[p2p-research] MakerBot in the Times (UK)

[Ryan]

  Sent to you by Ryan via Google Reader: MakerBot in the Times (UK) via
MakerBot Industries by Bre Pettis on 6/12/10



Jonathan Richards wrote up MakerBot is in the Times (UK). W00t!

The next time you have friends round, and the bottle opener goes
missing, consider how impressive it would be if you could say: “Don’t
worry. I’ll just print off another.”

For $980, you can purchase what may – if enthusiasts are to be believed
– be the next step in a revolution that has already given consumers the
ability to print high-quality photos at home: highly customisable
3D-printing.

The ‘Maker Bot’, the brainchild of a 12-person team based in Brooklyn,
New York, ‘prints’ 3-D objects out of plastic by rendering a series of
2-D layers, one on top of another.

The contraption, which measures about a cubic foot, works by receiving
a series of instructions from a small, micro-controller known as an
Arduino, which the owner can program.

As each layer is printed, a thin tube of plastic is funnelled down
through a sewing machine-like mechanism on to a metal base – heated to
230 degrees – which moves so that the correct shape is ‘drawn’. A
bottle opener takes about 20 minutes to print. Among the other objects
available in a giant, online collection of designs known as the
‘Thingiverse’, are jewellery, tools, small toys, even an outline of the
head of Thom Yorke, the lead singer of Radiohead.

The Maker Bot – 1,200 of which have been shipped worldwide – is just
one example of what was referred to at an internet conference in New
York this week as “pluggable culture”, a world where, increasingly,
consumers are able to build things using simple interfaces to
technologies that would previously have been out of their grasp.

Becky Stern, a US artist, for instance, recently used an Arduino she
programmed herself to embed a flashing display in a bag – and made the
code available on the web.

Just to keep it real, the MakerBot is $950 and there are 1562 in the
wild right now.

Read the rest on the Times site! Registration required.

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