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MakerBot Gets $10 Million Investment
First time accepted submitter chrisl456 writes "MakerBot Industries, makers (hah!) of 3D printers / personal fabrication devices, just got a big boost in the form of $10 million from an 'all-star lineup.' Replicators, here we come!"
Those aren't gold bars! They're Gold-Pressed Latinum! You can't print that...
Anything that could potentially drive the cost of 3D printing down is a win, IMHO!
/me sips his coffee and ponders a new sig...
Would this be referring to the Star Trek Replicators (SWEET!) or the Stargate Replications (RUUUUUUUUUUUUUN!!!!!)?
As long as these printers can't produce a real-looking dvd/blueray case, including insert, I'm not impressed.
If Pandora's box is destined to be opened, *I* want to be the one to open it.
Uhuh, it's the same kind of plastic as legos; anything but fragile. Something makes me think you've got serious sour grapes.
Hahaha idiot. You can print ABS plastic with these things, for starters. You can make real stuff with them. These will become the next common home appliance. The age of fragile prototypes is long gone.
And corporations will be up in arms. Want Lego? Why pay $30 for $1 worth of blocks when you can print them for a couple dollar's worth of material. Want a body kit or some lightweight/cheap replacement body panels (although even common cars now have plastic body panels) for your car but don't want to pay so much? A printer with a big enough build volume can do that too, and you can get an exact copy of a commercial product. Want a custom computer case or a copy of an expensive commercial model? Knock yourself out. Want some cheap/custom furniture? Plastic built into the right structures can be very strong. See: milk crates. Except it won't look ghetto because that will just be the under-structure of your custom furniture.
This will do for many physical objects what computers did for movies and music - including making it easy and cheap for anyone to produce it.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Until the "You wouldn't steal a car..." warnings come true and I can download myself a brand new Ferrari LOL
Funny that you're modded down, your reaction pretty much matches mine.
MakerBot is cool, but pointless and not actually useful yet for anything that matters. The technology just isn't there yet at the hobbiest level. Its certainly out there, just not at the hobbiest level. Everything produced out of the RepRap is too big and blocky and most importantly, weak to be used in anything of value other than some art deco kind of crap around a geeks house.
Oh well, modded down for disagreeing with a factual statement. Welcome to the new slashdot, where 15 year old fanboys and spa accounts like DrBob rule the roost.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Uhm, lack imagination much? It's distressing the anti-nerd, anti-tech, anti-imagination tone of a lot of comments I see on /. these days.
Yes the current incarnation is not much in terms of utility - but you wouldn't want to be commuting to work today in the first automobiles either. The notion here is to get the technology out into the hands of a bunch of self-motivated tinkerers and some of them will come up with useful, unforseen ideas. If you're an advocate for the free market, or American ingenuity, then you really shoudn't be taking issue with personal stereolithography.
Throw in some meat and it'll be "perfect".
What makes you think it's fragile? the example I saw recently was a fully working spanner. That's not something frangile because it must face a lot of forces when tightening and losening nuts and bolts.
I'm not sure why you think it'll be a fad. It's already seeing a lot of use in companies that can afford the kit as is right now. That implies it's already past the fad stage.
Of course, these things only ever get better with time too. So when it's consumer affordable it should be quite impressive technology.
Even if it doesn't improve and the current tech just comes down in price then it's already good enough to produce every day objects people might want to produce from drink cups/mugs, to plant pots, to hole punches, to key racks, to storage boxes, to lego pieces. There's just so many things it can already do that people will find useful.
ABS, while a fine plastic, does depend a bit on how it is formed: Injection molding into a tight-tolerance mold, as with lego, is going to produce better results than thread deposition, though the latter is hardly useless...
when a car company puts such devices in all of their service departments, and simply FTPs the CAD files to make replacement trim parts on demand --- my truck has a broken seat adjustment handle --- I haven't even considered asking the dealer what a replacement part, w/ shipping would cost, but in a couple of years, I predict that I'll be able to just drop in and they'll be able to make such on-demand.
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
I don't see why everyone's so fascinated with those extruding printers. They're extremely complex, extremely slow and their output is very low resolution. They have to fill solid parts with extruded material in a zig-zag pattern... takes forever and the output is a joke.
This, on the other hand, almost looks like magic. This thing makes one whole layer at a time with extreme precision. It's also extremely simple in design: a single motor on one axis, one projector and a container for liquid resin.
Compare the output of the two types of machines. If you still prefer the MakerBot-type machines after seeing the video and the photos, please explain because I can't see any reason for the MakerBot to even exist. It's like wanting Windows 3.11 instead of Linux or Mac OS X.
Lego will actually do OK(as some of their imitators have demonstrated over the years, sub-mm tolerances make all the difference in the world between lego that works and 'construction brick toys' that can barely support themselves; but there are going to be some Very Litigious Sad Pandas in looser-tolerance industries.
The current problem is mainly the cost of the raw material, plus the initial investment. From Maker-bot's website it's around $20 USD per pound, which is pretty hefty (although nowhere near where I thought it would be.) You are right: this will revolutionize the way we think of physical designs of objects.
The device itself is still pretty pricey. It'd be really cool if someone bought a nicer one and opened a store where you could send custom print jobs for the cost of materials + profit. Thats probably the first way they will become widespread. But you're quite right: not a fad, unless companies like Lego get involved in stopping it. AFAIK you can prevent they could prevent the widespread distribution of designs that copy Lego exactly, but they couldn't currently stop you from rolling your own. Watch them lobby to change that in the upcoming years. If you thought patent and copyright battles were bad, wait until companies are threatened by people able to build their own physical hardware copies of their products.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
Funny that you're modded down, your reaction pretty much matches mine.
MakerBot is cool, but pointless and not actually useful yet for anything that matters. The technology just isn't there yet at the hobbiest level. Its certainly out there, just not at the hobbiest level.
Right around 1980 or so you could have said the exact same thing about personal computers, and it would have been true.
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
Uhuh, it's the same kind of plastic as legos; anything but fragile. Something makes me think you've got serious sour grapes.
It's not fragile but it looks pretty ugly. Objects are formed by extruding molten plastic from a nozzle and snaking it around to form one slice of the shape. So objects look like a congealed series of coils and loops. Whether that matter or not really depends on what you intend the object for. I think the powder bed replicators produce a much nicer finish (in colour too) and support more complex shapes but then again they cost a lot more.
Either way it is not what anyone would be calling brittle, unless you are making some very thin sheets.
And I'd like that in my 3D printed coffee mug please.
And just like in 1980 hobbiests were doing it. The GP apparently thinks anything harder than a coloring book or more expensive than a meal at McDonalds can't be a hobby.
I am a fan of the whole RepRap thing -- built one myself (not a MakerBot model) -- but I can't see what they need $10M for. With the prices they are charging, compared to the costs of other kits out there and what you get for them, they should be rolling in dough given their current sales.
Error 404 - Sig Not Found
The problem is you can't make bricks of the same quality as Lego bricks using any 3D printer currently in existence or on the drawing board --- the tolerances simply aren't tight enough --- Lego uses _tons_ of pressure in their molding equipment, moreover, Lego is constantly doing QA on their production and will pull a mold and grind it up to re-use it at the slightest deviation --- the new Lego bricks I purchase for my kids still work fine w/ four decade old bricks from my childhood. Lego's precision for brick parts is something on the order of 2 micrometers.
By way of contrast, the printer which Shapeways ( http://www.shapeways.com/forum/index.php?t=tree&goto=1339&#page_top ) uses as a tolerance of, ``... about .1mm, but the material can change it slightly. Overall, .5 should be fine, just make sure that they are not any sort of support walls or they may get broken during shipping or printing.'' .1 mm == 100 micrometers
If you want to know what its like when the tolerances are sloppy, buy a set of Mega Blok bricks, but even those have tighter tolerance than the tenth of a millimeter which Shapeways quotes.
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
The intertubes, at your service!
Not inexpensive; but you pretty much upload mesh+money and get fedexed an object...
Cheaper and better for a number of applications; but somewhat less versatile, are the online machine shop services, which use conventional feedstock materials and machining techniques. You can't do some of the really fancy geometry; but paying $10/cc to have a part laser-sintered when it could be milled, tapped, and finished to your spec in the same time and probably for less money doesn't make a whole lot of sense...
True that lego will have to be an exact copy to fit properly unlike the awful lego knockoffs, but eventually it will be possible.
Anyways I think PirateLegos would become the new standard. Who cares if they fit properly with the expensive official Legos when you can have tons of PirateLegos for cheap? :D
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
This will do for many physical objects what computers did for movies and music - make non-entertainment companies assume you have stolen from them?
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
Jesus, man... xanax. /. is precisely as it's always been (no, this isn't my first uid). Everyone is a contrarian, or else they'd have little to say.
And for my part, I'll add that I've seen very useful things come out of these printers (not just the silly low-res busts we see too many of) and there are better, cheaper designs all the time.
So yeah, we're not exactly ending scarcity in manufactured goods any time this decade, but they're useful tools.
My inner nerd always did want to see the two franchises do something like the Jason vs Freddy movie and setup a Borg vs Replicators Battle Royale!
Zombie Nader Khalili thinks they're beautiful.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Yes :-(
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Until the technology gets much better and tolerances much tighter you will find that PirateBricks (Lego is a trademark) won't fit, stack or hold together well enough to justify the effort to make them.
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Are Gothic Cathedrals [thingiverse.com] ugly? How about golden chalices [makerbot.com]?
The first picture doesn't show what I am referring to (because the light cream doesn't reflect the light too well). The second picture amply shows it. It's fugly. Here is another pic which shows the typical surface you can expect from your manufactured objects.
There's no doubt it's cool tech but the results are pretty primitive. I'd see it more useful for replacement parts than producing something you'd want gracing your mantelpiece.
Needs some Maker Bot Love, I would love it if they would open up a facility on the west coast!
I'm not talking about building crankshafts and helicopter blades with this. Does it really matter if your computer case/peripherals or motorcycle body panels aren't quite as structurally sound as injection-molded pieces? Does it matter what your furniture's frame looks like, and do you think the cheapo wood with pressed-on spike plates that is currently used is really that strong?
I'm not saying it's anything like a Star Trek replicator by any means, but these aren't the flimsy prototype builders of the '90s either.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
And the openPhurARRARRRi project is stalled at 77% complete due to loss of interest by the originator.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
When 3d printers are capable of creating 3d printers the first steps of many paths will begin... LOL!
Sorry, but you'll get something which is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
There seems to have been no finishing work done either on those. Again that would not make it suitable for mantelpiece decorations, but with some minor heating to smooth out the surface it could be a fine replacement to a broken car door handle.
West Coast Needs some Maker Bot Love
I checked Thingiverse, and the only fleshlight-like models are all variations of goatse.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
To say that these things can not make anything useful is very far from correct. Checkout RepRap which is a very similar device to makerbot. Its firmware has the code built in to print the parts it is made from and is one of the tenants of the project. The video on the RepRap home page explaining the project is brilliant. These projects are indeed very worthy of getting funded.
Yes I admit printing legos is far off. As for the cost of electricity and materials, those are low. Practice prints will only be an issue for people developing an object (and are becoming a non-issue entirely at a rapid rate as these printers become more precise). Most people will just download a design and send it to their printer so design time would be no more of a consideration in printing objects than it is in running Linux.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
Certainly, it is quite tough(vaguely biomimetic 'web-of-threads/beams' structures can actually be fairly seriously load bearing...)
I was thinking more in terms of dimensional tolerances, homogenous density, surface finish, and the like. Anything where the bulk properties of ABS will do you can get away with extrusion printing(possibly with some clean-up work/drilling/etc. on critical surfaces); but most of what makes something like lego work depends on factors that extruders can't touch.
Attempting to calculate answer to your question: why you want dried leaves in boiling water.
That isn't quite true, if you trawl the, er, value-priced, toy stores, flea markets, and shady ebay auctions for models that lego never created you can find a number of "interoperable" plastic construction block toys of varying degrees of interoperability(in the very cheap seats, interoperability with bricks that came in the same bag is a problem, with the incrementally nicer ones interoperability with lego is rather dodgy) for rather small sums of money. All of that is injection moulded, though. Extrusion deposited lego-esque bricks wouldn't be worth the material you melted to make them.
And in 1980, you would have been correct. "Not actually useful yet for anything that matters" is an accurate statement in 2011.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
I'm sure they can find some way to disrupt 3D scanners. Just shiny paint would do the job fairly well at present.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
the material is not brittle, but with my experience with these things is it doesnt take much to peel apart the layers, unless you start adding heat tables and precision thermal control
Additive machining is cute, but not a miracle. It's a slow process. Building up objects one layer at a time takes forever. The consumables are rather expensive. Injection molding and casting are probably 100x cheaper in quantity.
High-end additive machining system are getting to be quite good. The low-end machines, though, are not yet very useful. The precision is too low, the surface quality is poor, and the material options are too limited. TechShop has both a high-end commercial machine, which is usually busy, and a machine at the MakerBot level, which is almost never used. If you're making tiny parts, you need high precision.
The big advantage of many of the additive processes is that they don't have work-holding problems. The big limitation of CNC machining is that you have to clamp down the workpiece, and the clamps get in the way of what you're doing. Some part of the workpiece will be inaccessible. So most work requires multiple setups, each of which has to be aligned with the previous setup to 0.001in or better. Designs have to be planned to be clampable.
The more interesting processes can work metals. But they need 500W to 6KW lasers. If you're going to work in steel, you need enough power to melt steel.
For comparison, here's a high speed stamping press. This is how most of the small metal parts in the world are made. Once you get the tooling set up, parts come out at machine-gun speeds.
I'm cool with this as long as it doesn't lead to Reploids too. My designs for Megaman aren't quite complete yet.
Cool post bro, highfive \o
CNC machines are infinitely practical. Not so with Robo Sapiens. The fact you don't understand such a basic concept speaks wonders for your entire theory and line of thinking.
Everything from games, equipment panels,jewelry, to cases, to glasses, to boxes, hobbyist equipment and components (car, plane, heli; including portions of airframes), to you name it, can be created with this category of equipment. Whereas with a Robo Sapiens, all you can do it make a costly puppet move.
To say they are comparable in the least is to espouse stupidity. But I suspect you already knew that given you posted anonymously.
Troll
I think you are all missing the point. Why bother with blocks when you can print the whole shape or section? Craft some interlocks if you want to build components instead of the whole thing :P
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
And in 1980, you would have been correct. "Not actually useful yet for anything that matters" is an accurate statement in 2011.
I think you're talking about Slashdot comments, right? :P
Eagles may soar, but weasels don't get sucked into jet engines.
Hopefully this means bringing the kit price down to under $500 and cheaper feedstock. I had just saved up enough money for the Cupcake kit when they were discontinued in favor of the new version at twice the price.
...it's not the printer that will tear your budget apart, it the consumables.
Imagine if someone could invent a 3D printer or InkJet printer that could work on recycled goods (powdered or not), now THAT would take care of that ever growing garbage pile problem of ours, but noooooo... it wouldn't bring any money on in...well...not enough billions anyway, besides - the car running on water was invented over 60 years ago, but you wouldn't depend on gazoline then...and money Money MOOOONEY!
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
Whoever wins, we all lose!
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
Ain't technology sweet?
Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc
MakerBot is cool, but pointless and not actually useful yet for anything that matters.
You'd be surprised at how many useful things you can make with a Makerbot. I own one and have printed things like radio controlled motor mounts, a GoPro camera mount for my scuba diving mask, and a bunch of other practical and useful items. I'm also in the process of designing and printing out parts for a quad rotor helicopter. I was also a machinist for 10 years in my previous life. When it comes to time from initial idea to finished product, the Makerbot almost always wins.