October 29, 2018 • 39 mins
MakerBot is known as the company that brought 3D printing into the consumer market. We learn about how the company was spawned from a project intended to turn the manufacturing world upside down.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
Give in touch with technology with tech Stuff from houstuffworks
dot com. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm
your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer over at
house stuff Works. No love all things tech, and today
I thought I would start the story of a company
(00:24):
that helped usher in the hype cycle for three D printing.
That company would be maker Butt. So we're going to
learn the story of where maker Butt came from and
what has happened to it throughout its history, which as
of this recording is still less than a decade in length.
It hasn't even been around for ten years yet. But
(00:45):
for such a young company, it has had a pretty
big impact. For better and for worse. Maker Butt helped
bring three D printing into a more mainstream awareness, and
the story's big enough for it to span two episodes.
I know it's a young company, but there's a lot
that happened that has important, relevant impact on multiple industries
(01:10):
that relate to tech, and I think there are a
lot of lessons to be learned from the story of
maker Bot, and so we're gonna take two episodes to
really look into it, not just the technology, but again
the story behind the people that formed it. So to
talk about the company's history, it helps if we first
talk about the history of three D printing, which is
(01:33):
also known as a type of additive manufacturing. And we
call it additive because it involves building something up layer
by layer, rather than by taking say a block of
material like wood or marble or something, and then carving
away everything that isn't whatever it is you're building. So
if you're trying to build a sphere, you would end
(01:55):
up putting down little thin layers of material in a
pad over and over, with each successive layer overlapping a
little bit on all the different edges to fill out
the sphere until you got to the widest part, and
then you would reverse that pattern to get back to
the other end, and you would build it up layer
by layer, as opposed to taking say a block of
(02:17):
plastic and then cutting a sphere from that block. An
early proposal for this approach came from Hideo Kodama, who
worked at the Nagoya the Municipal Industrial Research Institute, and
Kodama wrote a report about a rapid prototyping system that
could build models layer by layer. In nineteen eighty four,
a guy named Chuck Hull secured a patent for a
(02:38):
procedure called stereolithography. The story behind that is actually pretty interesting,
but I'm going to leave it for another podcast. Suffice
it to say he was not the only person who
had this idea, he was the first person to receive
a patent for it. In this approach, you could rapidly
build physical models of something by using a photo polymerized resin.
(03:00):
So that would be a type of material that would
be in liquid format, and it would go from liquid
to solid after you expose it to a certain kind
of light, like a very high high powered ultraviolet light,
and you would use this light to start turning the
liquid into solid stuff. And it worked almost like an
upside down version of today's common three D printers. So
(03:24):
if you have ever worked with a three D printer,
you know typically there's a platter a printer bed, typically
heated that the print head lays plastic down on top of. Well,
this approach reverses that. So you've got a platform that
is touching this liquid this photo polymerizing resin. When you
(03:46):
shoot UV light right at the part where the platform
and the liquid meat, it turns solid and that adheres
to the platform, and you slowly draw the platform up
as if you're lifting it out of that liquid, and
you keep adding layers by shooting the light at the
next layer down of this liquid, and you build it
(04:09):
that way, so it's actually drawing this up out of
the liquid. It almost looks like you've got a submerged
object that you're pulling up out of this stuff, but
in fact you're actually converting that stuff into a solid.
It's actually really cool to look at. But one of
the really important things that his approach relied upon was
(04:30):
using digital data to send instructions to the device. So
this idea of creating a file format that could send
that could contain the actual pattern and software that would
have the instructions for the equipment to say, based upon
this pattern, this is what you need to draw for
every single layer and build this three dimensional object. That
(04:52):
approach meant that designers could relatively quickly create models of
various components. You could prototype them in a matter of
rather than having to go through a very lengthy fabrication process.
And time is money and so is effort, So bringing
down the time and effort needed to create prototypes would
(05:12):
significantly reduce the cost of developing various stuff, so you
could very quickly find out which of your ideas were
viable and which ones you might have to tweak or
abandon by building out your components this way. But this
was in a time when such technology was really only
available to industries and corporations. You couldn't go out and
buy a three D printer back in those early days.
(05:33):
It would cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars. It
was not something the average person would even be aware of,
let alone be able to access. This also meant that
if you did have access to one of these devices,
you could print replacement parts for vintage technology. So maybe
no one's making a particular type of car part. For example,
(05:54):
maybe there's a specific model of car that you own
and you want to keep it in good repair, but
that company no longer exists, so you can't just go
out and buy a replacement part. With the right type
of additive manufacturing equipment, you could build a replacement part.
All you would need is the digital plan to do that.
(06:16):
Whether you made that in a computer assist Design CAD program,
or maybe you were able to get hold of that
design from somebody, or maybe even you were able to
scan an original part and make a digital copy that way.
Jay Leno reportedly uses this method to maintain his collection
of vintage cars. And it helps that we can now
(06:39):
print in lots of different materials, not just the plastics
that you typically encounter with consumer brand three D printers.
All right, So that's the basic history of additive manufacturing.
From its beginning, it was the realm of the manufacturing industry.
It was not something that your average person knew about.
(07:01):
Skip ahead twenty years, hop on over to the UK.
It's lovely there. And in two thousand and four, doctor
Adrian Bauer of the University of Bath proposed a new
project that the following year would be called rep rap
our ep r AP that stands for Replicating Rapid prototyper.
(07:21):
The goal of this project was to create a low
cost three D printer, one that would be capable of
printing most of the parts of a duplicate three D printer. Now,
this in itself wasn't exactly a new idea. There was
a mathematician and a total genius named John von Neuman.
I'll have to do a full episode about von Neuman
(07:42):
in the future. He proposed a concept which he called
the Universal Constructor. This would be a machine that would
be capable of replicating itself, Which is the super simple explanation.
If I do a full episode about him, I'll have
to go into much greater detail, because it's a pretty
phenomenal concept. Now. Bauyer's proposal was a little more modest
(08:06):
than what von Neuman was talking about. It would be
able to largely copy itself, piece by piece, but unlike
a true universal constructor, it would not be able to
assemble the new copy. It wouldn't be able to. It
had self copying but not self assembly abilities. You would
still need a person to actually take all those pieces
and put them together. He envisioned a rapid prototyping machine
(08:30):
that could make most of the components needed to make
a second copy. So in theory, you could make one
of these things. You could then buy the raw materials
you needed, meaning largely the plastic that the printer would
use as a printing medium and as for its parts.
Then you could print all the parts for a second one,
(08:50):
and then build the second one and use that one
to print all the parts for a third one, and
so on and so forth, and you could keep on
printing more and more copies and give them to all
your friends, and soon everybody has one of these things.
But he admitted that there were some parts like stepping
motors or metal fasteners that would not really be printable
in this way, so you would have to purchase those
(09:11):
parts separately and put them together with the parts that
you were able to print. However, these parts were widely
available and more importantly, pretty cheap, so the most it
would require is access to the digital plans to print
the pieces that you needed. You would need one working
(09:31):
printer to do the printing. Obviously, if you didn't have
a printer, you couldn't start the process, and you would
need some know how in the assembly process about how
to wire everything together and actually physically put it together.
But then you could just make copies. The project would
involve not just the design of the physical printer itself,
(09:52):
but also the software you would need to access this
piece of equipment, the file formats you would need to
be able to send to that equipment so that you
could actually do some meaningful printing. Another very important element
in RepRap and one that's going to become super important
in our maker bot story, is that this whole idea
(10:14):
was going to be an open source project and still
is to this day. It is an open source project. Now.
That meant none of the designs for rep wrap proper
would be proprietary or hidden from view. It needed to
be open source for two big reasons. One was that
it would allow these machines to perpetuate across large groups
(10:34):
of people, so you don't want to have any barriers
to keep that from happening. If you had protected intellectual property,
then that's a limitation on how quickly stuff could be
spread across the entire population. But if you make it
open source, everyone has access to it, so it removes
those barriers. The other important bit is that Valuer wanted
(10:57):
people to have the opportunity to change the open source information,
whether it was changes to the design of the hardware
or to the software, and in that way you could
create improvements or alterations, and the design of the rep
rep device would evolve over time. As people joined the
community and added their ideas to the design and implementation
(11:22):
of this printer. People could experiment with different approaches. They
might be able to improve the efficiency or the resolution
of the print jobs, meaning how smooth is the finished print?
If you can improve on that. That's a benefit to everybody.
And as long as everyone kept everything open source and
(11:42):
we're sharing it freely, those improvements flow back into the
overall maker community and they perpetuate across it, so everyone
gets to benefit from everyone's ideas. So if you designed
this properly, you could use a rep wrap one point
zero printer, and then when someone makes an improved movement
that would effectively become rep wrap one point one or whatever,
(12:04):
you could use your old printer to print out the
new stuff. Alter your old printer, and now you've got
a new printer. You never have to worry about obsolescence.
So instead of having to abandon a technology three or
four years down the road, you can keep making incremental
improvements to your device by printing stuff with the device itself.
(12:26):
So it almost becomes self improving. Not quite because it
does require the input of real human beings, but you
get the idea. So bow your imagine a world where
people could print whatever small parts they needed on demand,
whether it was a replacement for an existing piece of
technology or maybe just something totally new that they wanted.
And he even envisioned a world in which people could
(12:48):
print out their own recycling devices, and those recycling devices
would consume the old, broken or worn out plastic parts.
So instead of just accumulating more and more of these
broken parts, you would actually break that down so that
you could use it again. You could have a new
supply of plastic that you would use for printing material.
(13:10):
He thought the printers as wealth machines. The cost of
items would be reduced down to the cost of their
raw materials and the labor associated with assembling the stuff
if assembly was required, and Bayer called the whole process
Darwinian Marxism because the means of production would be in
the hands of the proletariat without the pesky requirement of
(13:32):
holding a bloody revolution in order to do it. Two
of the three founders of MakerBot became part of the
rep rap community, and we're working on this goal. In
two thousand and seven, Zach Hokin Smith joined the rep
rap project while attending Iowa State University. Smith was quickly
won over to the concept of open source hardware and
(13:54):
would become an remain a strong advocate for that approach,
so much so that he is now the executive rector
for RepRap Research Foundation. Then you had Adam Meyer. He
attended Cornell University in the early to mid nineteen nineties
and earned a degree in computer science. He worked as
a developer for a couple of companies before being invited
by Smith to work on a new project that would
(14:15):
become maker Bot. And the third co founder is the
one who was most closely associated with the maker Bot
in those early years, even though you could argue convincingly
that really Smith was the heart of the project. He
was the reason why it all started in the first place.
But there was a third person who was sort of
(14:36):
the face of the company, and this was Brie Pettis.
More on him in just a moment, but first let's
take a quick break to thank our sponsor. So I'm
going to spend a little more time talking about Brie
Petties because his story is the one tied to those
(14:59):
early years. The man Baker bought even more than the
other two for reasons that will later become clear. So
Brie Petis didn't come to the maker community through being
a computer scientist or an engineer. He had attended college
in the early nineties and studied subjects like performing arts
in psychology. After college, he lived in Prague for a while.
(15:19):
He worked on film sets as an assistant cameraman and
in other capacities. He also landed a gig for a
while as an assistant in Jim Henson's creature shop in London, England,
and he eventually returned to the States, went back to
school to further his studies, and he earned a teaching certificate.
So from the late nineties to the mid two thousands
(15:41):
he was a teacher in the Seattle Public school system.
And as a thirty one year old school teacher, you
probably wouldn't have looked at Pettis and said, this guy's
going to become the leader of a tech company with
an incredibly disruptive goal of turning manufacturing upside down and
putting that into the hands of the common consumer. He
(16:02):
was making instructional and educational videos for his students. He
was frequently incorporating puppets and other stuff in these videos,
and he was putting those videos up online and that
caught the attention of a guy named Philip Torone, who
was the senior editor of Make magazine, the diy Maker Journal.
Tarne offered Petis a job to come out to New
(16:24):
York City and to work for Make that would involve
him not just writing articles for make, but also creating videos,
kind of like what he had been doing in his
teaching gig, and he took Tourne up on the offer
moved out to New York City. Now while he was
in New York, Bree Pettis would meet Zack Smith, and
the two of them would become two of the founding
(16:45):
members of a hacker collective called NYC Resistor. The group
would hold regular meetings, including some that were open to
the public, and at those meetings people could discuss ideas
they could work on designs for hardware or software. Together,
they could recruit people to work on projects and generally
hacked technology just to figure out how it worked and
(17:07):
how it might work better or maybe work in a
way different from how the creators had originally intended, kind
of that whole hacker ethos. And it was through this
organization that they also met Adam Mayor. Zach Smith brought
his rep rap stuff to the NYC Resistor space to
show it off and invite folks to help him work
(17:27):
on the tech. In an effort to realize this RepRap
vision of building machines capable of printing the parts necessary
to make copies of itself. Now, according to Pettis, he
and Smith and Mayer got a RepRap machine, really a
repstrap machine up and running briefly before it stopped functioning entirely.
(17:47):
But that brief success inspired them to work on creating
a rep strap kit of their own. So what is repstrap. Well,
within the rep rap community, it refers to a three
D printer quote cobbled together from whatever parts you can find,
which will eventually allow you to print the parts for
a rep rap printer end quote. So it's another three
(18:08):
D printer, but this one is with all sorts of
like Frankenstein type parts, and the goal is that ultimately
you can print all the parts to just build a
rep rap printer using this kind of Jerry rigged system.
The name comes from a combination of rep rap and bootstrap.
The parts for a rep strap may not all be
(18:28):
three D printed, Some of them could be constructed through
subtractive means, like cutting materials down with like a laser
cutter or something along those lines. Now, their work led
to the design of a printer they would call the
Cupcake C in c C and C stands for computer
numerical control, which is a concept that applies to a
(18:49):
whole host of different computer controlled tools, not just three
D printers, but stuff like drills or lathes. My buddy
Oz used to operate a computer control router with this
kind of system. He would load a design into some software,
use that software to send a command to the routing table,
and the software would translate the design into a set
(19:13):
of instructions that would be sent to this computer controlled
routing table, and a big arm with a very fast
spinning drill bit would descend and start cutting the patterns
into the material below. Next thing you knew, you had
yourself a cutlass made out of aluminum, or some etched
awards that were made out of plexiglass, all sorts of
(19:34):
cool stuff. Well, the cupcake C and C was something
that the three were able to make in a kit form.
So the kit would include wires, a micro controller, and
acrylic build platform upon which your three D printed objects
would sit as the printer was working. It included an
extruder which would convert the solid plastic into a form
(19:56):
that could be laid down layer by layer. I'll talk
more about that later in this episode. In an XYZ
positioning system and more like a balsa case essentially that
you could put together. Based on this quasi success of
them getting this thing briefly running, the three decided that
they would start a company of their own and really
(20:17):
try to bring three D printing to the mass market,
or at least a consumer market filled with makers and
hobbyists who could perhaps support the business long enough for
it to catch on, kind of like how the home
PC business all started with kits in the nineteen seventies.
You would send off for a kit, you would get
the parts, and you would put the computer together at home.
(20:38):
That eventually led to the birth and then success of
companies like Apple. So the three settled on the maker
bought name pretty quickly. They all thought, well, this would
let you make stuff. It's part of the maker community.
It is more or less kind of a robot because
it will automatically carry out the instructions you send to it.
And they thought, well, there's no way that name is available.
(21:00):
It's too good of a name. But they did some
research and found that as far as they could tell,
no one had claimed to it. So they said, excellent,
we're going to go with that. In January two thousand
and nine, the three launched this company with the help
of seventy five thousand dollars of seed money. Twenty five
thousand dollars of that came from Adrian Bauer himself, the
man who proposed the RepRap project five years earlier. And
(21:22):
like I said, their first product was the cupcake C
and C and you would buy that in kit form,
or if you lack the patience but you happen to
have a whole lot more money, you could buy it
fully assembled. If you buy it as a kit, it
would set you back seven hundred and fifty dollars, a
princely sum in its own right. But if you wanted
someone else to put the thing together and save you
(21:45):
some time and remove the possibility that maybe you'd wire
it up incorrectly, then you're looking at twenty five hundred
dollars to buy one fully assembled. So what was up
with the name Cupcake? Well, as Adam Meyer would explain
to Google in two thousand and nine, there's a presentation
that's up online. You can actually watch the whole thing
if you like. The Cupcake device was meant to be
(22:07):
a three D positioning tool that could do more than
just act as a three D printer. That was the
first implementation they envisioned for it. But they thought, well,
this is really a device where you can have two
different components and they quote unquote know where they are
in orientation with relation to each other, including distance and positioning,
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and then you could use that for all sorts of stuff,
not just three D printing. And they created a design,
or propose a design at least that would use frosting
as a stuff to pipe out onto a surface, like
on a cupcake. So that's where they got the name
cupcake C and C because they thought, well, this could
(22:49):
really let you create very intricate designs and send them
to the machine, and then they would carry out the
designs automatically and your cupcakes would be made with robotic precision,
or at least frosted with robotic precision. While the team
had been working on the design for the cupcake for
a while, they didn't have an actual first generation cupcake
C and C ready to go working until March of
(23:13):
two thousand and nine. Brie was scheduled to travel to Austin,
Texas for south By Southwest with the goal of showing
off the maker bot to people there. He didn't have
a ticket, he was just going to show them the
printer in bars around Austin, Texas, And from my experience
the couple times I've been to south By Southwest, that
seems to be the kind of location where most of
(23:33):
the actual action of south By Southwest really takes place
in the after hours in the various restaurants and bars
around Austin, Texas. So he shot a quick video of
the team's early cupcake C and C printing out an
object in March two thousand and nine, then immediately went
to south By Southwest where he would show off this
printer in bars, and he printed out shot glasses as
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a demonstration. Apparently he had this fascination was shot glasses
in general, and so that was kind of his go
to demo. After south By Southwest, the team actually created
an online storefront so people could purchase the printers. This
was the first time they were actually offering them up
for sale. They had the idea of seven hundred and
fifty dollars for a kit. They knew they would charge
(24:17):
twenty five hundred for a fully assembled one, and now
they were finally ready to say, all right, if you
want one, put in the order. They had put together
twenty kits and boxed them up so they were ready
to go, and they thought that it would probably take
a couple of months to sell out of that initial
inventory because the idea was still pretty new, especially outside
(24:38):
of the type community of makers who were familiar with
the RepRap project. But instead, they actually sold out of
their kits in two weeks. At that point, maker Bot
was taking up space in the office of an entrepreneur
named Jake Lodwick. Loudwick had co founded the online video
platform Vimeo. Before that, he had worked as a web
(24:58):
developer for College Humor and It's early Days. He's another
interesting person in business in tech, and I'll probably have
to do a full episode about him in the future
as well. But as MakerBot was getting bigger, they were
taking up more and more space in Loudwick's office, and
he eventually told his team that once his lease was up,
he was not planning on renewing. He was going to
give up the space, and that meant the young company
(25:19):
needed to secure space of their own for realsies, So
they ended up leasing a five thousand square foot office
space in Brooklyn, New York. They were convinced that this
would give them plenty of room to grow, but within
two months they had pretty much filled it up with capacity.
Things were really exciting for the fledgling company at this time,
(25:40):
and I would have my first experience with maker bot
not long after this stuff was going on. I'll talk
more about that in just a second, but first let's
take another quick break to thank our sponsor. Not only
did the make Bought guys move into a new space,
(26:02):
they made their first hire to help handle incoming orders.
So now there was the three of them plus an employee. Exciting.
The maker community appeared to be eager to get hold
of the tech that would allow them to actually explore
the possibility of making the rep wrap dream a reality,
something where they would be able to print all sorts
of different parts, not just you know, chochkeys, but useful stuff.
(26:26):
Part of that meant adhering to those principles of the
open source philosophy. The cupcake was a true piece of
open source hardware. The software you need to run it
was also open source, so the community could scour over
the design of both and contribute fixes or improvements. They
were acting as quality assurance, they were acting as research
(26:47):
and development. This was incredibly valuable for Maker bought. Not
only was it creating a community of loyal customers, it
was also doing a lot of work that makrobot would
have had to do on its own. If it had
been proprietary technology from the get go, they would have
had to have their own teams QA stuff make sure
(27:08):
everything's working properly. If something's not working properly, then they
would have to go through the whole process of trying
to fix the problem, you know, find a work around
or a solution. They would also be looking at their
own ways to improve the technology, but by releasing it
in this open source format, their users became those people.
It was almost like the users were an employee by extension,
(27:28):
and an employee of incredible skill because it came with
all the ideas of all the different people in that community.
It was incredibly powerful and apparently it was just really
encouraging to participate in this community. People who bought a cupcake,
C and C felt like they were part of something
big and they had some sense of ownership there because
(27:51):
their input was valued. They were all working together to
change the world. It was kind of this almost utopian
sort of perspective. Well, as the orders were coming in
the company was making plans to take another step into
the consumer marketplace, and that would involve traveling out to
Las Vegas, Nevada for the twenty ten CEES Trade Show,
(28:12):
and that's where I saw a maker bought cupcake C
and C for the first time as it slowly printed
out a special plastic coin that I still have somewhere.
The team also talked about how they hoped to create
a three D scanner in the future to let people
convert a three dimensional scan of a physical object into
the data necessary to print out a replica of that object.
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That would be a huge jump forward because it would
mean you wouldn't have to plot out all the points
yourself in a CAD program or hope that someone else
could do it. With a good scanner, you could get
a full three dimensional scan of something like a replacement part,
and then you would have that information forever. So it's
not like you would scan it once and then you
just print it once. You scan it once and you've
(28:56):
got it, and whenever you need another one, you just
print another one. So it was like you suddenly got
access to a never ending supply of all these different
parts if you could just scan them in and if
you had the raw materials to print on another one.
So you started to see the possibility of that vision
coming true. But at this point they didn't have the
scanner that would come later, but they didn't have it
(29:18):
at this early station, but they did say that was
something they were interested in developing. Part of the disruption
that three D printers were all about was a related
project that Zack Smith had worked on back when the
three co founders were still getting ready to launch maker
Bot as a company, so this was late two thousand
and eight. This was a website called thingaverse, and the
(29:41):
website is kind of a companion piece to maker Bot.
It acts as a repository for user generated digital design files.
So at thingaverse, designers could upload their design files for
other people to use or even to alter in any
way that they liked. So if you created a collection
of files for say three D printed chess pieces, you
(30:02):
could upload them all as files to thingaverse and someone
else could download those and print out the chess pieces
that you designed, and the designs all followed the licensing
strategy of either the New General Public License or the
Creative Commons License, and those agreements typically allow people to
use a piece of intellectual property with very few limitations.
(30:24):
Of course, it all depends upon the specific type of license.
These licenses are not all just one approach. There are
multiple different pathways you can take with them. But with
some of those license you can actually allow folks to
not just take your work, but make derivative or altered
works based off of what you've already done. So that
(30:45):
means someone could download those chess pieces you designed, for example,
and then they create a customized version of every piece
that uses your models as a starting point, or then
after that they might upload their own altered designs they
can set right alongside your originals, and someone else could
download either one or both and make changes to either
(31:06):
or both. So one of the categories that got a
lot of action on Thingaverse early on had to do
with the printers themselves, so users were designing parts that
could upgrade the basic cupcake C and C design, So
it was possible to go out and buy a cupcake
C and C kit, spend the eighty hours or so
it would take to put it together, get some plastic
(31:28):
filament as your printing material, and then print out a
printer upgrade using the original version of the printer. Then
you could take it apart, put the upgrade into your
new and improved printer, and start up again. And that
was again one of the most powerful parts of having
this community was having people who are actively working to
improve the product. Maker Bot paid attention to those designs
(31:52):
and would even incorporate some of them in the official
future machines that would produce, and often it would include attribution,
so the people who had created the designs would get
an attribution in future versions of the actual products. So
this was really the honeymoon phase for a maker Bot.
(32:13):
The maker community was enthusiastically embracing the company. Tech news
outlets were really getting excited about covering it. But there
were some big changes lurking on the horizon and they
would affect everything. So before I end this episode, before
I conclude on this part, I figured it would be
good to give just kind of a quick high level
rundown on how these printers work in general, and I'll
(32:34):
be chatting about some other models in the upcoming episodes,
but they all work on a similar principle in the
maker Bot family, So essentially, it all begins with that
digital three D model of whatever it is you're going
to print. That model serves as the set of instructions
for the printer. The printer software takes the model and
essentially slices it into very thin layers from the bottom up.
(32:57):
The bottom in this case being the side of the
object that will be in contact with the building platform.
It's not necessarily the bottom of the object itself, because
you could print an object on its side or even
upside down, so top and bottom in this case refer
to whichever side is making contact with the base the
(33:18):
printing platform, that's the bottom. These instructions get sent to
the printer, which can interpret the instructions as a set
of plot points where it's going to lay down the
plastic in a very thin layer. The type of plastic
falls into a category called thermoplastic, and, as the name suggests,
with thermo heat has an important part to play here.
Thermoplastics are materials that soften as they get hotter and
(33:43):
they harden as they cool down, so if you heat
them up to a hot enough temperature, they'll actually they'll melt.
So a real of thermoplastic filament would serve as the
raw material for the printer. The type of plastic. The
two most common types of thermoplasts that you'll find for
consumer three D printers would be ABS, which is oil
(34:06):
based and it's the same sort of plastic that lego
bricks are made out of, and PLA, which is a
biodegradable organic plastic. It's made from starchy byproducts maker Bot
it tends to focus on both. They tended to focus
earlier on ABS over PLA, but that would change over
the course of the life of MakerBot as well. ABS
(34:29):
tends to make a harder plastic than PLA once it sets,
but it's also gotten amorphous melting point ABS does. That
means that you can't be totally certain that which temperature
of the stuff is actually going to melt. It depends
heavily upon the batch of plastic you have, so typically
three D printers will heat up extruders to around two
(34:49):
hundred and thirty degrees celsius, but depending upon the filament,
you might need anything between two hundred and ten degrees
celsius to two hundred and forty degrees celsius to get
the ideal temperature to get the consistency the melting that
you will need to print properly in addition, ABS can
warp as you print if it happens to cool down
(35:10):
too much during the printing process. So for that reason,
if you print an ABS, you need a heated bed
or heated platform to keep the plastic at a high
enough temperature so it holds its shape through the entire
printing process. But you also don't want the bed to
be so hot that it ends up making the plastic
guy like it never has a chance to actually cool
(35:32):
enough to start hardening, and it'll warp as the print
head moves around or as the object becomes too heavy.
PLA is in general safer to use than ABS. It
puts out fewer fumes at any rate. It also has
a lower melting point, so you don't have to operate
the printer at such a high temperature at the extruders,
(35:52):
and it cools into a glossy, smooth appearance. It's a
little more esthetically pleasing than ABS typically is. After printing
running bed doesn't necessarily have to be heated, though the
resources I'm familiar with suggest you should probably still use
a heated print bed. You just don't need it as
hot as you would with ABS, So in other words,
you might need a heated print bed that's at sixty
(36:16):
degrees celsius for PLA versus eighty degrees celsius for ABS.
PLA has greater tensile strength than ABS, but ABS typically
withstands wear and tear better and will withstand impact better.
If you drop something that's been printed in ABS plastic,
it tends to just kind of bounce, and it's typically
kind of fine. PLA material can be a bit more brittle.
(36:38):
It could actually shatter, depending upon what it is and
how hard it hits the ground, whether it's PLA or ABS.
There's a motor that's in a three D printer that
pulls this filament, this wire like construction of plastic into
the printer's extruder. The extruder is essentially a super heated nozzle,
(37:01):
or not superheated, but at least a very hot nozzle.
It's heated to a precise temperature like that two hundred
and thirty degrees celsius for APS, for example, and that's
in order to melt this filament, and the extruder prints
this molten plastic on the heated print bed. The motor
keeps it moving, so the filament keeps adding pressure, thus
pushing the liquid plastic through the end of the nozzle,
(37:24):
and the process continues until you finish the print job.
Either the extruder will move around the print bed or
the print bed will move underneath the extruder. It depends
upon the design of the printer. In either case, these
movements correspond with the digital three D model for the
object that you're sending to the printer in the first place,
and the printer lays down the first of many layers
(37:45):
of molten plastic. The printer repeats that process layer by layer,
laying down molten plastic to sit on top of and
bind to the lower layer of plastic. The printer is
essentially creating multiple two dimensional images, just stacks of two
dimensional images, over and over again until they add up
(38:05):
to a full three dimensional printed object. The Cupcake CNC
could print an object up to one hundred millimeters long,
one hundred millimeters wide, and one hundred and thirty millimeters tall,
so that translates to four inches by four inches by
five inches more or less. But the Cupcake C and
C was just the beginning, and while this company was
(38:27):
rapidly gaining fans in the maker community, things were bound
to change pretty dramatically in the next couple of years.
I'll explain more in part two of this episode, but
that concludes this part. So I hope you guys are
enjoying the story of makerbots so far. Our next episode
will have a lot of controversy and tragedy in it,
(38:49):
at least from a kind of a high level view,
very interesting stuff. If you guys have suggestions for future
episodes of tech Stuff, tell you what, go to our website,
it's tech Stuff podcast dot com. You can check out
the links there, you can get in contact with me,
let me know what you would like me to cover
in future episodes. You can also pop on over to
(39:09):
our store over at tepublic dot com slash tech stuff
and look at the merchandise there and not just look
at it, you know, buy something if you like it.
Every purchase you make goes to help the show. We
greatly appreciate it. Then We've got some fun designs on there,
and we've got new ones coming all the time. So
go check it out and I'll talk to you again
really soon for more on this and thousands of other topics.
(39:37):
Because it HowStuffWorks. Dot Com
Give in touch with technology with tech Stuff from houstuffworks
dot com. Hey there, and welcome to tech Stuff. I'm
your host, Jonathan Strickland. I'm an executive producer over at
house stuff Works. No love all things tech, and today
I thought I would start the story of a company
(00:24):
that helped usher in the hype cycle for three D printing.
That company would be maker Butt. So we're going to
learn the story of where maker Butt came from and
what has happened to it throughout its history, which as
of this recording is still less than a decade in length.
It hasn't even been around for ten years yet. But
(00:45):
for such a young company, it has had a pretty
big impact. For better and for worse. Maker Butt helped
bring three D printing into a more mainstream awareness, and
the story's big enough for it to span two episodes.
I know it's a young company, but there's a lot
that happened that has important, relevant impact on multiple industries
(01:10):
that relate to tech, and I think there are a
lot of lessons to be learned from the story of
maker Bot, and so we're gonna take two episodes to
really look into it, not just the technology, but again
the story behind the people that formed it. So to
talk about the company's history, it helps if we first
talk about the history of three D printing, which is
(01:33):
also known as a type of additive manufacturing. And we
call it additive because it involves building something up layer
by layer, rather than by taking say a block of
material like wood or marble or something, and then carving
away everything that isn't whatever it is you're building. So
if you're trying to build a sphere, you would end
(01:55):
up putting down little thin layers of material in a
pad over and over, with each successive layer overlapping a
little bit on all the different edges to fill out
the sphere until you got to the widest part, and
then you would reverse that pattern to get back to
the other end, and you would build it up layer
by layer, as opposed to taking say a block of
(02:17):
plastic and then cutting a sphere from that block. An
early proposal for this approach came from Hideo Kodama, who
worked at the Nagoya the Municipal Industrial Research Institute, and
Kodama wrote a report about a rapid prototyping system that
could build models layer by layer. In nineteen eighty four,
a guy named Chuck Hull secured a patent for a
(02:38):
procedure called stereolithography. The story behind that is actually pretty interesting,
but I'm going to leave it for another podcast. Suffice
it to say he was not the only person who
had this idea, he was the first person to receive
a patent for it. In this approach, you could rapidly
build physical models of something by using a photo polymerized resin.
(03:00):
So that would be a type of material that would
be in liquid format, and it would go from liquid
to solid after you expose it to a certain kind
of light, like a very high high powered ultraviolet light,
and you would use this light to start turning the
liquid into solid stuff. And it worked almost like an
upside down version of today's common three D printers. So
(03:24):
if you have ever worked with a three D printer,
you know typically there's a platter a printer bed, typically
heated that the print head lays plastic down on top of. Well,
this approach reverses that. So you've got a platform that
is touching this liquid this photo polymerizing resin. When you
(03:46):
shoot UV light right at the part where the platform
and the liquid meat, it turns solid and that adheres
to the platform, and you slowly draw the platform up
as if you're lifting it out of that liquid, and
you keep adding layers by shooting the light at the
next layer down of this liquid, and you build it
(04:09):
that way, so it's actually drawing this up out of
the liquid. It almost looks like you've got a submerged
object that you're pulling up out of this stuff, but
in fact you're actually converting that stuff into a solid.
It's actually really cool to look at. But one of
the really important things that his approach relied upon was
(04:30):
using digital data to send instructions to the device. So
this idea of creating a file format that could send
that could contain the actual pattern and software that would
have the instructions for the equipment to say, based upon
this pattern, this is what you need to draw for
every single layer and build this three dimensional object. That
(04:52):
approach meant that designers could relatively quickly create models of
various components. You could prototype them in a matter of
rather than having to go through a very lengthy fabrication process.
And time is money and so is effort, So bringing
down the time and effort needed to create prototypes would
(05:12):
significantly reduce the cost of developing various stuff, so you
could very quickly find out which of your ideas were
viable and which ones you might have to tweak or
abandon by building out your components this way. But this
was in a time when such technology was really only
available to industries and corporations. You couldn't go out and
buy a three D printer back in those early days.
(05:33):
It would cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars. It
was not something the average person would even be aware of,
let alone be able to access. This also meant that
if you did have access to one of these devices,
you could print replacement parts for vintage technology. So maybe
no one's making a particular type of car part. For example,
(05:54):
maybe there's a specific model of car that you own
and you want to keep it in good repair, but
that company no longer exists, so you can't just go
out and buy a replacement part. With the right type
of additive manufacturing equipment, you could build a replacement part.
All you would need is the digital plan to do that.
(06:16):
Whether you made that in a computer assist Design CAD program,
or maybe you were able to get hold of that
design from somebody, or maybe even you were able to
scan an original part and make a digital copy that way.
Jay Leno reportedly uses this method to maintain his collection
of vintage cars. And it helps that we can now
(06:39):
print in lots of different materials, not just the plastics
that you typically encounter with consumer brand three D printers.
All right, So that's the basic history of additive manufacturing.
From its beginning, it was the realm of the manufacturing industry.
It was not something that your average person knew about.
(07:01):
Skip ahead twenty years, hop on over to the UK.
It's lovely there. And in two thousand and four, doctor
Adrian Bauer of the University of Bath proposed a new
project that the following year would be called rep rap
our ep r AP that stands for Replicating Rapid prototyper.
(07:21):
The goal of this project was to create a low
cost three D printer, one that would be capable of
printing most of the parts of a duplicate three D printer. Now,
this in itself wasn't exactly a new idea. There was
a mathematician and a total genius named John von Neuman.
I'll have to do a full episode about von Neuman
(07:42):
in the future. He proposed a concept which he called
the Universal Constructor. This would be a machine that would
be capable of replicating itself, Which is the super simple explanation.
If I do a full episode about him, I'll have
to go into much greater detail, because it's a pretty
phenomenal concept. Now. Bauyer's proposal was a little more modest
(08:06):
than what von Neuman was talking about. It would be
able to largely copy itself, piece by piece, but unlike
a true universal constructor, it would not be able to
assemble the new copy. It wouldn't be able to. It
had self copying but not self assembly abilities. You would
still need a person to actually take all those pieces
and put them together. He envisioned a rapid prototyping machine
(08:30):
that could make most of the components needed to make
a second copy. So in theory, you could make one
of these things. You could then buy the raw materials
you needed, meaning largely the plastic that the printer would
use as a printing medium and as for its parts.
Then you could print all the parts for a second one,
(08:50):
and then build the second one and use that one
to print all the parts for a third one, and
so on and so forth, and you could keep on
printing more and more copies and give them to all
your friends, and soon everybody has one of these things.
But he admitted that there were some parts like stepping
motors or metal fasteners that would not really be printable
in this way, so you would have to purchase those
(09:11):
parts separately and put them together with the parts that
you were able to print. However, these parts were widely
available and more importantly, pretty cheap, so the most it
would require is access to the digital plans to print
the pieces that you needed. You would need one working
(09:31):
printer to do the printing. Obviously, if you didn't have
a printer, you couldn't start the process, and you would
need some know how in the assembly process about how
to wire everything together and actually physically put it together.
But then you could just make copies. The project would
involve not just the design of the physical printer itself,
(09:52):
but also the software you would need to access this
piece of equipment, the file formats you would need to
be able to send to that equipment so that you
could actually do some meaningful printing. Another very important element
in RepRap and one that's going to become super important
in our maker bot story, is that this whole idea
(10:14):
was going to be an open source project and still
is to this day. It is an open source project. Now.
That meant none of the designs for rep wrap proper
would be proprietary or hidden from view. It needed to
be open source for two big reasons. One was that
it would allow these machines to perpetuate across large groups
(10:34):
of people, so you don't want to have any barriers
to keep that from happening. If you had protected intellectual property,
then that's a limitation on how quickly stuff could be
spread across the entire population. But if you make it
open source, everyone has access to it, so it removes
those barriers. The other important bit is that Valuer wanted
(10:57):
people to have the opportunity to change the open source information,
whether it was changes to the design of the hardware
or to the software, and in that way you could
create improvements or alterations, and the design of the rep
rep device would evolve over time. As people joined the
community and added their ideas to the design and implementation
(11:22):
of this printer. People could experiment with different approaches. They
might be able to improve the efficiency or the resolution
of the print jobs, meaning how smooth is the finished print?
If you can improve on that. That's a benefit to everybody.
And as long as everyone kept everything open source and
(11:42):
we're sharing it freely, those improvements flow back into the
overall maker community and they perpetuate across it, so everyone
gets to benefit from everyone's ideas. So if you designed
this properly, you could use a rep wrap one point
zero printer, and then when someone makes an improved movement
that would effectively become rep wrap one point one or whatever,
(12:04):
you could use your old printer to print out the
new stuff. Alter your old printer, and now you've got
a new printer. You never have to worry about obsolescence.
So instead of having to abandon a technology three or
four years down the road, you can keep making incremental
improvements to your device by printing stuff with the device itself.
(12:26):
So it almost becomes self improving. Not quite because it
does require the input of real human beings, but you
get the idea. So bow your imagine a world where
people could print whatever small parts they needed on demand,
whether it was a replacement for an existing piece of
technology or maybe just something totally new that they wanted.
And he even envisioned a world in which people could
(12:48):
print out their own recycling devices, and those recycling devices
would consume the old, broken or worn out plastic parts.
So instead of just accumulating more and more of these
broken parts, you would actually break that down so that
you could use it again. You could have a new
supply of plastic that you would use for printing material.
(13:10):
He thought the printers as wealth machines. The cost of
items would be reduced down to the cost of their
raw materials and the labor associated with assembling the stuff
if assembly was required, and Bayer called the whole process
Darwinian Marxism because the means of production would be in
the hands of the proletariat without the pesky requirement of
(13:32):
holding a bloody revolution in order to do it. Two
of the three founders of MakerBot became part of the
rep rap community, and we're working on this goal. In
two thousand and seven, Zach Hokin Smith joined the rep
rap project while attending Iowa State University. Smith was quickly
won over to the concept of open source hardware and
(13:54):
would become an remain a strong advocate for that approach,
so much so that he is now the executive rector
for RepRap Research Foundation. Then you had Adam Meyer. He
attended Cornell University in the early to mid nineteen nineties
and earned a degree in computer science. He worked as
a developer for a couple of companies before being invited
by Smith to work on a new project that would
(14:15):
become maker Bot. And the third co founder is the
one who was most closely associated with the maker Bot
in those early years, even though you could argue convincingly
that really Smith was the heart of the project. He
was the reason why it all started in the first place.
But there was a third person who was sort of
(14:36):
the face of the company, and this was Brie Pettis.
More on him in just a moment, but first let's
take a quick break to thank our sponsor. So I'm
going to spend a little more time talking about Brie
Petties because his story is the one tied to those
(14:59):
early years. The man Baker bought even more than the
other two for reasons that will later become clear. So
Brie Petis didn't come to the maker community through being
a computer scientist or an engineer. He had attended college
in the early nineties and studied subjects like performing arts
in psychology. After college, he lived in Prague for a while.
(15:19):
He worked on film sets as an assistant cameraman and
in other capacities. He also landed a gig for a
while as an assistant in Jim Henson's creature shop in London, England,
and he eventually returned to the States, went back to
school to further his studies, and he earned a teaching certificate.
So from the late nineties to the mid two thousands
(15:41):
he was a teacher in the Seattle Public school system.
And as a thirty one year old school teacher, you
probably wouldn't have looked at Pettis and said, this guy's
going to become the leader of a tech company with
an incredibly disruptive goal of turning manufacturing upside down and
putting that into the hands of the common consumer. He
(16:02):
was making instructional and educational videos for his students. He
was frequently incorporating puppets and other stuff in these videos,
and he was putting those videos up online and that
caught the attention of a guy named Philip Torone, who
was the senior editor of Make magazine, the diy Maker Journal.
Tarne offered Petis a job to come out to New
(16:24):
York City and to work for Make that would involve
him not just writing articles for make, but also creating videos,
kind of like what he had been doing in his
teaching gig, and he took Tourne up on the offer
moved out to New York City. Now while he was
in New York, Bree Pettis would meet Zack Smith, and
the two of them would become two of the founding
(16:45):
members of a hacker collective called NYC Resistor. The group
would hold regular meetings, including some that were open to
the public, and at those meetings people could discuss ideas
they could work on designs for hardware or software. Together,
they could recruit people to work on projects and generally
hacked technology just to figure out how it worked and
(17:07):
how it might work better or maybe work in a
way different from how the creators had originally intended, kind
of that whole hacker ethos. And it was through this
organization that they also met Adam Mayor. Zach Smith brought
his rep rap stuff to the NYC Resistor space to
show it off and invite folks to help him work
(17:27):
on the tech. In an effort to realize this RepRap
vision of building machines capable of printing the parts necessary
to make copies of itself. Now, according to Pettis, he
and Smith and Mayer got a RepRap machine, really a
repstrap machine up and running briefly before it stopped functioning entirely.
(17:47):
But that brief success inspired them to work on creating
a rep strap kit of their own. So what is repstrap. Well,
within the rep rap community, it refers to a three
D printer quote cobbled together from whatever parts you can find,
which will eventually allow you to print the parts for
a rep rap printer end quote. So it's another three
(18:08):
D printer, but this one is with all sorts of
like Frankenstein type parts, and the goal is that ultimately
you can print all the parts to just build a
rep rap printer using this kind of Jerry rigged system.
The name comes from a combination of rep rap and bootstrap.
The parts for a rep strap may not all be
(18:28):
three D printed, Some of them could be constructed through
subtractive means, like cutting materials down with like a laser
cutter or something along those lines. Now, their work led
to the design of a printer they would call the
Cupcake C in c C and C stands for computer
numerical control, which is a concept that applies to a
(18:49):
whole host of different computer controlled tools, not just three
D printers, but stuff like drills or lathes. My buddy
Oz used to operate a computer control router with this
kind of system. He would load a design into some software,
use that software to send a command to the routing table,
and the software would translate the design into a set
(19:13):
of instructions that would be sent to this computer controlled
routing table, and a big arm with a very fast
spinning drill bit would descend and start cutting the patterns
into the material below. Next thing you knew, you had
yourself a cutlass made out of aluminum, or some etched
awards that were made out of plexiglass, all sorts of
(19:34):
cool stuff. Well, the cupcake C and C was something
that the three were able to make in a kit form.
So the kit would include wires, a micro controller, and
acrylic build platform upon which your three D printed objects
would sit as the printer was working. It included an
extruder which would convert the solid plastic into a form
(19:56):
that could be laid down layer by layer. I'll talk
more about that later in this episode. In an XYZ
positioning system and more like a balsa case essentially that
you could put together. Based on this quasi success of
them getting this thing briefly running, the three decided that
they would start a company of their own and really
(20:17):
try to bring three D printing to the mass market,
or at least a consumer market filled with makers and
hobbyists who could perhaps support the business long enough for
it to catch on, kind of like how the home
PC business all started with kits in the nineteen seventies.
You would send off for a kit, you would get
the parts, and you would put the computer together at home.
(20:38):
That eventually led to the birth and then success of
companies like Apple. So the three settled on the maker
bought name pretty quickly. They all thought, well, this would
let you make stuff. It's part of the maker community.
It is more or less kind of a robot because
it will automatically carry out the instructions you send to it.
And they thought, well, there's no way that name is available.
(21:00):
It's too good of a name. But they did some
research and found that as far as they could tell,
no one had claimed to it. So they said, excellent,
we're going to go with that. In January two thousand
and nine, the three launched this company with the help
of seventy five thousand dollars of seed money. Twenty five
thousand dollars of that came from Adrian Bauer himself, the
man who proposed the RepRap project five years earlier. And
(21:22):
like I said, their first product was the cupcake C
and C and you would buy that in kit form,
or if you lack the patience but you happen to
have a whole lot more money, you could buy it
fully assembled. If you buy it as a kit, it
would set you back seven hundred and fifty dollars, a
princely sum in its own right. But if you wanted
someone else to put the thing together and save you
(21:45):
some time and remove the possibility that maybe you'd wire
it up incorrectly, then you're looking at twenty five hundred
dollars to buy one fully assembled. So what was up
with the name Cupcake? Well, as Adam Meyer would explain
to Google in two thousand and nine, there's a presentation
that's up online. You can actually watch the whole thing
if you like. The Cupcake device was meant to be
(22:07):
a three D positioning tool that could do more than
just act as a three D printer. That was the
first implementation they envisioned for it. But they thought, well,
this is really a device where you can have two
different components and they quote unquote know where they are
in orientation with relation to each other, including distance and positioning,
(22:29):
and then you could use that for all sorts of stuff,
not just three D printing. And they created a design,
or propose a design at least that would use frosting
as a stuff to pipe out onto a surface, like
on a cupcake. So that's where they got the name
cupcake C and C because they thought, well, this could
(22:49):
really let you create very intricate designs and send them
to the machine, and then they would carry out the
designs automatically and your cupcakes would be made with robotic precision,
or at least frosted with robotic precision. While the team
had been working on the design for the cupcake for
a while, they didn't have an actual first generation cupcake
C and C ready to go working until March of
(23:13):
two thousand and nine. Brie was scheduled to travel to Austin,
Texas for south By Southwest with the goal of showing
off the maker bot to people there. He didn't have
a ticket, he was just going to show them the
printer in bars around Austin, Texas, And from my experience
the couple times I've been to south By Southwest, that
seems to be the kind of location where most of
(23:33):
the actual action of south By Southwest really takes place
in the after hours in the various restaurants and bars
around Austin, Texas. So he shot a quick video of
the team's early cupcake C and C printing out an
object in March two thousand and nine, then immediately went
to south By Southwest where he would show off this
printer in bars, and he printed out shot glasses as
(23:56):
a demonstration. Apparently he had this fascination was shot glasses
in general, and so that was kind of his go
to demo. After south By Southwest, the team actually created
an online storefront so people could purchase the printers. This
was the first time they were actually offering them up
for sale. They had the idea of seven hundred and
fifty dollars for a kit. They knew they would charge
(24:17):
twenty five hundred for a fully assembled one, and now
they were finally ready to say, all right, if you
want one, put in the order. They had put together
twenty kits and boxed them up so they were ready
to go, and they thought that it would probably take
a couple of months to sell out of that initial
inventory because the idea was still pretty new, especially outside
(24:38):
of the type community of makers who were familiar with
the RepRap project. But instead, they actually sold out of
their kits in two weeks. At that point, maker Bot
was taking up space in the office of an entrepreneur
named Jake Lodwick. Loudwick had co founded the online video
platform Vimeo. Before that, he had worked as a web
(24:58):
developer for College Humor and It's early Days. He's another
interesting person in business in tech, and I'll probably have
to do a full episode about him in the future
as well. But as MakerBot was getting bigger, they were
taking up more and more space in Loudwick's office, and
he eventually told his team that once his lease was up,
he was not planning on renewing. He was going to
give up the space, and that meant the young company
(25:19):
needed to secure space of their own for realsies, So
they ended up leasing a five thousand square foot office
space in Brooklyn, New York. They were convinced that this
would give them plenty of room to grow, but within
two months they had pretty much filled it up with capacity.
Things were really exciting for the fledgling company at this time,
(25:40):
and I would have my first experience with maker bot
not long after this stuff was going on. I'll talk
more about that in just a second, but first let's
take another quick break to thank our sponsor. Not only
did the make Bought guys move into a new space,
(26:02):
they made their first hire to help handle incoming orders.
So now there was the three of them plus an employee. Exciting.
The maker community appeared to be eager to get hold
of the tech that would allow them to actually explore
the possibility of making the rep wrap dream a reality,
something where they would be able to print all sorts
of different parts, not just you know, chochkeys, but useful stuff.
(26:26):
Part of that meant adhering to those principles of the
open source philosophy. The cupcake was a true piece of
open source hardware. The software you need to run it
was also open source, so the community could scour over
the design of both and contribute fixes or improvements. They
were acting as quality assurance, they were acting as research
(26:47):
and development. This was incredibly valuable for Maker bought. Not
only was it creating a community of loyal customers, it
was also doing a lot of work that makrobot would
have had to do on its own. If it had
been proprietary technology from the get go, they would have
had to have their own teams QA stuff make sure
(27:08):
everything's working properly. If something's not working properly, then they
would have to go through the whole process of trying
to fix the problem, you know, find a work around
or a solution. They would also be looking at their
own ways to improve the technology, but by releasing it
in this open source format, their users became those people.
It was almost like the users were an employee by extension,
(27:28):
and an employee of incredible skill because it came with
all the ideas of all the different people in that community.
It was incredibly powerful and apparently it was just really
encouraging to participate in this community. People who bought a cupcake,
C and C felt like they were part of something
big and they had some sense of ownership there because
(27:51):
their input was valued. They were all working together to
change the world. It was kind of this almost utopian
sort of perspective. Well, as the orders were coming in
the company was making plans to take another step into
the consumer marketplace, and that would involve traveling out to
Las Vegas, Nevada for the twenty ten CEES Trade Show,
(28:12):
and that's where I saw a maker bought cupcake C
and C for the first time as it slowly printed
out a special plastic coin that I still have somewhere.
The team also talked about how they hoped to create
a three D scanner in the future to let people
convert a three dimensional scan of a physical object into
the data necessary to print out a replica of that object.
(28:35):
That would be a huge jump forward because it would
mean you wouldn't have to plot out all the points
yourself in a CAD program or hope that someone else
could do it. With a good scanner, you could get
a full three dimensional scan of something like a replacement part,
and then you would have that information forever. So it's
not like you would scan it once and then you
just print it once. You scan it once and you've
(28:56):
got it, and whenever you need another one, you just
print another one. So it was like you suddenly got
access to a never ending supply of all these different
parts if you could just scan them in and if
you had the raw materials to print on another one.
So you started to see the possibility of that vision
coming true. But at this point they didn't have the
scanner that would come later, but they didn't have it
(29:18):
at this early station, but they did say that was
something they were interested in developing. Part of the disruption
that three D printers were all about was a related
project that Zack Smith had worked on back when the
three co founders were still getting ready to launch maker
Bot as a company, so this was late two thousand
and eight. This was a website called thingaverse, and the
(29:41):
website is kind of a companion piece to maker Bot.
It acts as a repository for user generated digital design files.
So at thingaverse, designers could upload their design files for
other people to use or even to alter in any
way that they liked. So if you created a collection
of files for say three D printed chess pieces, you
(30:02):
could upload them all as files to thingaverse and someone
else could download those and print out the chess pieces
that you designed, and the designs all followed the licensing
strategy of either the New General Public License or the
Creative Commons License, and those agreements typically allow people to
use a piece of intellectual property with very few limitations.
(30:24):
Of course, it all depends upon the specific type of license.
These licenses are not all just one approach. There are
multiple different pathways you can take with them. But with
some of those license you can actually allow folks to
not just take your work, but make derivative or altered
works based off of what you've already done. So that
(30:45):
means someone could download those chess pieces you designed, for example,
and then they create a customized version of every piece
that uses your models as a starting point, or then
after that they might upload their own altered designs they
can set right alongside your originals, and someone else could
download either one or both and make changes to either
(31:06):
or both. So one of the categories that got a
lot of action on Thingaverse early on had to do
with the printers themselves, so users were designing parts that
could upgrade the basic cupcake C and C design, So
it was possible to go out and buy a cupcake
C and C kit, spend the eighty hours or so
it would take to put it together, get some plastic
(31:28):
filament as your printing material, and then print out a
printer upgrade using the original version of the printer. Then
you could take it apart, put the upgrade into your
new and improved printer, and start up again. And that
was again one of the most powerful parts of having
this community was having people who are actively working to
improve the product. Maker Bot paid attention to those designs
(31:52):
and would even incorporate some of them in the official
future machines that would produce, and often it would include attribution,
so the people who had created the designs would get
an attribution in future versions of the actual products. So
this was really the honeymoon phase for a maker Bot.
(32:13):
The maker community was enthusiastically embracing the company. Tech news
outlets were really getting excited about covering it. But there
were some big changes lurking on the horizon and they
would affect everything. So before I end this episode, before
I conclude on this part, I figured it would be
good to give just kind of a quick high level
rundown on how these printers work in general, and I'll
(32:34):
be chatting about some other models in the upcoming episodes,
but they all work on a similar principle in the
maker Bot family, So essentially, it all begins with that
digital three D model of whatever it is you're going
to print. That model serves as the set of instructions
for the printer. The printer software takes the model and
essentially slices it into very thin layers from the bottom up.
(32:57):
The bottom in this case being the side of the
object that will be in contact with the building platform.
It's not necessarily the bottom of the object itself, because
you could print an object on its side or even
upside down, so top and bottom in this case refer
to whichever side is making contact with the base the
(33:18):
printing platform, that's the bottom. These instructions get sent to
the printer, which can interpret the instructions as a set
of plot points where it's going to lay down the
plastic in a very thin layer. The type of plastic
falls into a category called thermoplastic, and, as the name suggests,
with thermo heat has an important part to play here.
Thermoplastics are materials that soften as they get hotter and
(33:43):
they harden as they cool down, so if you heat
them up to a hot enough temperature, they'll actually they'll melt.
So a real of thermoplastic filament would serve as the
raw material for the printer. The type of plastic. The
two most common types of thermoplasts that you'll find for
consumer three D printers would be ABS, which is oil
(34:06):
based and it's the same sort of plastic that lego
bricks are made out of, and PLA, which is a
biodegradable organic plastic. It's made from starchy byproducts maker Bot
it tends to focus on both. They tended to focus
earlier on ABS over PLA, but that would change over
the course of the life of MakerBot as well. ABS
(34:29):
tends to make a harder plastic than PLA once it sets,
but it's also gotten amorphous melting point ABS does. That
means that you can't be totally certain that which temperature
of the stuff is actually going to melt. It depends
heavily upon the batch of plastic you have, so typically
three D printers will heat up extruders to around two
(34:49):
hundred and thirty degrees celsius, but depending upon the filament,
you might need anything between two hundred and ten degrees
celsius to two hundred and forty degrees celsius to get
the ideal temperature to get the consistency the melting that
you will need to print properly in addition, ABS can
warp as you print if it happens to cool down
(35:10):
too much during the printing process. So for that reason,
if you print an ABS, you need a heated bed
or heated platform to keep the plastic at a high
enough temperature so it holds its shape through the entire
printing process. But you also don't want the bed to
be so hot that it ends up making the plastic
guy like it never has a chance to actually cool
(35:32):
enough to start hardening, and it'll warp as the print
head moves around or as the object becomes too heavy.
PLA is in general safer to use than ABS. It
puts out fewer fumes at any rate. It also has
a lower melting point, so you don't have to operate
the printer at such a high temperature at the extruders,
(35:52):
and it cools into a glossy, smooth appearance. It's a
little more esthetically pleasing than ABS typically is. After printing
running bed doesn't necessarily have to be heated, though the
resources I'm familiar with suggest you should probably still use
a heated print bed. You just don't need it as
hot as you would with ABS, So in other words,
you might need a heated print bed that's at sixty
(36:16):
degrees celsius for PLA versus eighty degrees celsius for ABS.
PLA has greater tensile strength than ABS, but ABS typically
withstands wear and tear better and will withstand impact better.
If you drop something that's been printed in ABS plastic,
it tends to just kind of bounce, and it's typically
kind of fine. PLA material can be a bit more brittle.
(36:38):
It could actually shatter, depending upon what it is and
how hard it hits the ground, whether it's PLA or ABS.
There's a motor that's in a three D printer that
pulls this filament, this wire like construction of plastic into
the printer's extruder. The extruder is essentially a super heated nozzle,
(37:01):
or not superheated, but at least a very hot nozzle.
It's heated to a precise temperature like that two hundred
and thirty degrees celsius for APS, for example, and that's
in order to melt this filament, and the extruder prints
this molten plastic on the heated print bed. The motor
keeps it moving, so the filament keeps adding pressure, thus
pushing the liquid plastic through the end of the nozzle,
(37:24):
and the process continues until you finish the print job.
Either the extruder will move around the print bed or
the print bed will move underneath the extruder. It depends
upon the design of the printer. In either case, these
movements correspond with the digital three D model for the
object that you're sending to the printer in the first place,
and the printer lays down the first of many layers
(37:45):
of molten plastic. The printer repeats that process layer by layer,
laying down molten plastic to sit on top of and
bind to the lower layer of plastic. The printer is
essentially creating multiple two dimensional images, just stacks of two
dimensional images, over and over again until they add up
(38:05):
to a full three dimensional printed object. The Cupcake CNC
could print an object up to one hundred millimeters long,
one hundred millimeters wide, and one hundred and thirty millimeters tall,
so that translates to four inches by four inches by
five inches more or less. But the Cupcake C and
C was just the beginning, and while this company was
(38:27):
rapidly gaining fans in the maker community, things were bound
to change pretty dramatically in the next couple of years.
I'll explain more in part two of this episode, but
that concludes this part. So I hope you guys are
enjoying the story of makerbots so far. Our next episode
will have a lot of controversy and tragedy in it,
(38:49):
at least from a kind of a high level view,
very interesting stuff. If you guys have suggestions for future
episodes of tech Stuff, tell you what, go to our website,
it's tech Stuff podcast dot com. You can check out
the links there, you can get in contact with me,
let me know what you would like me to cover
in future episodes. You can also pop on over to
(39:09):
our store over at tepublic dot com slash tech stuff
and look at the merchandise there and not just look
at it, you know, buy something if you like it.
Every purchase you make goes to help the show. We
greatly appreciate it. Then We've got some fun designs on there,
and we've got new ones coming all the time. So
go check it out and I'll talk to you again
really soon for more on this and thousands of other topics.
(39:37):
Because it HowStuffWorks. Dot Com
TechStuff News
Hosts And Creators
Oz Woloshyn
Karah Preiss
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