I realize it’s not the biggest interest in this group, but Makerbot announced they are providing “free” (you pay $9 shipping) upgrades to Replicator 2 owners to move to a spring-levered design (@Whosa_whatsis being the progenitor of what eventually became this design).
There are a few interesting tidbits that I learned about this - the plastic pieces of the upgrade will be injection molded and (learned while discussing this with a Replicator 2 owner), more recent batch of Replicator 2’s are (if I understood correctly) invoiced as “Replicator 2 version 2.0”.
I think this points to Makerbot making a commitment to making the Replicator 2 their “Camry” – the bread-and-butter vehicle. I expect continuing refinement to the same product, so that they keep introducing incremental improvements to drive down cost, increase reliability and quality, and so on in an effort to make the product a defacto standard in the mass market. I wouldn’t be surprised if the R2 hangs around as a 2014-model year and then some.
This is basically what Ultimaker does with their printer. Except they don’t rebrand it 1.0, 2.0, etc. They constantly upgrade it, update it, fix it, and incorporate those fixes for free into the printer that people are buying. Then they sell the upgrades/changes to existing Ultimaker owners.
@ThantiK Since it’s just printed on the invoice, I don’t think it’s branding, just tracking which version people have. Same as Ultimaker.
@Addidis_no No royalties (that I know of), just public thanks and credit, consistent with the licenses, which is that the designs were based on existing open sourced designs, and thus were open sourced, as is MBI’s final version. So nobody paid anybody.
@Paul_Chase Makerbot printers are almost all open source. Only the thin GUI layer is proprietary software. The firmware, slicers, conveyor, ReplicatorG, etc., are FOSS. The new extruder is published, and the other hardware is either published or easy to measure and mod. So yes, they’re not quite 100% open source. But everything that matters is FOSS. So it hasn’t stopped anyone from doing what they want. And MBI being smart enough to adopt and promote community generated improvements is a good thing.
@Laird_Popkin Can you tell me where the replicator 2 hardware files are? The new extruder is open source, yes, but I haven’t seen the lasercut templates or any of the replicator 2’s injection-molded parts released.
Makerware is closed source, as is their slicer (pretty sure it’s skeinforge-derived, but they’ve updated the code and not released the changes).
Neither the printer or the software is open source. I know that it is entirely descended from open source tools and printers, but the tradition has died with the replicator 2.