Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “New Dimensions to 3D Printing: Brook Drumm, Printrbot”.
My name’s brooke and i’m from printerbot, so i’m the ceo founder guy and i say that informally, because i’m just a guy, i don’t have any training. I don’t have an electrical engineering degree. I don’t have a mechanical engineering degree. I was literally a pastor for years and years and started making stuff, so i started doing um, i started doing websites and then, when i i stopped working at a church, i went over and i started doing websites and that got a little boring.
So i wanted to make something that you could hold in your hands. So really i did. I did the kickstarter just from being bored and not being able to hold it in my hand and have toys to play with. So i did the kickstarter just give you a quick update of where printerbot is so the kickstarter. You know i wanted to raise 25 000 and build 50 bots. We raised 830 000 and sold 100 and 1400 units somewhere around there, and that was like a total life changer right, a total shock in every single way. I mean everything changed and i’ve had a blast, but i got to tell you doing a startup.
That quickly is really really hard for a guy. That has no experience right, but i’m here to, i really want to cheer on the people that you know. I’Ve met some guys that are starting companies, man and i’m so excited for people just jumping in with both feet. Who cares what you know just going for it man? So that’s what we’ve done at printerbot and so from the very beginning. I really wanted to create something that was you know, something that i wanted to own.
So if you watch my product line, you know we kind of started out with this 500 bot, and you know that went crazy, and so we thought well. We got to follow that up with something, so we made a little bigger, a little smaller and really from the very beginning after buying a makerbot cupcake and putting it together at the table. With my boy and my kids, i knew that i wanted to make it smaller. I wanted to make it cheaper and i wanted to be easier to build right. So to answer the question of of you know what, where are we going with 3d printing? I think one thing is just more accessibility, not just to the printers, because there are a lot of companies that are springing up around this right, but i think they’re going to get easier and i just brought one.
I just wanted to show you so we’ve kind of had that progression of you know. I wanted to be able to carry it with me, and so i do i fly with my bots, i’m the only guy. I know that has printed at thirty thousand feet. I didn’t tell anybody – and i was like margie, so i have the junior it folds up and goes in your backpack and uh.
I had it on the plane and it runs off battery, so you can run our bots off batteries. It’S just 12 volts and margie was uh beside me and i said: hey hold this blanket and she’s like what are you doing, and so i just kind of reached in and i turn it on. I’M warming up the hot end, i’m printing with pla and it kind of smells like like waffle syrup. You know and my wife.
Unfortunately you know my wife. We were printing on our kitchen table and then in the kitchen and then she banished me to the the laundry room and then eventually out to the garage where i started and she hates the smell of abs, so um. And when you get 30 bots printing abs. Trying to get the kickstarter done man, it really stinks. So i’ve been doing a lot of pla, which is like a biodegradable thing. She knows the smell so anyway, i i got it to warm up, you know and she was like what are you doing? We’Re gon na get in so much trouble anyway. So honestly, i wish i could tell you a cooler story, but i just printed a blob. You know i was like really nervous hurry up hurry up and about halfway through it just kind of ran out of battery. So i was like okay, at least i did it, but anyway, so i’ve got i’ve gotten bots down to smaller, small and smaller and easier to build the nice thing about that is they’re easier to manufacture. We we do. We have three laser cutters. They run like 24 7, all the time we may in the first year, including the kickstarter.
You know a guy that was having trouble uh, you know paying his house payment, and now i got to deal with in the first year. There’S about 2.4 million dollars of business gross sales, so we’re sit. We’Ve got about 5 000 bots in the wild now and which is really really great to get so much feedback from people. So i really think our our products are getting a lot better but they’re getting smaller. I just wanted to show you one, so this one is uh tied up in chords. This one is the printabot simple, and this is three and a half by three and a half by three and a half and the cool thing about this. You know i did acrylic just to be flashy, we make them in wood uh, it actually looks really cool, but i’m so scared um. You know about the the brittle and nature nature of acrylic that these will eventually be done in metal.
So we’ve kind of gone on this um. This progression from you know what we can do and then kind of like a halfway step to what we want to do and then there’s the goal of what we will do so right now we can do wood and we’re replacing a lot of our parts in Our bots we’ve got like five different models. All different price range, all under a thousand dollars, so like the junior’s 400 dollars and that’s a kit. We also assemble if you want, but so anyway, we’re just kind of this diy company. That’S trying to get these in the hands of people, and i think this is a this is an interesting moment, because this is going to retail in june for 299 dollars. So it’s opening it up to people that weren’t able to have access to a printer in the past.
In fact, i just had uh one of the first schools i went to was down in berkeley and and christine. I think i don’t know where she is but um she she said, hey, come down and show this to the kids, and so i take the uh. You know take the bot down to the kids and i kind of wondered. You know what are people gon na think at this young age of i think with sixth grade. Are they gon na be interested in 3d printing? Well, they were, i mean they attacked it, and now she gives me a report that uh now they’re watching the website. When’S, the simple gon na go on sale, they’re, saving up their money.
She literally said they’re spending all their bar mitzvah money on printers now, and i thought that’s awesome, because i have a kid in my meetup group that that was his uh bar mitzvah. You know he i want the the printer for the bar mitzvah and his dad surprised him and he said um. This is like 11 12 year old, 12 years old about to be 13. and his dad said.
Well, i’m getting him one early, but for his bar mitzvah. Now i want your company to come down and just bring a whole bunch of printers and you’re the entertainment. I thought, are you serious? He goes i’m dead serious. He wants you guys there. I was like. Okay well come, but the point i’m trying to make is it’s: it’s going to be so much easier for a kid to own a printer very soon and that’s exciting to me.
So we really want to get them in in the hands of kids and i’m so passionate about education so where, before you know, it was like, i would talk to people about 3d printing and you know how do we get into education and they’d say? Well, we’ve got a school that you know we put i’m not picking on makerbot but they’re, a well-known name right, um, so they’re pretty popular in schools um. But the problem is, you know, there’s one bot because of the cost. There’S one bot for one classroom now: they’re having now we’re having conversations with project lead the way and some other organizations that are saying you’ve got it down to now. We can have one bot per kid and now i know that not every kid is interested, but when you have these design classes, you know they’re in there for that purpose.
So i think it’s going to be really exciting. What we see in education. So that’s! That’S! The simple i wanted to show you that now just real briefly um a couple of things that uh that printerbot’s doing um we are, do we all working on a dlp, uh, printer and uh kind of like form, labs right and i bought um. I you know i had this little.
I told my wife, i’m going to tell them about the the dlp and she’s like it’s supposed to be a secret, and i’m like i’ve mentioned it a couple of times but um. I think using it the one that we have uh, we have it working it just started. Working last week, we’re it’s kind of fun. You guys might like it um we’re using the printer board, which is you know, kind of just the regular electronics that we’ve been using with uh it’s a derivative of teensy and arduino derivative and that’s been great. We’Re going to use that to run the printer. But we love the raspberry pi, so we’re using the raspberry pi to run a little web server, and so you get your phone or any browser out and just log into the web server and you actually control the printer from your phone using raspberry pi.
So it’s kind of fun and uh, so we we print – and i got to tell you the scene because i mean i’m telling you i’m a regular guy and uh. There’S nothing fancy about our shop. It’S like a warehouse, you know so caleb is my 15 and a half year old engineer he’s just a kid i’m trying to mentor and and he i’m teaching him how to design and learn about business and and he’s going to be a part of the company. So caleb i said, caleb get get the dlp set up.
I want to make sure it prints before i go to the the conferences and she goes okay, and so he comes and gets me my office and says: hey we’re ready to try it we’re ready to try come on in he’s really excited. You know he’s been working on this on and off with me for like six months and anyway. So he goes come on in and i said: where is it set up? He goes well. The only room i could find that’s dark enough is the bathroom, so we’re four of us are in the bathroom and it finally starts printing and it prints this little bitty cube.
You know it’s not very impressive, to show you, but it prints this little cube and we get about halfway done with it and we had to stop the print because caleb’s mom showed up to pick him up, so my wife was like. Don’T take that little thing i said i’ll just tell him that his mom came, so we couldn’t finish it well. The one other thing i wanted to show you is: you know: a lot of people have talked about printing printing with um.
Carbomorph is the the term for this specific filament that is uh, it conducts electricity, and i don’t mean a little bit. This is like the real deal and we got online and downloaded the plans from what the information from the university in england that published a paper. They didn’t publish the recipe, so we’ve been trying to figure out.
The ratios of you know how much ash to this polymorph, and so you come up with this stuff and it’s pretty amazing. You can print circuits with this. It’S real we’re making it in very small quantities like here’s, a quantity of one and it took a day, but the future is cool. If you combine that with our triple extruder you’ll, be able to do flexible joints in a robot hand with hard abs and run electricity up and down the fingers all in one print, so i’m excited about what the futures future brings hope you come check us out. Printerbot .