I am determined to have a fully printed chess set before Botacon so that I can play12 at least one game. I’ve been tracking my heat/speed/etc settings in PLA but it is a time consuming process. It just holds its heat so long that small lower layers stay molten and gooey too long. The only reasonable option that I can foresee is dialing in my settings for PLA so that it prints at slightly cooler temperatures and far more slowly than I am printing right now. However, between work, blogging, holidays, and other sundry obligations I don’t think I’m going to have time to fully dial in my MakerBot for printing small parts in PLA.
I spent most of my free time this weekend cranking out parts. I printed up two more key fobs, all the non-pawn pieces for the second half of the chess set, and a really large number of experiments/tests/proofs of concept/nascent ideas.
PLA, and I can’t believe I’m actually saying this, has been a lot of fun. I get to run a robot making things, mostly toys or toy components, that smells like cotton candy, without warping. The downside, as I’ve mentioned above, is that it doesn’t work nearly as well for small parts. Last night I printed the tallest objects I’ve ever attempted – a 10cm cylinder and another 10cm model. 3
This is the long way of saying… I’m bringing a printed chess set to Botacon. The clear PLA side may be droopy and melty looking, but by god you’ll see it there. I’ve actually got way more than enough melty looking pawns to call this set done. 4 I’ll probably just come back and print the clear pieces again once I get PLA dialed in. 5
And, by graciously, I mean to say that upon not winning I will smash every piece to bits and yell something along the lines of “I MADE YOU!!! WHY WILL YOU NOT DO MY BIDDING AND STRIKE HIM DOWN!?!” [↩]
I know some people use their MakerBots as small scale rapid prototyping services. What I don’t know is what or how they charge for providing these services. Obviously, there’s a cost associated with the plastic, electricity, wear and tear, failed prints, etc. 1 Setting aside the intrinsic value of what you have produced 2 , what’s a reasonable way to set the price of an object printed on a MakerBot?
I can think of several ways to look at this:
Resource cost. $0.04 per cubic centimeter, of pure cost in terms of just MakerBot ABS/PLA. Electricity is probably around $0.02 per hour of print time. The laptop connected to the MakerBot is capable of multitasking, so there’s no real opportunity cost there.
Shapeways. Their gray ABS is $2.50/cc. They also have a white nylon polymide for $1.50/cc with a $1.50 start up charge. Their colored prints are made with a plastic powder that is relatively fragile. At $2.50/cc and assuming it takes 4.5 minutes to print 1cc, this comes to $0.56/minute.3
Ponoko. Their UV curable resin is $2.76/cc and their white nylon polymide is $0.80/cc. 4 Their colored prints are made with a plastic powder that is relatively fragile. At a MakerBot’s printing speed, $2.76/cc comes to $0.61/minute.
I believe transparency makes for a better customer experience. That way a customer can see right up front what they may be spending, avoiding “sticker shock.” It is probably a lot easier for the average customer to estimate the volume of a digital design than it is for them to guesstimate how long my printer would take to print such a thing.
What metric and pricing structure do you use to charge for your printing services? Do you go by volume, weight, plastic used, machine time, or something else entirely?
It takes about 4.5 minutes to print one cubic centimeter of ABS or PLA. This is a rough average of several different types of settings, but assumes a roughly 0.36mm layer thickness. [↩]
Pretending 19cc of a puzzle cube is worth exactly 19cc of a toy rocket, window latch, or plastic part that will fix the international space station. [↩]
This is more of an analogy to a MakerBot’s printing speed than an actual assumption of the printing capabilities at Shapeways. [↩]
There are discounts for their “prime” members. [↩]
I spent WAY too long this morning working on a post here… got ready to hit print… and was told by WordPress the post no longer existed. Even better? Every post and page on the entire site was gone. Even better? MySQL said the posts table had crashed.
I use a plugin that backs up this website regularly, so it wouldn’t have been tragic – just painful. However the post I spent the morning working on was totally gone. I was able to repair the posts table using the MySQL repair function, but that post was GONE.
I mentioned recently how much I loved a recent episode of Doctor Who entitled “Vincent and the Doctor.” 1 Well, someone uploaded a clip and sped up the audio. It makes for disorienting listening, but the brilliant monologue from Bill Nighy as Dr. Black, a museum curator, answering the question, “Where do you think Van Gogh rates in the history of art?” Just tune in at 1:52 for his response.2
Amusing side note, the DeYoung has a list of things prohibited at the exhibit:
No strollers or baby-carrying backpacks are allowed in the exhibition.
Tickets do not allow for re-entry into the exhibition; there are no restrooms located inside the exhibition galleries.
Sketching, photography, videotaping, and cell-phone cameras are not allowed in the exhibition.
Can you imagine? No sketching while standing in front of the most inspirational works of art in all the world?! :(
That episode of Doctor Who may just stay on my DVR until it’s drives rot to pieces. [↩]
Well… um… big question, but, to me Van Gogh is the finest painter in the world. Certainly the most popular, great painter of all time. The most beloved, his command of color most magnificent. He transformed the pain of his tormented life into ecstatic beauty. Pain is easy to portray. But to use your passion and pain to portray the ecstasy and joy and magnificence of our world? No one had ever done it before. Perhaps no one ever will again. To my mind, that strange, wild man who roamed the fields of Provenance was not only the world’s greatest artist, but also one of the greatest men who ever lived. [↩]
I like the idea of making a crayon mold with my MakerBot. I even have a draft design sitting on my hard drive. However, what’s a good shape for a crayon mold? Triangular crayons, square crayons, fat crayons, thin crayons, flat crayons, smiley face crayons, Christmas crayons, Halloween crayons, Valentine’s Day crayons, Easter egg crayons…
If you could have any1 shape crayon, what shape would you choose?
A few weeks ago I was contacted by Les H. about helping his company prototype a design.
Jay is very knowledgeable about his machine’s capabilities and any pitfalls. His advice enabled us to get a pretty good first prototype out quickly, which showed some deficiencies in our design, and recommended changes to make the design more robust and enable his machine to print it easily. We are about to make the second run. Jay’s suggestions about wall thickness, design elements and dimensional requirements have made us pretty sure that this will be the one we use (unless I make a mistake on layout or measurements). What he printed for us was exactly what we specified, and he worked with us to accomplish a moderately difficult design shape. I am not a mechanical designer, so his assistance filled many gaps in my knowledge. Check out the photos. It all fit together right the very first time.
My advice, go with Makerblock for your prototyping needs.
Regards,
Les H
Prototype enclosure
They had originally expected to go through several design iterations before getting a usable prototype. By exchanging a few e-mails and discussing their designs we were able to eliminate those intermediate print jobs.
I’ve seen multiple chess pieces on Thingiverse, but I’ve never seen a full black and white (or any two-toned, for that matter) printed chess set. Do you know if anyone has ever done this already?
I’ve got all 16 pieces in black ABS, but have been struggling with PLA. Then, as I am wont to do, I’ve gotten distracted with this or that project. I’m determined to print out all of the pieces in time for Botacon. I’d really like to play a fellow MakerBot/RepRap operator with a totally printed set. I’m less concerned the type of board we’re playing on – it could be a piece of fabric for all I care.
As someone with a modicum of javascript, URL hacking, and a passing familiarity with Firebug I sneer at websites that use javascript to disable right clicks. Frankly, I’m amazing anyone would bother doing it. There are just too many ways around these “protections” to make them worthwhile.
I recently was reading a website and started to select some text… to discover that they had included some javascript which blanked the content if you tried to select anything. And, of course, they disabled right click as well. There are hardly impediments to anyone who’s been using a web browser for more than a few years – but I found the experience amusing nonetheless.
If your content is important, why not do something to actually protect it rather than just annoy legitimate users?
If your content isn’t important enough to try some kind of actual protection schema, why are you bothering at all?
