Breaking the 100 Micron Barrier

Let's Get Small

We recently took a look at the new firmware available for Replicators and older Makerbots.  It's called Sailfish and may be the next step toward consumer printers with incredible resolution.  This is thanks to agressive use of acceleration to alter machine motion on-the-fly.  The above squirrel was printed as part of the Make Magazine Meetup this month at the Columbus Idea Foundry.  Unfortunately it didn't get shown off as Columbus was having technical issues during the Google Hangout.  Folks were shocked that the machine could produce that kind of resolution on it's first try.  The compact extruder design of the MK8 is in part responsible, and the Replicator is a flexiable machine thanks to Makerbot's open source philosophy.  Hopefully this will transfer to future products as well.

There are tradeoffs however.  While the installation process is straight forward based on the Sailfish version of ReplicatorG, the firmware had some bugs in the "0040" version including the misplacement of firmware variables caused by a confluence of code changes by the firmware hackers and Makerbot's own additions to the open source ReplicatorG project.  Also, the newest slicer  inteface, MakerWare is incompatible with Sailfish and isn't entirely open sourced for modification (the slicing engine is open source, but not the full chrome version). Sailfish ReplicatorG "0039" is considered stable for now and recommended for those on the bleeding edge and don't mind reading through wiki's, google groups, and post comments.  It's likely that because of the nature of open source collaboration, the best bits will eventually become part of Makerbot's offerings.