Makerbot Cupcake 866 delivered

[pmwasson]

Hello! I received Cupcake 866 (batch 12) on Friday. I have already
started putting it together. You can follow my progress at
http://www.lasermego.com/fab

Anyone else around Beaverton have a working bot?

- Paul

[Duane]

I have a batch 6 Makerbot, which I got last fall. I had a lot of
trouble at first. But, with help from a few people, including Cid
Vilas of this group, I managed to get it working.

There are lots of settings in the skeinforge program and the
documentation is not very good. (At least it wasn't good the last
time I checked, a few months ago.) After much advice and
experimentation, I managed to get my machine to work fairly well, but
I'm sure it could work better with more skeinforge tweaking.

So far, I've made only one useful thing with my MakerBot. It's a pair
of brackets to hold a speed controller on a model helicopter. You can
see them at http://www.jandue.com/makerbot/. I'd like to try making
something else, but I currently don't need any part for which MakerBot
quality would be sufficient.

I used BRL-CAD (http://brlcad.org/) for drawing and creating the STL
files. I highly recommend BRL-CAD. It's much easier to use than
Blender. I used skeinforge to control my MakerBot. But, if I were
starting over, I might take a look at the RepRap Java software instead
(http://reprap.org/wiki/DriverSoftware). It might be better than
skeinforge.

Let me know if I can be of any help. I live near the MAX Sunset TC.
If you get yours working well, I'd be interested to know your
skeinforge settings.

Duane

[Paul Wasson]

Well, I'm happy to report that my Makerbot seems to be alive!  I haven't made anything complicated with it yet, but I have a real nice 1cm cube.  I just used the latest default Skeinforge settings, but I am planning to try tweaking them once I have a more complicated design.

I wrote about my experience here:  http://www.lasermego.com/fab

Thanks for pointing me to brlcad.  I played with blender but didn't get too far as I found the UI confusing, so I'm looking forward to trying something else.  I have designed a few things with OpenSCAD (http://www.openscad.org) and like its programming interface for design.

- Paul

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