How MakerBot Was Born

That company would be maker Butt. So we're going to learn the story of where maker Butt came from and what has happened to it throughout its history, which as of this recording is still less than a decade in length. It hasn't even been around for ten years yet. But for such a young company, it has had a pretty big impact. For better and for worse. Maker Butt helped bring three D printing into a more mainstream awareness, and the story's big enough for it to span two episodes.

I know it's a young company, but there's a lot that happened that has important, relevant impact on multiple industries that relate to tech, and I think there are a lot of lessons to be learned from the story of maker Bot, and so we're gonna take two episodes to really look into it, not just the technology, but again the story behind the people that formed it. So to talk about the company's history, it helps if we first talk about the history of three D printing, which is

also known as a type of additive manufacturing. And we call it additive because it involves building something up layer by layer, rather than by taking say a block of material like wood or marble or something, and then carving

away everything that isn't whatever it is you're building. So if you're trying to build a sphere, you would end up putting down little thin layers of material in a pad over and over, with each successive layer overlapping a little bit on all the different edges to fill out the sphere until you got to the widest part, and then you would reverse that pattern to get back to the other end, and you would build it up layer by layer, as opposed to taking say a block of

plastic and then cutting a sphere from that block. An early proposal for this approach came from Hideo Kodama, who worked at the Nagoya the Municipal Industrial Research Institute, and Kodama wrote a report about a rapid prototyping system that could build models layer by layer. In nineteen eighty four, a guy named Chuck Hull secured a patent for a procedure called stereolithography. The story behind that is actually pretty interesting,

but I'm going to leave it for another podcast. Suffice it to say he was not the only person who had this idea, he was the first person to receive a patent for it. In this approach, you could rapidly build physical models of something by using a photo polymerized resin.

So that would be a type of material that would be in liquid format, and it would go from liquid to solid after you expose it to a certain kind of light, like a very high high powered ultraviolet light, and you would use this light to start turning the liquid into solid stuff. And it worked almost like an upside down version of today's common three D printers. So if you have ever worked with a three D printer, you know typically there's a platter a printer bed, typically

heated that the print head lays plastic down on top of. Well, this approach reverses that. So you've got a platform that

is touching this liquid this photo polymerizing resin. When you shoot UV light right at the part where the platform and the liquid meat, it turns solid and that adheres to the platform, and you slowly draw the platform up as if you're lifting it out of that liquid, and you keep adding layers by shooting the light at the next layer down of this liquid, and you build it that way, so it's actually drawing this up out of

the liquid. It almost looks like you've got a submerged object that you're pulling up out of this stuff, but in fact you're actually converting that stuff into a solid. It's actually really cool to look at. But one of the really important things that his approach relied upon was

using digital data to send instructions to the device. So this idea of creating a file format that could send that could contain the actual pattern and software that would have the instructions for the equipment to say, based upon this pattern, this is what you need to draw for every single layer and build this three dimensional object. That approach meant that designers could relatively quickly create models of

various components. You could prototype them in a matter of rather than having to go through a very lengthy fabrication process. And time is money and so is effort, So bringing down the time and effort needed to create prototypes would significantly reduce the cost of developing various stuff, so you could very quickly find out which of your ideas were viable and which ones you might have to tweak or

abandon by building out your components this way. But this was in a time when such technology was really only available to industries and corporations. You couldn't go out and buy a three D printer back in those early days. It would cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars. It was not something the average person would even be aware of, let alone be able to access. This also meant that if you did have access to one of these devices,

you could print replacement parts for vintage technology. So maybe no one's making a particular type of car part. For example, maybe there's a specific model of car that you own and you want to keep it in good repair, but that company no longer exists, so you can't just go out and buy a replacement part. With the right type of additive manufacturing equipment, you could build a replacement part. All you would need is the digital plan to do that.

Whether you made that in a computer assist Design CAD program, or maybe you were able to get hold of that design from somebody, or maybe even you were able to scan an original part and make a digital copy that way. Jay Leno reportedly uses this method to maintain his collection of vintage cars. And it helps that we can now print in lots of different materials, not just the plastics that you typically encounter with consumer brand three D printers.

All right, So that's the basic history of additive manufacturing. From its beginning, it was the realm of the manufacturing industry. It was not something that your average person knew about. Skip ahead twenty years, hop on over to the UK. It's lovely there. And in two thousand and four, doctor Adrian Bauer of the University of Bath proposed a new project that the following year would be called rep rap our ep r AP that stands for Replicating Rapid prototyper.

The goal of this project was to create a low cost three D printer, one that would be capable of printing most of the parts of a duplicate three D printer. Now, this in itself wasn't exactly a new idea. There was a mathematician and a total genius named John von Neuman. I'll have to do a full episode about von Neuman in the future. He proposed a concept which he called

the Universal Constructor. This would be a machine that would be capable of replicating itself, Which is the super simple explanation. If I do a full episode about him, I'll have to go into much greater detail, because it's a pretty phenomenal concept. Now. Bauyer's proposal was a little more modest than what von Neuman was talking about. It would be able to largely copy itself, piece by piece, but unlike a true universal constructor, it would not be able to

assemble the new copy. It wouldn't be able to. It had self copying but not self assembly abilities. You would still need a person to actually take all those pieces and put them together. He envisioned a rapid prototyping machine that could make most of the components needed to make a second copy. So in theory, you could make one of these things. You could then buy the raw materials you needed, meaning largely the plastic that the printer would use as a printing medium and as for its parts.

Then you could print all the parts for a second one, and then build the second one and use that one to print all the parts for a third one, and so on and so forth, and you could keep on printing more and more copies and give them to all your friends, and soon everybody has one of these things.

But he admitted that there were some parts like stepping motors or metal fasteners that would not really be printable in this way, so you would have to purchase those parts separately and put them together with the parts that you were able to print. However, these parts were widely available and more importantly, pretty cheap, so the most it would require is access to the digital plans to print the pieces that you needed. You would need one working

printer to do the printing. Obviously, if you didn't have a printer, you couldn't start the process, and you would need some know how in the assembly process about how to wire everything together and actually physically put it together.

But then you could just make copies. The project would involve not just the design of the physical printer itself, but also the software you would need to access this piece of equipment, the file formats you would need to be able to send to that equipment so that you could actually do some meaningful printing. Another very important element in RepRap and one that's going to become super important in our maker bot story, is that this whole idea was going to be an open source project and still

is to this day. It is an open source project. Now. That meant none of the designs for rep wrap proper would be proprietary or hidden from view. It needed to be open source for two big reasons. One was that it would allow these machines to perpetuate across large groups of people, so you don't want to have any barriers to keep that from happening. If you had protected intellectual property, then that's a limitation on how quickly stuff could be

spread across the entire population. But if you make it open source, everyone has access to it, so it removes those barriers. The other important bit is that Valuer wanted people to have the opportunity to change the open source information, whether it was changes to the design of the hardware or to the software, and in that way you could create improvements or alterations, and the design of the rep

rep device would evolve over time. As people joined the community and added their ideas to the design and implementation of this printer. People could experiment with different approaches. They might be able to improve the efficiency or the resolution of the print jobs, meaning how smooth is the finished print? If you can improve on that. That's a benefit to everybody.

And as long as everyone kept everything open source and we're sharing it freely, those improvements flow back into the overall maker community and they perpetuate across it, so everyone gets to benefit from everyone's ideas. So if you designed this properly, you could use a rep wrap one point zero printer, and then when someone makes an improved movement that would effectively become rep wrap one point one or whatever, you could use your old printer to print out the

new stuff. Alter your old printer, and now you've got a new printer. You never have to worry about obsolescence. So instead of having to abandon a technology three or four years down the road, you can keep making incremental improvements to your device by printing stuff with the device itself. So it almost becomes self improving. Not quite because it does require the input of real human beings, but you

get the idea. So bow your imagine a world where people could print whatever small parts they needed on demand, whether it was a replacement for an existing piece of technology or maybe just something totally new that they wanted. And he even envisioned a world in which people could print out their own recycling devices, and those recycling devices would consume the old, broken or worn out plastic parts.

So instead of just accumulating more and more of these broken parts, you would actually break that down so that you could use it again. You could have a new supply of plastic that you would use for printing material.

He thought the printers as wealth machines. The cost of items would be reduced down to the cost of their raw materials and the labor associated with assembling the stuff if assembly was required, and Bayer called the whole process Darwinian Marxism because the means of production would be in the hands of the proletariat without the pesky requirement of holding a bloody revolution in order to do it. Two of the three founders of MakerBot became part of the

rep rap community, and we're working on this goal. In two thousand and seven, Zach Hokin Smith joined the rep rap project while attending Iowa State University. Smith was quickly won over to the concept of open source hardware and would become an remain a strong advocate for that approach, so much so that he is now the executive rector for RepRap Research Foundation. Then you had Adam Meyer. He attended Cornell University in the early to mid nineteen nineties

and earned a degree in computer science. He worked as a developer for a couple of companies before being invited by Smith to work on a new project that would become maker Bot. And the third co founder is the one who was most closely associated with the maker Bot in those early years, even though you could argue convincingly that really Smith was the heart of the project. He was the reason why it all started in the first place.

But there was a third person who was sort of the face of the company, and this was Brie Pettis. More on him in just a moment, but first let's take a quick break to thank our sponsor. So I'm going to spend a little more time talking about Brie Petties because his story is the one tied to those early years. The man Baker bought even more than the other two for reasons that will later become clear. So Brie Petis didn't come to the maker community through being

a computer scientist or an engineer. He had attended college in the early nineties and studied subjects like performing arts in psychology. After college, he lived in Prague for a while. He worked on film sets as an assistant cameraman and in other capacities. He also landed a gig for a while as an assistant in Jim Henson's creature shop in London, England, and he eventually returned to the States, went back to school to further his studies, and he earned a teaching certificate.

So from the late nineties to the mid two thousands he was a teacher in the Seattle Public school system. And as a thirty one year old school teacher, you probably wouldn't have looked at Pettis and said, this guy's going to become the leader of a tech company with an incredibly disruptive goal of turning manufacturing upside down and putting that into the hands of the common consumer. He

was making instructional and educational videos for his students. He was frequently incorporating puppets and other stuff in these videos, and he was putting those videos up online and that caught the attention of a guy named Philip Torone, who was the senior editor of Make magazine, the diy Maker Journal.

Tarne offered Petis a job to come out to New York City and to work for Make that would involve him not just writing articles for make, but also creating videos, kind of like what he had been doing in his teaching gig, and he took Tourne up on the offer moved out to New York City. Now while he was in New York, Bree Pettis would meet Zack Smith, and the two of them would become two of the founding

members of a hacker collective called NYC Resistor. The group would hold regular meetings, including some that were open to the public, and at those meetings people could discuss ideas they could work on designs for hardware or software. Together, they could recruit people to work on projects and generally hacked technology just to figure out how it worked and how it might work better or maybe work in a way different from how the creators had originally intended, kind

of that whole hacker ethos. And it was through this organization that they also met Adam Mayor. Zach Smith brought his rep rap stuff to the NYC Resistor space to show it off and invite folks to help him work on the tech. In an effort to realize this RepRap vision of building machines capable of printing the parts necessary

to make copies of itself. Now, according to Pettis, he and Smith and Mayer got a RepRap machine, really a repstrap machine up and running briefly before it stopped functioning entirely. But that brief success inspired them to work on creating a rep strap kit of their own. So what is repstrap. Well, within the rep rap community, it refers to a three D printer quote cobbled together from whatever parts you can find, which will eventually allow you to print the parts for

a rep rap printer end quote. So it's another three D printer, but this one is with all sorts of like Frankenstein type parts, and the goal is that ultimately you can print all the parts to just build a rep rap printer using this kind of Jerry rigged system. The name comes from a combination of rep rap and bootstrap. The parts for a rep strap may not all be three D printed, Some of them could be constructed through subtractive means, like cutting materials down with like a laser

cutter or something along those lines. Now, their work led to the design of a printer they would call the Cupcake C in c C and C stands for computer numerical control, which is a concept that applies to a whole host of different computer controlled tools, not just three D printers, but stuff like drills or lathes. My buddy Oz used to operate a computer control router with this

kind of system. He would load a design into some software, use that software to send a command to the routing table, and the software would translate the design into a set of instructions that would be sent to this computer controlled routing table, and a big arm with a very fast spinning drill bit would descend and start cutting the patterns

into the material below. Next thing you knew, you had yourself a cutlass made out of aluminum, or some etched awards that were made out of plexiglass, all sorts of cool stuff. Well, the cupcake C and C was something that the three were able to make in a kit form. So the kit would include wires, a micro controller, and acrylic build platform upon which your three D printed objects would sit as the printer was working. It included an extruder which would convert the solid plastic into a form

that could be laid down layer by layer. I'll talk more about that later in this episode. In an XYZ positioning system and more like a balsa case essentially that

you could put together. Based on this quasi success of them getting this thing briefly running, the three decided that they would start a company of their own and really try to bring three D printing to the mass market, or at least a consumer market filled with makers and hobbyists who could perhaps support the business long enough for it to catch on, kind of like how the home PC business all started with kits in the nineteen seventies.

You would send off for a kit, you would get the parts, and you would put the computer together at home. That eventually led to the birth and then success of companies like Apple. So the three settled on the maker bought name pretty quickly. They all thought, well, this would let you make stuff. It's part of the maker community. It is more or less kind of a robot because it will automatically carry out the instructions you send to it. And they thought, well, there's no way that name is available.

It's too good of a name. But they did some research and found that as far as they could tell, no one had claimed to it. So they said, excellent, we're going to go with that. In January two thousand and nine, the three launched this company with the help of seventy five thousand dollars of seed money. Twenty five thousand dollars of that came from Adrian Bauer himself, the

man who proposed the RepRap project five years earlier. And like I said, their first product was the cupcake C and C and you would buy that in kit form, or if you lack the patience but you happen to have a whole lot more money, you could buy it fully assembled. If you buy it as a kit, it would set you back seven hundred and fifty dollars, a

princely sum in its own right. But if you wanted someone else to put the thing together and save you some time and remove the possibility that maybe you'd wire it up incorrectly, then you're looking at twenty five hundred dollars to buy one fully assembled. So what was up with the name Cupcake? Well, as Adam Meyer would explain to Google in two thousand and nine, there's a presentation that's up online. You can actually watch the whole thing

if you like. The Cupcake device was meant to be a three D positioning tool that could do more than just act as a three D printer. That was the first implementation they envisioned for it. But they thought, well, this is really a device where you can have two different components and they quote unquote know where they are in orientation with relation to each other, including distance and positioning, and then you could use that for all sorts of stuff,

not just three D printing. And they created a design, or propose a design at least that would use frosting as a stuff to pipe out onto a surface, like on a cupcake. So that's where they got the name cupcake C and C because they thought, well, this could really let you create very intricate designs and send them to the machine, and then they would carry out the designs automatically and your cupcakes would be made with robotic precision,

or at least frosted with robotic precision. While the team had been working on the design for the cupcake for a while, they didn't have an actual first generation cupcake C and C ready to go working until March of two thousand and nine. Brie was scheduled to travel to Austin, Texas for south By Southwest with the goal of showing

off the maker bot to people there. He didn't have a ticket, he was just going to show them the printer in bars around Austin, Texas, And from my experience the couple times I've been to south By Southwest, that seems to be the kind of location where most of the actual action of south By Southwest really takes place in the after hours in the various restaurants and bars

around Austin, Texas. So he shot a quick video of the team's early cupcake C and C printing out an object in March two thousand and nine, then immediately went to south By Southwest where he would show off this printer in bars, and he printed out shot glasses as a demonstration. Apparently he had this fascination was shot glasses in general, and so that was kind of his go to demo. After south By Southwest, the team actually created

an online storefront so people could purchase the printers. This was the first time they were actually offering them up for sale. They had the idea of seven hundred and fifty dollars for a kit. They knew they would charge twenty five hundred for a fully assembled one, and now they were finally ready to say, all right, if you

want one, put in the order. They had put together twenty kits and boxed them up so they were ready to go, and they thought that it would probably take a couple of months to sell out of that initial inventory because the idea was still pretty new, especially outside of the type community of makers who were familiar with the RepRap project. But instead, they actually sold out of their kits in two weeks. At that point, maker Bot was taking up space in the office of an entrepreneur

named Jake Lodwick. Loudwick had co founded the online video platform Vimeo. Before that, he had worked as a web developer for College Humor and It's early Days. He's another interesting person in business in tech, and I'll probably have to do a full episode about him in the future as well. But as MakerBot was getting bigger, they were taking up more and more space in Loudwick's office, and he eventually told his team that once his lease was up,

he was not planning on renewing. He was going to give up the space, and that meant the young company needed to secure space of their own for realsies, So they ended up leasing a five thousand square foot office space in Brooklyn, New York. They were convinced that this would give them plenty of room to grow, but within two months they had pretty much filled it up with capacity. Things were really exciting for the fledgling company at this time, and I would have my first experience with maker bot

not long after this stuff was going on. I'll talk more about that in just a second, but first let's take another quick break to thank our sponsor. Not only did the make Bought guys move into a new space, they made their first hire to help handle incoming orders. So now there was the three of them plus an employee. Exciting.

The maker community appeared to be eager to get hold of the tech that would allow them to actually explore the possibility of making the rep wrap dream a reality, something where they would be able to print all sorts of different parts, not just you know, chochkeys, but useful stuff. Part of that meant adhering to those principles of the open source philosophy. The cupcake was a true piece of

open source hardware. The software you need to run it was also open source, so the community could scour over the design of both and contribute fixes or improvements. They were acting as quality assurance, they were acting as research and development. This was incredibly valuable for Maker bought. Not only was it creating a community of loyal customers, it was also doing a lot of work that makrobot would

have had to do on its own. If it had been proprietary technology from the get go, they would have had to have their own teams QA stuff make sure everything's working properly. If something's not working properly, then they would have to go through the whole process of trying to fix the problem, you know, find a work around or a solution. They would also be looking at their own ways to improve the technology, but by releasing it in this open source format, their users became those people.

It was almost like the users were an employee by extension, and an employee of incredible skill because it came with all the ideas of all the different people in that community. It was incredibly powerful and apparently it was just really encouraging to participate in this community. People who bought a cupcake, C and C felt like they were part of something big and they had some sense of ownership there because their input was valued. They were all working together to

change the world. It was kind of this almost utopian sort of perspective. Well, as the orders were coming in the company was making plans to take another step into the consumer marketplace, and that would involve traveling out to Las Vegas, Nevada for the twenty ten CEES Trade Show, and that's where I saw a maker bought cupcake C and C for the first time as it slowly printed out a special plastic coin that I still have somewhere.

The team also talked about how they hoped to create a three D scanner in the future to let people convert a three dimensional scan of a physical object into the data necessary to print out a replica of that object. That would be a huge jump forward because it would mean you wouldn't have to plot out all the points yourself in a CAD program or hope that someone else could do it. With a good scanner, you could get a full three dimensional scan of something like a replacement part,

and then you would have that information forever. So it's not like you would scan it once and then you just print it once. You scan it once and you've got it, and whenever you need another one, you just print another one. So it was like you suddenly got access to a never ending supply of all these different parts if you could just scan them in and if you had the raw materials to print on another one. So you started to see the possibility of that vision

coming true. But at this point they didn't have the scanner that would come later, but they didn't have it at this early station, but they did say that was something they were interested in developing. Part of the disruption that three D printers were all about was a related project that Zack Smith had worked on back when the three co founders were still getting ready to launch maker Bot as a company, so this was late two thousand

and eight. This was a website called thingaverse, and the website is kind of a companion piece to maker Bot. It acts as a repository for user generated digital design files. So at thingaverse, designers could upload their design files for other people to use or even to alter in any

way that they liked. So if you created a collection of files for say three D printed chess pieces, you could upload them all as files to thingaverse and someone else could download those and print out the chess pieces that you designed, and the designs all followed the licensing strategy of either the New General Public License or the Creative Commons License, and those agreements typically allow people to use a piece of intellectual property with very few limitations.

Of course, it all depends upon the specific type of license. These licenses are not all just one approach. There are multiple different pathways you can take with them. But with some of those license you can actually allow folks to not just take your work, but make derivative or altered

works based off of what you've already done. So that means someone could download those chess pieces you designed, for example, and then they create a customized version of every piece that uses your models as a starting point, or then after that they might upload their own altered designs they can set right alongside your originals, and someone else could download either one or both and make changes to either

or both. So one of the categories that got a lot of action on Thingaverse early on had to do with the printers themselves, so users were designing parts that could upgrade the basic cupcake C and C design, So it was possible to go out and buy a cupcake C and C kit, spend the eighty hours or so it would take to put it together, get some plastic filament as your printing material, and then print out a

printer upgrade using the original version of the printer. Then you could take it apart, put the upgrade into your new and improved printer, and start up again. And that was again one of the most powerful parts of having this community was having people who are actively working to

improve the product. Maker Bot paid attention to those designs and would even incorporate some of them in the official future machines that would produce, and often it would include attribution, so the people who had created the designs would get an attribution in future versions of the actual products. So this was really the honeymoon phase for a maker Bot. The maker community was enthusiastically embracing the company. Tech news

outlets were really getting excited about covering it. But there were some big changes lurking on the horizon and they

would affect everything. So before I end this episode, before I conclude on this part, I figured it would be good to give just kind of a quick high level rundown on how these printers work in general, and I'll be chatting about some other models in the upcoming episodes, but they all work on a similar principle in the maker Bot family, So essentially, it all begins with that digital three D model of whatever it is you're going to print. That model serves as the set of instructions

for the printer. The printer software takes the model and essentially slices it into very thin layers from the bottom up. The bottom in this case being the side of the object that will be in contact with the building platform. It's not necessarily the bottom of the object itself, because you could print an object on its side or even upside down, so top and bottom in this case refer to whichever side is making contact with the base the

printing platform, that's the bottom. These instructions get sent to the printer, which can interpret the instructions as a set of plot points where it's going to lay down the plastic in a very thin layer. The type of plastic falls into a category called thermoplastic, and, as the name suggests, with thermo heat has an important part to play here.

Thermoplastics are materials that soften as they get hotter and they harden as they cool down, so if you heat them up to a hot enough temperature, they'll actually they'll melt. So a real of thermoplastic filament would serve as the raw material for the printer. The type of plastic. The two most common types of thermoplasts that you'll find for consumer three D printers would be ABS, which is oil based and it's the same sort of plastic that lego bricks are made out of, and PLA, which is a

biodegradable organic plastic. It's made from starchy byproducts maker Bot it tends to focus on both. They tended to focus earlier on ABS over PLA, but that would change over the course of the life of MakerBot as well. ABS tends to make a harder plastic than PLA once it sets, but it's also gotten amorphous melting point ABS does. That means that you can't be totally certain that which temperature

of the stuff is actually going to melt. It depends heavily upon the batch of plastic you have, so typically three D printers will heat up extruders to around two hundred and thirty degrees celsius, but depending upon the filament, you might need anything between two hundred and ten degrees celsius to two hundred and forty degrees celsius to get the ideal temperature to get the consistency the melting that you will need to print properly in addition, ABS can

warp as you print if it happens to cool down too much during the printing process. So for that reason, if you print an ABS, you need a heated bed or heated platform to keep the plastic at a high enough temperature so it holds its shape through the entire

printing process. But you also don't want the bed to be so hot that it ends up making the plastic guy like it never has a chance to actually cool enough to start hardening, and it'll warp as the print head moves around or as the object becomes too heavy. PLA is in general safer to use than ABS. It puts out fewer fumes at any rate. It also has a lower melting point, so you don't have to operate the printer at such a high temperature at the extruders,

and it cools into a glossy, smooth appearance. It's a little more esthetically pleasing than ABS typically is. After printing running bed doesn't necessarily have to be heated, though the resources I'm familiar with suggest you should probably still use a heated print bed. You just don't need it as hot as you would with ABS, So in other words, you might need a heated print bed that's at sixty degrees celsius for PLA versus eighty degrees celsius for ABS.

PLA has greater tensile strength than ABS, but ABS typically withstands wear and tear better and will withstand impact better. If you drop something that's been printed in ABS plastic, it tends to just kind of bounce, and it's typically kind of fine. PLA material can be a bit more brittle. It could actually shatter, depending upon what it is and how hard it hits the ground, whether it's PLA or ABS.

There's a motor that's in a three D printer that pulls this filament, this wire like construction of plastic into the printer's extruder. The extruder is essentially a super heated nozzle, or not superheated, but at least a very hot nozzle. It's heated to a precise temperature like that two hundred and thirty degrees celsius for APS, for example, and that's in order to melt this filament, and the extruder prints

this molten plastic on the heated print bed. The motor keeps it moving, so the filament keeps adding pressure, thus pushing the liquid plastic through the end of the nozzle, and the process continues until you finish the print job. Either the extruder will move around the print bed or the print bed will move underneath the extruder. It depends

upon the design of the printer. In either case, these movements correspond with the digital three D model for the object that you're sending to the printer in the first place, and the printer lays down the first of many layers of molten plastic. The printer repeats that process layer by layer, laying down molten plastic to sit on top of and

bind to the lower layer of plastic. The printer is essentially creating multiple two dimensional images, just stacks of two dimensional images, over and over again until they add up to a full three dimensional printed object. The Cupcake CNC could print an object up to one hundred millimeters long, one hundred millimeters wide, and one hundred and thirty millimeters tall, so that translates to four inches by four inches by

five inches more or less. But the Cupcake C and C was just the beginning, and while this company was rapidly gaining fans in the maker community, things were bound to change pretty dramatically in the next couple of years. I'll explain more in part two of this episode, but that concludes this part. So I hope you guys are enjoying the story of makerbots so far. Our next episode will have a lot of controversy and tragedy in it, at least from a kind of a high level view,

very interesting stuff. If you guys have suggestions for future episodes of tech Stuff, tell you what, go to our website, it's tech Stuff podcast dot com. You can check out the links there, you can get in contact with me, let me know what you would like me to cover in future episodes. You can also pop on over to our store over at tepublic dot com slash tech stuff and look at the merchandise there and not just look at it, you know, buy something if you like it.

Every purchase you make goes to help the show. We greatly appreciate it. Then We've got some fun designs on there, and we've got new ones coming all the time. So go check it out and I'll talk to you again really soon for more on this and thousands of other topics. Because it HowStuffWorks. Dot Com