[hackerspaces] Big Announcement - My Company Has Launched! - MakerBot Industries

[Domain Admin]

Hey Friend,

I just launched a robotics company with some friends and I'm sending this
email to you to tell you about it!

MakerBot Industries <http://makerbot.com/> 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 <http://jamesprovost.com/>
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<http://www.dieselsweeties.com/archive/545>

[image: Superstars and The
MakerBot]<http://www.flickr.com/photos/bre/3360152941/>

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 <http://thingiverse.co/>.

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.

[image: Jonathan Coulton and
Makerbot]<http://www.flickr.com/photos/bre/3364200826/>

MakerBot opened for Jonathon Coulton at the Squarespace party at SXSW.

The CupCake
<http://store.makerbot.com/featured-products/cupcake-cnc-presale.html>CNC<http://store.makerbot.com/featured-products/cupcake-cnc-presale.html>
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 <http://www.dieselsweeties.com/archive/1985>

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

http://makerbot.com
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.
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