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
    • The RepRap project.
      • Reproducing Rapid-prototyper

Text

About 25 years ago, machines the size of walk-in refrigerators started appearing deep within the R&D departments of corporations and universities with big budgets. While I was printing school assignments to a brand new Epson dot-matrix printer, these folks were printing actual three-dimensional THINGS!

Six years ago a professor over in the UK launched a little open source project called RepRap, short for Reproducing Rapid-prototyper. A desktop footprint 3D printer that can not just print things but print it's own replacement parts and eventually spawn the next generation.

But it's the old chicken vs egg problem. How do you make the first generation RepRap?

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.

Text

What's needed is a pre-chicken! While some people take the franken-chicken approach, bolting together machines from primordial 2D printer parts, these three decided to design a purpose-built bootstrap, or RepStrap machine.

A little over a year ago, Adam, Bre and Zach launched MakerBot Industries.

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

  • Ultimately, the most intriguing use of a MakerBot is for making itself obsolete.
  • Coming full circle back to its' RepRap origins, many MakerBots (including my own) are being enlisted to manufacture more 3D printers.
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