I arrived today in Dallas with the makerbot in fine shape, after flying with it as checked baggage. I had checked with the folks at makerbot labs, and they advised me that a Pelican 1620 case was the way to travel with a ‘bot. They were right.

I have to give a shout out for the people I ordered the case from – Leisure Pro. I ordered the case with less than a week to go before this trip, so I had it shipped second day via UPS. Leisure Pro called on delivery day and said “Your shipment was just delivered to us. We don’t know why, but since you ordered this second day you must need it in a hurry – what can we do to make sure you have it when you need it?”.

Wow – proactive customer service! They got the case to me in time, it holds the makerbot, a handful of tools, and a couple of pounds of plastic with no problems. And – it comes in under 50lbs, which makes the checked bag limit.

So the ‘bot is here at the Ubuntu Developer Summit, and is printing as I write.

Unless the creek rises or something, I’ll be at the space on Saturday demoing the makerbot during the public hours. Come on by and say hi!

It was a great day down at the space – including a visit from a bunch of people from Maker’s local 256. I’m sure we’ll find a lot to collaborate on.

I wanted to reciprocate and stop by their place on the way home, but evening arrived I realized that I’m being beaten by a cold of something, and headed home.

I’ve been painting and building the makerbot for a couple of weeks, and finally powered it up today. After fussing around with various versions of software for a while, I hit a mostly working combination, and printed this:

The Makerbot coin was the first object I printed

I’m having a few minor printing problems, but most of them can be tweaked out I think. The one that worries me is the periodic halting of the print for a second or so, which causes problems, and the occasional hard motion stop during printing – although the extruder keeps going.

But – not bad for the first few hours under power.

Makerbot batch 5 ships today, and mine should be in that batch! I already have several pounds of plastic waiting to be extruded. I’ll post build progress.