.
  • Sometimes the old way is still the best way.

Upon the Shoulders of Arduino - Slide 6

  • Finally, to control the machine they embraced and extended another popular open source platform; the Arduino.

Channeling Ikea - Slide 7

  • As part of the early-adopting first batch, it took me a couple of months worth of late evenings and early mornings to assemble MakerBotNumberNine.
  • I had to solder all the boards myself.
  • They switched to US-manufactured and assembled boards early on.
  • For more recent batches, they finally made the jump to China-manufactured boards.
  • Another case of old-school approaches making the most sense for scaling.

What Can It Make?

Around the House (Part 1) - Slide 8

  • One of my earliest from-scratch designs was a replacement part for a plastic clip that broke in our bathroom.
  • I designed it in Google's free version of SketchUp.

Around the House (Part 2) - Slide 9

  • It almost worked.
  • The biggest problem I ran into was that fabjects made in this way, layer upon layer, tend to be weak at the layer interfaces.
  • My mistake was mimicking the physical design of an injection molded part without taking into consideration the mechanical stresses at play.

Building Blocks - Slide 10

  • Next up, a classic. Lego!
  • Lego is made of ABS plastic. My MakerBot extrudes ABS. Need I say more?

The Button - Slide 11

  • Yes, I do. Why make run-of-the-mill blocks when you can design your own Lego-compatible designs?
  • Take this button as an example.
  • Bre got the idea to print off a replacement button for one he lost.
  • I embraced and extended the idea to make a Lego-compatible button.

Material Exploration - Slide 12

  • I didn't stop there.
  • A company out of the Netherlands (home of Mark Hoekstra, RIP) called Shapeways lets you upload your own designs and have them made in a selection of materials.

Wearable Electronics - Slide 13

  • Since my first print was so successful, I designed special thread holes into the pegs so I could make things like this simple electronic circuit with conductive thread.

Thom Yorke's Head; Warp Factor - Slide 14

  • Getting back to the earlier limitations of this particular 3D printing process, here's another example of how things can go wrong.
  • Thom Yorke's Radiohead. Channeling Han Solo meets Easter Island.
  • The larger the print footprint, the more challenging it becomes to manage warping.

Train Track; Lattice Solution - Slide 15

  • One approach to working around the warping is to modify your design to meet the process.
  • On this train track piece I created a lattice structure on the bottom to make lots of little footprints instead of one big area of contact.

Modified!

Heated Build Platform - Slide 16

  • A better approach is to modify the machine itself to address the ultimate cause.
  • Here I designed a heated build platform made of laser-cut plastic, manufactured using the Ponoko service.
  • By keeping the build surface hot, the printed object doesn't warp as quickly, making for a more mechanically stable structure as layers are added.

Stainless Steel Nozzle - Slide 17

  • Returning to the extruder, I decided to try printing a nozzle upgrade via Shapeways in Stainless Steel.
  • Unfortunately, that manufacturing process is such that holes smaller than a certain size fill themselves in.
  • A jeweller friend tried drilling out a 0.35mm diameter hole but the SS/Bronze composite proved too tough for the drill bit.

MakerBeam Dremel Attachement - Slide 18

  • Playing with the product of another open source hardware project called MakerBeam, I designed this Dremel flex-shaft adapter to use my MakerBot as a subtractive CNC mill.

The Frostruder - Slide 19

  • The MakerBot folks haven't been sitting still either.
  • This is a Frostruder accessory for the MakerBot. It lets you print using a variety of paste-like materials including, of course, frosting.

Planned Obsolescence - Slide 20

Personal tools