The Very First 3D Printer Hobby Shop: The MakerBot BotCave Retail Store

87th Avenue, Brooklyn. It's like the early 70s all over again! I remember visiting the first hobby computer board shops in London. I remember buying my first single board computer. It was called a NASCOM. It was a UK design. It was based on the Zilog Z80 processor. Yes, I had to solder a few hundred components. It took a year to get working. I spent the next 2 years writing a compiler for it in Z80 assembler code. It worked. I still have it, and it still boots (at think I think it does - I tried 2 years ago and none of the capacitors had rotted, so all was ok). It had 64k RAM because I added a 48K RAM card, also built from discrete components. It eventually made it into a rack, with other cards, all built from discrete components.

And so here we are in 2010, and MakerBot Industries has set up shop on 87th Avenue, Brooklyn.

Will the personal computer explosion that followed the period of intense experimentation in the 70s with single board computers be repeated with 3D Printing? Will 3DP be bigger? Will a 3DP capability have as much, or more, impact on the world?

Visit the first hobby shop for 3D Printing here:



http://www.makerbot.com/

Print 3D for Rapid Tooling

Why do you want a 3D part? Why are you interested in 3D Printing? To make a product or spare part? How about to make a tool for making another part?

Watch how a 3D object (printed by ObJetGeometries) can be used to make a mold which is then used to make the target part .... in this case a flexible keypad.

http://www.youtube.com/user/ObjetGeometries#p/u/0/H-LNSrvan-M

Shapeways prints a chair in 3D

Shapeways - the Amazon of 3D Printing - surprises us again. They have brought a service to market that is capable of printing objects the size of a chair:

http://www.shapeways.com/blog/archives/624-Supersize-Your-3D-Prints.html