I was super excited to get a shiny new kit of Maker Beam today, so I thought I share my first impressions of it. Read on for the details!
Maker Beam is a “Mini T-Slot” aluminum extrusion. It is very similar to other products like 80/20, but Maker Beam extrusion is 10mm x 10mm. The small size makes it perfect for small projects like enclosures, small fixtures and small to medium robots.
One of the big attractions of Maker Beam is that it’s T-slot profile can fit a piece of cardboard, plastic, or a circuit board. Since this was the main reason I wound up buying it instead of Microrax, I was extremely disappointed to find out that it doesn’t actually fit pre-made circuit boards that well. The t-slot is roughly twice as wide as the thickness of a standard PCB (shown below next to a Maple Pro), so boards will not fit in snugly. There is an indentation in the bottom of the slot that is designed to cradle a PCB, but it’s too far back to hold parts that have components near the edge (eg. Arduino). Proto/perf boards and cardboard from boxes fit nicely, though.
The kit comes with a nice assortment of pieces and lots of hardware for putting things together. As numerous trolls commentators on Sparkfun point out, the angle brackets are marked in Tau radians, but there are only three angles to choose from, so it shouldn’t be a problem to pick the one that fits where you want it to.
Of more importance is the selection of length of pieces you get. There are plenty of pieces in the kit and they’re sized appropriately to match the included brackets. There is about 5.78 meters of extrusion in the kit total. You could probably get a lot more for a lot less, but the kit does come pre-cut, which is worth a lot in terms of time and quality of cuts. That said, the ends of the pieces are unfinished bandsaw cuts. For $130, it would have been nice to have finished ends. Or at least de-burred ends…
Another problem with the Maker Beam system is the choice of capitve nuts vs. captive screws. In Maker Beam, the screw heads slide into the T-slot, leaving the nut and a bit of screw hanging off the connector. Personally, I don’t think this looks very nice in a , though I imagine that it would have been much more expensive to get custom nuts to fit the profile. Someone on Sparkfun suggested that you could drop a project and damage the screw threads, making it impossible to get apart. I doubt that (worst case you strip out a screw and have to toss it), but I am concerned about the screws getting snagged on stuff like carpet and wires…
All in all, I think that Maker Beam is promising. The profile looks nice and the kit fits together well. If you have some specific needs that can be met with a kit of Makerbeam (like I did), then I’d get one. I don’t know if I would go so far as to recommend it just to have around, but I do wish that makerbeam.com would come up already and start selling bulk extrusion. I think I’d buy a dozen meters just to keep around for custom cuts when needed.
