MakerBot Founders and Final Prototypes

First of all, if you want to learn more about our robot, go check out makerbot.com. It's a robot that you can make yourself to make anything you can imagine, from toys to gears to... well, anything!

We finished our final prototype last night at around 3AM and took this picture. We've been working around the clock getting this robot up and running.

We got our first prototype up and running about a month ago and we've spent the last month making improvements to get it to the point where it is now where it's really working fantastic and all the notches and holes are in the best places.

It feels really good to be at a place where we've got our prototype done and now and I suppose I'm going to have to stop calling it a prototype now that it's the official production machine.

Besides final tweaks we've been spending a lot of time ordering things. There are a ton of parts that have to be ordered from all over and we bring them together. This has been a great experience for me since I usually am making one-off projects and having to work within the boundaries of using materials that we can source 1000's of is a really interesting limitation for a maker like me. I thrive on constraints, so it's been fun to have the constraint that I can only use parts that I can make sure thousands of people can access!

We're in documentation and preproduction mode now and I'm going to be running the lasercutter a lot to get all the pre-orders filled and shipped in 10 days. Stay tuned!

-Bre Pettis