Have You Seen the Maker Movement, MakerBots, and RepRap?

I’ve know about the Maker people for a long time, but only recently subscribed to the MAKE Magazine blog, and it’s been a lot of fun. There’s a lot of homebrew CNC, but a lot of other projects too. Sort of a “nerds gone wild” sort of motif. Many of the projects are fascinating, but not entirely practical, such as a Trashcan accelerometer. Why? Because you want to know how many g’s the garbage man is putting on your trash to load it into his truck. The answer, BTW, was up to 3 negative g’s–that’ll make your stomach clench.

On the CNC front, I love the upcoming EggBot kit:

Very cute for Easter!

What’s cool about this stuff (some will say it’s too useless!) is it gets more people interested in CNC and making things. In particular, it seems to capture the imagination of the young. This country needs that as does the rest of the world.

Aside from the Egg Bot, the Maker world is all about 3D printing. They make simple 3-axis CNC machines with hand tools that extrude plastic filament to make parts. And speaking of the young, here is a wonderful video showing one handmade “Maker Bot” being used to create its more-sophisticated successor machine:

As you can see from the video, they call these things “RepRap”. I like the idea. While I wouldn’t trade my CNC mill for a RepRap printer, I suspect there are some parts where RepRap would be perfect. I don’t know if the plastics they extrude are suitable, but it seems like it would be awesome for flexible parts like custom gaskets.

I saw this very cool commercial RepRap printer (supposed to be a new price performance plateau at $1500) from PP3DP which gives an idea of a little more refined machine:

PP3DP is pretty cool. Love the extruded skull!

As soon as I saw it, I envisioned my Widgitmaster Mini-Router converted to a RepRap 3D printer:

Widgitmaster Mini-Router as RepRap 3D printer? Heck, yeah!

Should be pretty easy to build a RepRap-style extruder head for it. Lord knows it’ll be quieter than that screaming Dremel, and I would certainly use it more. The Mini-Router is beautifully constructed and very precise. In fact I suspect it’s much more precise than the majority of the RepRap machines one sees.

Incidentally, here is the “official” MakerBot next to the PP3DP:

Kinda neat how that plastic filament just spools through a heating element to create the extruder…

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