Interviews: Ask Bre Pettis About Making Things

As co-founder and CEO of MakerBot Industries, Bre Pettis is a driving force in the Maker and 3-D printing world. He's done a number of podcasts for Make, and even worked as an assistant at Jim Henson's Creature Shop in London after college. Makerbot's design community, Thingiverse, boasts over 100,000 3D models, and inspires countless artists and designers by allowing them to share their designs. Bre has agreed to set aside some time from printing in order to type answer to your questions. Normal Slashdot interview rules apply.

Comments

What can you tell me...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ask about making things? What can you tell me about making Slashdot Beta go away?

Materials

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems consumer 3d printers mostly deal with plastics. Will we see other materials soon? I'm specifically interested in printing metal objects.

Re:Materials

[LoRdTAW]

The problem is cost. The best process is sintering using either a laser or electron beam. Additive systems using a welding head are nowhere near accurate and very dirty in terms of smoke and soot. Sintering has its own can of worms including a cheap source of powdered or granular metals.

To sinter with a laser you need a laser and a box to put it inside of filled with an inert gas like nitrogen or argon. Nitrogen is cheap but people would have to buy or rent gas cylinders and keep up on getting new filled cylinders from a gas or welding supply company. Not exactly user friendly.
Now for the laser: A 500 watts cheap, compact, continuous wave laser would be needed but from my research, they don't exist. The ideal laser source would be a fiber laser. They are simply a cluster of LED's and the fiber that couples them together is the laser gain medium. The fibers then feed into a delivery fiber and off to the workpiece or yet another coupler to add more LED clusters. A CO2 laser would also work but they are bulky, inefficient and need a lot of cooling. I work with both NdYAG and fiber lasers so I know the industry. And the industry for fiber lasers is a patent minefield. So good luck getting a cheap 500+W fiber laser. Our 4kW IPG YLS-4000 ran us almost $300,000 including chiller, fibers and beam delivery head.
From the laser you need a galvo scanner to scan the beam around the powder surface. The galvo scanner might actually be an easy hack using cheap galvanometers.

Electron beam sintering. As crazy as it sounds, EB sintering is probably the better way to go. You don't need shield gas and the purity of a vacuum leads to higher quality parts. The only issue is again cost and bulk. You need a vacuum chamber of sufficient size and a decent pumping system including a high vacuum pump, either turbo or diffusion. Though I bet you could build one the size of a larger mini fridge. The electron gun is simply a tungsten wire or ribbon and the beam is deflected using what is analogous to the deflection coils in a CRT. And we all (well mostly) should know we can scan in the 10's of kHZ so printing can be very fast. A 60kV power supply of about 5-10mA would suffice (about 600W). All you would need to do maintenance wise is keep a stock of filaments, keep the chamber door seals clean, ensure your vacuum pump oil level is good and have plenty of powdered metal. The expensive part is the vacuum system could cost well over 10 grand.

Why are build envelopes so small?

[scorp1us]

Many of the things I want to build with a 3D printer are not complicated but are outside the build envelope of the printers out there. Like my truck grill which is about 48" wide, 12" tall and 3" deep.

Why don't we have bigger print envelopes? This should just be a matter of more steps of the stepper motor.

Re:Why are build envelopes so small?

[DRMShill]

This physics of melted plastic are the limitation here not the robotics. To get good quality prints with anything larger than what most printers usually offer you'd need a well regulated heated build chamber surrounding it which is actually patented by Stratasys.

Stratasys

[ArcadeMan]

Stratasys acquired Makerbot a few months ago. Has things changed on the hardware or software side? What changes await for the future?

Will Makerbot release a cheaper FDM 3D printer?

Does Makerbot have any plans for an UV 3D printer, either laser-based or projector-based?

Reliability

[Anonymous Coward]

I have heard from the BBC, forums and other internet hangouts that 3-D printers are unreliable. You can start to print something and the printer errors, or the process is somehow falters , causing you to restart all over again.

I this true, and do you expect as the tech captures more attention, so will reliability?

Future Replicator 2 Upgrade Kit Plans?

[mandark1967]

I note that the Replicator 2 and Replicator 2X share many components.

Will there ever be plans to release an upgrade kit for the Replicator 2 which adds a more powerful Power Supply, Heated Build Plate, and/or a second Extruder Head Assembly?

It would be nice to be able to add those options to the Rep2 in order to print ABS and other materials, or to do multi-color prints.

Follow up Question relies on the proviso that an upgrade kit is planned....

Will you shut up and take my money already?!

beyond novelty

[globaljustin]

Mr. Pettis thanks for taking the time. Your 3D printers are nice.

My question:

What is needed to take consumer home-based 3D printing beyond novelty items? Specifically everyday home consumers not pure hobbyists.

Of course 3D fabricators are used for more than "novelty items" in several commercial and industrial applications, but for several reasons, not the least of which is cost of the 3D fabricator, most of what people make is just knick knacks, novelty items, and bric-a-brac.

What will we need to see technologically to take consumer home fabrication beyond things like action figures? Ex: making something like a flashlight or toothbrush

Mainstreaming 3D printing

[MobyDisk]

How close to mainstream will 3D printers become?

I've talked to makers who predict everyone will have a 3D printer in their home. I've heard other opinions that 3D printing will become a common hobby like building model railroads, astronomy, or programming. Yet others believe it is a fad and it will return to being a tool for professional engineers only. What do you think?

Advantage over mass-production

[Warbothong]

What kinds of useful objects do you envisage being printed which aren't available from a local store? I've been following 3D printing for a while and have helped build a few machines, but the only objects I've seen printed are either purely aesthetic (eg. keyrings) or could be bought from a local shop in less time than the print takes.

Fuck petis

[AndyKron]

Fuck turncoat Petis. I don't want to ask him a god damn thing.

How big is your ego?

[nietsch]

You started out as a 3 man company, but somehow you have 'lost' the other two founders. Was the size of your ego to blame for that?

And: why are your printers not allowed to print during shows and conventions? Too much chance something goes wrong with them?