BotBuilder

Only a few weeks before we will be heading over to Maker Faire 2012.  This year our 3D Printer Village will be bigger than ever.  Come see all the different styles and makes of 3D Printers in action!  September 29 & 30th.

Our new REPLICATOR from MAKERBOT arrived last night and John Jr. was anxious to unpack it and get it set up.  It takes about an hour or so to unpack everything and go through the print platform and set up procedures.  Everything on our new bot was perfect!  First print from the SD Card sample card printed well and with a few small tweaks, we were able to get some real products printed.  Looking forward to getting some more prints done and get a good handle on it before displaying it at Maker Faire in September.

Botbuilder will be hosting the second annual New York Maker Faire on September 17th & 18th.  Last year we had 800 square feet of makers in the 3D Printer’s Village, this year we have nearly tripled our display and we will be on the asphalt close to the Science Center building.  Please come and check out all our wonderful presenters & makers at the Faire!

We were able to purchase Cupcake number 2494 – batch 16 from it’s original owner, who felt he was in over his head and could not get this bot together and printing properly.  It is a Gen 3 electronics/mark 5 extruder, HBP cupcake.   Unfortunately, the original builder felt is was a good idea to glue all the case parts together, including the Z axis blocks.  Of course, this makes adjustments and servicing practically impossible. We replaced the X & Y Axis with our original pieces from bot 1136 (with outrigger bearings on the X Axis and mendel inspired Y Axis), which is now sporting the mendel inspired X-Y Axis Stages.

We were able to do minimal disassembly, realignment, wiring, assembly and configuration and get it working.  We actually built the HBP with traditional soldering pen techniques rather than our traditional surface mount soldering.  Of course, we will be tweaking the settings over the next couple of days but our first print was the Cube Gear and it came out well.  next was the tall faceted vase which also came out well.

We look forward to printing many items with this bot while upgrading and improving settings.  The next mod will undoubtedly be the Mark 6 Stepper Extruder.

Botbuilder was proud to be a big part in the 3D Printer Village at the 2010 Maker Faire and is looking forward to the 2011 Maker Faire in September.  There were over 15,000 visitors to our 40′ tent over the weekend and we drew quite a lot of media attention with reporters from NPR, The Post, The New York Times and many more media outlets interviewing the makers who were printing and displaying their “Bots”.  We even got a short spot on a film piece on the Martha Stewart Show feature on Maker Faire.  Many of our builders won blue ribbons for their work, including two for botbuilder.net.  Please make plans to visit our display at the 2011 Faire.

Botbuilder will be participating at the 2010 New York Maker Faire on October 25 & 26.  If you are at the Faire, stop by and see all the bots printing and on display.  Look for the 3D Printer Village tent right next to the MakerBot tent.

3d Printer Village

We printed all the RepRap pieces for our Mendel Build and started work on it a few days ago.  It is assembled, the electronics installed and ready for the “hot end” to be completed.   We will post pictures and details in the next couple of days.  We were amazed on how well the RepRap parts fit and how fast the build process was.

Our latest build, MakerBot Batch 14, Bot #1290 has been listed on ebay.  Here is the auction MakerBot #1290

At Botbuilder, we provide build services for those that want to get into operating a MakerBot but either lack the time or the skills to build and set up their bot themselves.

A MakerBot is a Simple CNC machine that takes ABS or PLA plastic, melts it in it’s extruder and makes items that have been designed on your computer.  The build plate is 100mm by 100mm so your item must be able to fit into that dimension and it can build an item approximately 120mm high.