Bre Pettis Blog

MakerBot: One Foot in Front of the Other

brepettis@gmail.com (Things!) — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 19:10:35 +0000

We just hit a few inflection points at MakerBot. It's an exciting time for the company and the industry.

The biggest shift was last September when we launched the MakerBot Replicator 2 Desktop 3D Printer and the new MakerWare. By being made with a chassis of powder coated steel and with a number of refreshing updates, it's a machine that professionals can feel proud to have on their desk. The wooden machines we made were awesome and each of the 3 previous generations were leaders in the category at that time, but the Replicator 2 is black. The users that have shown up to get this new MakerBot are a mix of professionals getting a jump on the innovation process.

MakerWare was a shift away from ReplicatorG. It's a lot easier to use and streamlines the whole process of moving a digital design from your computer to your MakerBot. Our software team worked hard to make it simpler and more powerful.

In December we moved offices. At the old botcave, I had rented anything on the block that we could put desks into and it had become a rabbit warren. With our new office, I focused on keeping things simple with simple desks and we spent our buildout money on nice ergonomic chairs. People work hard at MakerBot and it's a lot easier to work hard when you've got good posture in a nice chair.

Thingiverse Customizer is an application that runs on Thingiverse that allows people to make things that can be customized. This new class of customizable things is huge. It means that a lot of people who haven't thought of themselves as designers get to jump into the world of digital design. Want to try it? Check out the lithopanes project, as seen above and make an awesome 3D model!

At MakerBot, we're making great partnerships with companies that innovate. We worked with Nokia to create backs that go right on the Lumia series phones. We've teamed up with Autodesk to do some wonderful things too.

MakerBot is hiring! We've got a lot of work to do and we're looking for people to help us. Go to the MakerBot jobs page to check it out.

This is all just some of the stuff that we're working on. The game is on and we're focused on making wonderful things happen in the world.

As a CEO, I've grown a lot. I used to be the guy who wanted to do everything myself and now we're 200 people and I've got a team that reports to me and each one is a ninja in their field. I love coming to work. I enjoy the people I get to work with. Life is busy, full of hard work, and good!

HackerSpaces: The Beginning (The Book)

brepettis@gmail.com (Things!) — Wed, 31 Aug 2011 16:44:46 +0000

Repost of my post on hackerspaces.org. In December of 2008, a group of hackers was sitting on the floor with faces aglow with laptop light cruising the internet and skyping friends in and listening to death metal. It was 12 days before 25c3. Astera and I had a conversation that went something like this:

B: There should be a book.

A: Yes, there should.

B: We have 12 days.

A: We can do it.

The twelve days we had was until CCC started. We figured we would have it done by then. We contacted all the hackers we knew around the world and put the word out. We expected to get about a half a page of writing from each space. We reckoned that it would be a 25 page pamphlet. We also reckoned that it be easy for folks to write up a little summary within a few days of what it was like to get their hackerspace started and get back to us.

Within a week we had been scorched by a flame war, gotten a lot of both written and photographic material submitted and it seemed likely that the book would happen. Then the submissions kept coming… and coming. The hackerspaces around the world told each other about the project and many groups sent some writing in describing the beginning of their hackerspace. Word had even gotten round to groups that didn't have a space yet and they were sending us descriptions of their pre-beginnings too! The 12 days came and went and still the submissions kept coming.

After a few months submissions had trailed off and Astera came to NYC and began designing the book. She's a pro and it shows. This book looks beautiful because she took the material and somehow made it fit together aesthetically, not a trivial task. Jens Ohlig jumped into the process last year to help push the editing process forward. Remember, in our minds it was going to be a project that would take less than two weeks and it turned into something epic. It's been a long wait and I hope you'll think that it's worth it.

Download HackerSpaces: The Beginning!

This book documents where the hackerspace movement was in December of 2008. In that way it's a bit of a time capsule. It's not an exhaustive book, but we hope there are enough stories in here to show that all your excuses for not starting up a hackerspace are invalid. Each group faced down their own dragons to bring their hackerspace into existence including floods, rats, and drama. If they can do it, so can you.

We did this because we wanted it to exist and so it is a reward in itself. If you feel moved and want to support hackerspaces, we suggest contributing to the Wau Holland fund which helps make awesome things happen for hackerspaces. We would also like to thank everyone who submitted photographs and writing, this is your book.

After these years, the book is finally free in the world as a pdf. Download it, read it, and share it. We're open to the idea of making it into a real physical book and if you're interested in making that happen, let us know.

Build, Unite, Multiply!

Survival Guide to a Hospital NICU

brepettis@gmail.com (Things!) — Wed, 03 Aug 2011 00:17:11 +0000

On July 8th, Kio Stark and I had a baby named Nika Stark Pettis at a hospital. We had been camped out there since Kio was on bedrest for about 6 weeks before the birth and Kio had the baby about 7 weeks early which is pretty early. Then the baby spent 6 weeks in the NICU. (Neo Natal Intensive Care Unit) It's a total relief to have her home. I'm not very impressed with the state of hospitals and health care. If there is one thing that could be improved, it would be redundancy in the transfer of patient data from one shift to the next and from one doctor to the next and from one nurse to the next.

I learned a lot about being in the NICU by being an obsessive dad at the NICU and so I figured I'd share some tips and tricks for surviving the NICU here for others. This is going to sound pretty intense. NICU's are intense places!

Here are my rules for being an obsessive dad in the NICU:

1. Always have an advocate with you at the hospital. This isn't really a tip just for the NICU, it's for everyone. Hospitals are stressful places. This experience taught me that every one who goes to a hospital should have an advocate with them that takes notes, helps figure out what doctors and nurses mean, checks on medicine side effects, and can remind nurses and doctors of the plans for the patient including the times medicine is given and just to keep everything in line.

2. Professional patient advocates are there to help when things aren't right. If something is not right, you've got to be the advocate and get your baby the help they need. Don't assume that someone else is looking after your baby. If something isn't right and does not get addressed, there are patient advocates to help you make sure the issue is addressed. Ask for directions to the patient advocate office, it may not be easy to find or in an obvious place in the hospital.

On the second day that Nika was in the NICU, I arrived after a shift change to find the monitor flatlined. I quickly checked her breathing and pulse and found that the baby had been unplugged and there was no one in the room with her or the room outside. From the datasheet, she'd been unplugged for over an hour and even with the backup systems including remote monitors, nobody had noticed. I blew a gasket when the nurse made excuses about how busy she was, how the technology isn't reliable, and how they were understaffed. I went to a supervisor, who didn't actually have time to get to the bottom of the situation and then the managing doctor who didn't get back to me after saying he would look into it. At that point I went to the patient advocate office and a patient advocate helped make the issue real and made sure it didn't get swept under the rug. Every hospital has a patient advocate office. The patient advocate made sure everyone knew that a mistake had been made and it wasn't going to just get swept under the rug. I had already learned from the pregnancy that hospitals are horrible at data transfer across shifts, but it was pretty stressful to realize that all the technology in the world can't be a redundant life support network if humans are neglectful. If I couldn't depend on the NICU to be a redundant life support system, it meant that I had to be there all the time.

3. Be there as much as possible. After that experience, I made sure to be there as much as possible. We figured that if me or Kio or Grandma was there, there will be at least one person there to make sure the baby is breathing and her heart is breathing. NICUs are very busy places, and after spending a lot of time there, I can say that they never have enough people and the technology isn't failsafe. Alarms go off so often because leads become disconnected that there can be a long time between an alarm going off and anyone responding. If you're there, you can take your baby's pulse or feel her breathing and apply cpr if there is a problem. (Never had to do this thankfully!) Get trained to do this. It's easy. 30 chest compressions, 2 puffs of breath. Kio and I are super lucky and Grandma was able to be at the hospital a lot which was a huge blessing. Huge win for us and huge win for Nika to have someone with her a lot of the time that she was at the hospital. We also ended up staying at a friend's place and then after that we used craigslist to find a sublet across the street from the hospital so that we didn't have to spend hours a day communiting from home during the time Nika was in the NICU and therefore we could spend more time with the baby.

4. Take notes on everything the nurses and doctors say. Hospitals haven't set up a reliable and redundant data network to transfer information from one shift to the next, so you have to be the data network and tell each nurse and doctor all the details of what's going on, what medications are involved and how often they need to be given. Find out when rounds are and be there for them. Rounds are when they come around and talk about your baby and make decisions about when things happen. Nurses end up carrying a lot of weight here. Pretty much the doctor says, "what should we do?" and the nurse decides. Very often, the nurse has only been around the baby for an hour or two and makes decisions. Often times, you'll have to remind them about things that are scheduled to happen. I had many times where I had to ask them to stick to their own timeline. While taking notes, ask for last names when you write their names down. Taking full names gave them notice that they were accountable and was the most helpful thing I did in making sure that Nika got good care. Ask for timelines and checkpoints and rules. They kept saying that when she gets to 4 pounds she'd go home, but the reality is when she got to 4 pounds she has to have a sleep test and a number of other tests.

5. There are no rules. Nurses and doctor said absolutely conflicting things about when and why things happen. This is actually kinda disturbing because it means that the internet might be more reliable for information about many things relating to the health of your child! We went home one night after being told that it would be days before she'd transition from an isollete incubator to an open bassinet. Then the next morning, the morning doctor had her decided to put her in a bassinet.

6. Transition times are dangerous. At the hospital I was not allowed to be there from 8-9 am and pm. There were a few times where they would ask me to leave at 8 for the transition and I had to basically say to the nurse, "you're about to go home and the next person isn't here to take over from you, I'm staying until I can transfer the data since you still don't know who the next nurse is and you're leaving." To they're credit, they figured out that I'm a bit of a stickler for this and that I also am a source of some random chocolate, cookies and overall friendliness, so unless it's a nurses first time with me, they know my routine. If I could go back in time, I would have brought more cookies. 95% of the nurses and doctors we dealt are top notch human beings full of caring and love for all babies and these folks deserve as much chocolate as they can eat.

7. Don't accept things that aren't right. I had one nurse who was not very awake and I think she was on some sort of heavy medication. I caught her touching the baby and then touching the garbage can lid with her hands instead of using the foot pedal and then not using purell and touching the baby with dirty hands. after she did it a 3rd time, I finally confronted her and later pulled the managing doctor aside to say, "This woman is not very awake and every time she's my baby's nurse, I have to watch over her like a hawk to make sure she doesn't do things that put my babies life in danger." After that conversation, the nurse took a month long vacation. Again, remember there is a patient advocate that can help if you don't feel your issue is being adressed.

8. Make friends with the other parents at the NICU and exchange phone numbers. You can be there for each other and let each other know that something is wrong faster than the staff.

9. Ask for a tour of the place. We found out a month into being there that there was a room for parents that had it's own bathroom that was cleaner than the public toilet on the floor. We also found out at the end of our time there that there were showers and towels and a computer with a printer and scanner for parents who were there all the time and it would have been great to have known those things from the beginning.

I feel so thankful that Nika is doing great now. She's been a fighter since day 1 and now she's 7 weeks old and is growing more than an ounce a day. She came out at about 2.6 pounds and is now 4.8 pounds. She's beautiful, I love her so much and am filled with happy daddy vibes a lot. Photos at http://flickr.com/bre.

Art Project: Important People

brepettis@gmail.com (Things!) — Fri, 27 May 2011 12:55:03 +0000

I really tried making a go of being an artist multiple times last decade. I'd quit my job, give it a go and try and make it work until I ran out of money. That didn't work and I got ended up making tutorial videos and now I have a company making 3D printers. All good and I get to be creative in my daily life, but not very arty.

Getting to work on 7 on 7 with Rhyzome at the New Museum made the artist inside me very happy! This is what Forbes said about the project that Zach Lieberman and I worked on. Sweet!

The most finished and pure-arty of the projects was “Important People,” by Zach Lieberman and Bre Pettis. They took a Kinect camera to the East Village’s Tompkins Park and recruited volunteers to be filmed listing off the most important people in their lives. The Kinect camera allowed them to build a digital topographic map of each person’s face, which they then fed into a 3-D printer. They then played the films back projected onto the miniature 3-D faces to dramatic effect. I particularly liked about this that they captured the emotions that play across a person’s face as they think about the most important people in their lives, and the way that the speakers were transformed into important people, with casts of their faces created. It speaks to the way technology has the power to make us so easily into celebrities, as the access and cost of publicity has fallen so dramatically in the digital age.The most finished and pure-arty of the projects was “Important People,” by Zach Lieberman and Bre Pettis. They took a Kinect camera to the East Village’s Tompkins Park and recruited volunteers to be filmed listing off the most important people in their lives. The Kinect camera allowed them to build a digital topographic map of each person’s face, which they then fed into a 3-D printer. They then played the films back projected onto the miniature 3-D faces to dramatic effect. I particularly liked about this that they captured the emotions that play across a person’s face as they think about the most important people in their lives, and the way that the speakers were transformed into important people, with casts of their faces created. It speaks to the way technology has the power to make us so easily into celebrities, as the access and cost of publicity has fallen so dramatically in the digital age.

Fabricate 2011

brepettis@gmail.com (Things!) — Sat, 16 Apr 2011 15:11:51 +0000

I'm at Fabricate 2001, a conference about fabrication, design, and architecture. It's been great to meet the architecture community and chat. I don't have any architecture background, so it's a cultural anthropology lesson for me as well. Here are my takeaway points. I may add more later.

Architects are like philosophers and are capable of thinking about things from a very extrapolated and conceptual level.
The two main buzzwords in the architectural fabrication community here are parametric and optimisation.
There is a new generation of architects that are either in school or recently graduated that are obsessed with low cost or free tools and materials and automation. Arduinos got mentioned many times. Open source tools, software, and infrastructure is a small but growing voice in architecture. The internet/sharing culture is just beginning to really arrive to the field and is beginning to unlock the black boxes of old boy networks and proprietary software/hardware. It seems like there were lots of people who were experimenting with students to explore automated manufacturing techniques on a scale that could bring design and manufacturing to the masses.
This crowd loves orange robotic arms. Seriously, 4 or 5 presentations had pictures of them in their talks. Also, there was an awesome robotic arm in the lobby. While this technology is 30 years old, they are being used in interesting ways to collaborate with human friends to make interesting things. Where can I get a big orange robotic arm? Am I going to have to make my own? (probably)
3D printing is gaining traction and there are a lot of people who want to get involved at the gcode level to explore the material at the molecule level. I gave out lots of MakerBotted presents!

I made a lot of new friends and enjoyed learning about the state of technology and fabrication in the architectural field, thanks to the organizers and presenters for a wonderful conference!

Craving Art Creation with a Plotter

brepettis@gmail.com (Things!) — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 20:18:03 +0000

In high school, I took an engineering class. It was, by far, my favorite class. We had all sorts of assignments that ranged from taking something and drawing it from multiple angles to creating mousetrap powered balloon popping machines.

It was 1988 and there was a computer that had cad software. I remember that you could zoom in on a drawing of the moon to find the lunar lander. It was amazing to my 16 year old brain that you could look at the moon and zoom in on the lander. Google maps has made this experience ubiquotous.

There was also a plotter and I remember the senior students got to use it. It had multiple pens and the machine would go over and trade in it's pen for one of a different color. I could have just watched that machine for the rest of high school, it was so fascinating. I always wanted to use it. There was also a blueprint machine that we could use to make blueprints. You fed your vellum drawing into it and it converted it into a beautiful blue print.

Fast forward 20 years. I made a drawbot in Seattle with my awesome friends that assembled at Hackerbot labs. I've also worked with the craftrobo.

I also got inspired by being at Modelabs this last weekend where they have two plotters and a shopbot. I've been craving large pieces of art to put on the wall. Today I pulled out a lumenlab mill that we've had on the shelf here at MakerBot and it totally works, but it moves veeeeeery slow, which is fine for milling, but not so exciting for for drawing.

So the next step is to use a real plotter. We've got one at NYCR, but nobody has been able to get the drivers for it and get it up and running, so I'll try that first. I'm also wanting to get a blueprint machine and make blueprints from plotter prints.

Apps for the Appocolypse

brepettis@gmail.com (Things!) — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 15:21:00 +0000

With my prediction that the internet has would go down in 2011 coming true in Egypt and Obama looking to get it set up so he can shut down the internet in times of emergency, it makes you wonder what we'd do if some shit went down locally. First they shut down facebook and twitter and then they shut down the cell networks and it sounds like they are jamming ham radio freqs as well.

How would you contact the ones you love if the cell/internet networks went down? How would you get the news out to the greater worldwide community if there were things you were seeing that the world needed to see?

There are a million game apps and a million calorie counting apps and those are cool, but I'd like to propose something that I'd like to see built in preparation for national or political or military disasters.

It's very possible that these kind of ideas are naive/already been done or just plain stupid. That's the point of brainstorming, to get them out. Feel free to come up with better ideas or improve ideas in the comments. Even better... make something happen!!!

Local wifi IRC: I want an app that creates a localized IRC channel that anyone within wifi range can join. The idea here is that wifi can't be jammed locally, so it would be nice to set up a localized network to chat with your neighbors without leaving the house. Bonus points if it can act as a node. This may already be possible, but it's definately not easy. I'd like to just open my phone, turn on wifi, run the app and see IRC chat rooms within wifi range of my device. Bonus points for being able to make the nodes into a network. Extra bonus points for sending a message chained via wifi devices accross a continent.

What other apps do you want for the appocolypse? What can you make that will be useful to the rest of the world in times of trouble? The time to make these things is before you need them! Go!

2011 Predictions

brepettis@gmail.com (Things!) — Fri, 31 Dec 2010 04:30:06 +0000

2011 is going to be a year of sharing. Here are my predictions for 2011.

1. Life will continue to be interesting and I will continue to be very busy working on MakerBots and the community of more than 3000 MakerBot Operators will do something on a global scale. I'm not sure what, but I feel it coming.

2. Wikileaks is just the beginning of an immense amount of sharing. I predict there will be a lot more sharing of things that in a pre-internet world, couldn't have been shared.

3. Gold will continue to do well as the dollar declines and other currencies rise.

4. The internet infrastructure will go down for 2 days in 2011 and cause an immense amount of frustration and an emergance of local off grid networks and physical data storage will emerge. Also neighborhood networks will happen... finally!

5. I'll play the banjo more.

6. Someone will upload a digital design to Thingiverse that will have an impact on lives in places where there isn't a daily postal service. Not sure what, but got a feeling about this one too.

Haircut

brepettis@gmail.com (Things!) — Sun, 26 Dec 2010 00:23:38 +0000

My hair grows and eventually I get all scruffy and I am forced to get a haircut.

Haircuts are expensive and require appointments and time. I cut my hair myself every few months. Here's my procedure so you can do it too.

Acquire scissors. Sharp ones if possible. I've used safety scissors before and scissors meant to cut clothes off someone who has been in a wreck. Those scissors are great. They are serated.
Lay down a sheet of newspaper. This helps with clean up.
Cut your hair. I personally just grab some, pull it out from my head and snip it leaving it about 1-2 inches long. Repeat!
Trim. I have a beard trimmer that was like $10 and I use it to clean up the back of my neck and tidy up the chops. It's a bit of a trick doing this without eyes on the back of your head, but you get the hang of it and it grows out if you screw it up. Note: I once got help on this part and got a reverse mohawk and had to start from scratch by shaving my head.
Throw the hair away and take a shower.

That's it! Go forth and cut your own hair and be free of the cost of having someone else do it for you!

DIY Fablab!

brepettis@gmail.com (Things!) — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 14:11:23 +0000

If you were going to build your own diy manufacturing facility for making almost anything, what would you have in it? Here's my list!

MakerBot - 3D printer and I'd add the heated build platform - $1000
Lasersaur - DIY Laser cutter kit in development - $559
DIYLILCNC - Sweet little CNC that uses a dremel $700 (on my personal make-list)
Oltrogge CNC 4×8 Router - Sweet large CNC Mill - $3000 (also on my personal make-list)
An awesome wet dry vacuum VERY IMPORTANT!- $200

Ok, so the total comes to $5459! Yarr! That is a super cheap and fabulous laboratory!

If I was in a hurry, I'd probably get an Epilog Zing laser instead of wait for the lasersaur, although once the lasersaur arrives on the market it's going to open up laser cutting for the masses.

I believe you can make almost anything with the above stuff. And so I throw down the challenge! What changes would you make to this list! What would you add to the DIY Fablab list? What are the cheapest options that offer the biggest opportunities for creativity? I challenge you to make your own list filled with the most powerful inexpensive tools for your own fabulous laboratory! What would you add/change?

Photo: Tesla... just chilling and reading a book with a tesla coil in his workshop. I should probably add one of those to the list, right?