Gadgetory

I welcome back here at the scene at stage i'm donald bell at CES 2013 and i am joined by Bre Pettis here co-founder and CEO of MakerBot industries and yesterday you guys announced the MakerBot replicator 2x am i right tell me about your new 3d printer so we unveiled this one yesterday so this is our fourth generation of MakerBot and to kind of break it down the MakerBot replicator 2 is a single extruder a 3d printer optimized to use a material called PLA which is a renewable by plastic that's made from corn now yesterday we unveiled the replicator 2x for extreme for for experimental airplanes yes maybe but it's kind of like that actually because it uses the replicator 2x uses a material called ABS which is a little bit fuzzier material and we made we optimized the machines so that you can be successful with it but it's really set up for the Doc Brown MacGyver types like you know if you've built a trebuchet from scratch replicator 2 axis abs 7 go up to 11 so now for like you can really feel the power yeah so you can print out your own style and let's back up I know there's still people out there who really haven't gotten their head around 3d printing the why of it the who's using your 3d printers you've been selling these now for a good two three years how long has makeup up and selling MakerBot's this is our fourth year we are and this is our fourth time at CES the first year we were here we were the we were like so far back did you guys make a box here but you were yeah you were in the boonies yeah way back there then who's really taking up the the MakerBot's and kind of been your your biggest market well to kind of well first I should tell people at 3d printing us cuz it's still science fiction for a lot of people and basically if you think about 2d printing like you have a virtual document on your computer and you turn into a physical documentary with 3d printing you have a virtual 3d model and you turn into you know a physical 3d model and it builds it up layer by layer and then you take it out and you have your thing that your mouth is there you can give her a name and so what's so we've got these two new 3d printers that we launched and then we've also got some other stuff we've got we updated our software so it's more feature-rich and then we launched a thing on Thingiverse which is our place where it's our library where people share downloadable digital designs we launched an API which allows developers to make things so just for fun we made an application on that API called the MakerBot customizer and it lets you go on there and create things so it makes it it makes it really simple to make things so like there's the iPhone case and you literally you choose what kind of iPhone you have and you choose what kind of shapes you want to have and how much they overlap and how thick things are going to be and you can make a custom geometric pattern geometric pattern to iPhone case looks really cool show some of these off show me some of the things that been made by the MakerBot so this is one of my I'm a gearhead I you know I've had like 30 cars and only two of them were worth more than a thousand dollars so I've spent a lot of the time under the hood of old cars and this is a v6 Ford engine block and Ford sent us the model for this and this is actually the model for a Ford v6 engine block so just scale down you have to print out a few more pieces though to get the whole car eventually that's true we need there's actually but it's really cool you can see where the where the oil goes and then there's a separate system for the coolant and it's all there so in some ways this is an education in how an engine works just printing that out and this is printed actually at medium resolution which is still really nice and then this is actually we're making this right now it's just starting this is a sculpture a Sappho sculpture and this is printing it printed at our highest resolution 100 micron layer height yeah and you can definitely tell the difference in the the feel of the resolution on this little statuesque statue eight and that and the engine block this has kind of like a satiny finish smoother this one you can kind of feel the steps as of things and this is smooth and then you better oh you also should this little statue can live in this house yes your miniature furniture here so this is furniture made by Casey Holdren and Casey Hall Grimm she's a set designer in New York and her sets are on Broadway and in the old days she used to design sets with like cardboard and exacto knives and glue and you know spilled blood everywhere and process right well now she's got a few MakerBot's and when she goes to the sign a set she designs them all on her computer and then makes them on her MakerBot takes him into the director and they talk about stuff and and because of this she's done this for a lot of shows she's got all this period furniture for like games just got Victorian furniture and I'm not sure really kind of like classic furniture for different plays hopper where Bane's full of old Victorian miniature furniture so now on top of being a set designer she's also got a side business where she sells us to dollhouse enthusiasts so it's one of the things that when you're a maker about operator you think about okay I'm gonna make these things in the world and if people want them no problem I'll just make more but mostly you're talking about creative professionals people are in kind of different crafty professions or hobbies but there is also that that sense that what's exciting about this technology and why is that CES is that it may be this step towards this future of printing out your own gadgets or or somehow a cooperative process of you know the next iPhone come how comes out in some parallel universe it's pseudo open sourced and you can print out the casing for it and then just buy the chips from Apple or something like that right there's there's this idea that maybe 3d printing is going to replace the conventional distribution of gadgets so at our core MakerBot is an innovation company and and what's cool is we innovate so that you can innovate and our core audiences is you know in engineers industrial designers architects and you know professionals who use CAD but then there's this whole other level of people who just want to live in the future and so they get their amp there may be a teacher or they a parent and they just get one of these so that they can be ready for what happens now and those people they don't necessarily have to design the next Ford engine they're free to design whatever weird thing they can imagine and you know traditionally if you were going to come up with a product you have to think about you know selling it to ten or a hundred thousand people or the MakerBot you just have to make it for yourself right so there's all sorts of wonderful things on Thingiverse every day that's and that are coming out and it's and we're at an inflection point no it's never been a better time to be a creative you know maker in the world with a MakerBot you can make stuff just straight out of your head what used to take a month to send off to a model shop to be made and take you an hour so that whole process of innovation you can iterate much faster so you can do a lot more you can try things out a lot more before you make your final check I mean it gets to this idea of home production right of instead of the printer analogy instead of you know having to go down and have your your you know making copies on your old mimeograph machine you can print out at home now and in the same way here you can instead of having to go and buy an iPhone case you can print one out at home or print out your miniature furniture is there is there it doesn't stop it at plastics or is there a way that this is technology is eventually going to come down to 3d printing you know motherboards for your computer or 3d printing food as our producer was mentioning today is there if there another step to this that gets towards the whole gadget what's so great is that we're at the beginning of the next Industrial Revolution and we put this power in people's hands and they're gonna do both wonderfully innovative and totally absurd things with it and in many ways absurd things are really close to innovative things because when you make something that's just stupid because you can you learn a little bit something different about what's possible then if you are really focused on a traditional application so we're gonna see just a massive blossoming in the coming years as more and more people get these in their hands and it just becomes normal to innovate super-excited about it breathe thank you so much for joining us today