Big Announcement - My Company Has Launched! - MakerBot Industries
bre pettis
I just launched a robotics company with some friends and I'm sending this email to you to tell you about it!
MakerBot Industries is our company and we make robots that make things. I took our prototype to SXSW and had a great time making things with our flagship robot, the MakerBot CupCake CNC. Makerbots are robots that make things and Makerbot Industries designs and sells kits to make MakerBots. Me and my friends Zach Hoeken Smith and Adam Mayer have started this company to bring rapid prototyping and 3D Printing to the masses.
Illustration by our Designer James Provost
To celebrate the birth of our MakerBot, we've been printed out shot glasses and dodecahedrons by the score. (a dodecahedron is a 12 sided geometric shape used as a 12 sided die in Dungeons and Dragons) As if that wasn't enough, we modified the dodecahedron to make it into a shot glass too. We are excited to build more things, but we're even more excited to see what folks come up with. I can't wait to see the first action figure that someone designs and makes on a MakerBot.
A dodecahedron printed by the CupCake CNC MakerBot - Photo by RStevens
Superstars of The Internet gather as the Makerbot makes things.
We're obsessed with our robots being open source. You will be able to download all the schematics and designs. You don't even have to wait until they are finalized since just keep our latest revisions up on our digital design site, Thingiverse.com.
Our goal is to make it cheap and easy for anyone to fabricate digitally designed 3D objects. MakerBot Operators can make their own and their friends designs become physically real. It turns out that making a MakerBot isn't very hard and with a little bit of soldering experience, anyone can make thier own MakerBot.
MakerBot opened for Jonathon Coulton at the Squarespace party at SXSW.
The CupCake CNC is our flagship robot because it's inexpensive and can make things about the same size as a rubics cube, but in the MakerBot store you can buy all of the parts modularly to make other kinds of robots of your own design.
Photo by RStevens
We have also designed an optional frosting extruder. Here I am having fun getting the frosting extruder working and ready to frost cupcakes. We can control it now with joystick style controls and will have it drawing pictures on cupcakes soon.
We made our robot to have a smaller than printer footprint on your desk. In the future that we envision, everyone will have one and if you make up a new amazing design for a fork, you can upload it to the thingiverse and share it with the world. Right now our first robot is like the Model T Ford. It's modular, easy to customize, and fun to work on. Being able to use a MakerBot to make anything you can imagine is too awesome for it to avoid becoming mainstream. Who doesn't want a MakerBot to make whatever they can imagine?
We start shipping robots next month and we've already presold a good bunch of them. As you can tell, I'm pretty excited about this. If you can blog about this or mention it on your facebook away message, that would be great. If you know any media people who like to write about these kinds of things, send them my way. We want to make a splash!
Thanks!
Bre Pettis
I am sending this to you because you're on my list of people I know. If for some reason you don't want to get updates like this, just drop me a note and I'll take you off the list, no fuss no muss.