Blog

If you ship software, you are used to a workflow: you cut a release, tag the repo, and everyone knows exactly which bits went out the door. You can point teammates and users at a single page with a version number, notes, and downloadable artifacts.

Hardware usually does not feel that way. Product development cycles are long, and the design phase alone can stretch for months. Even when additive manufacturing makes it fast to turn a digital design into a physical part, the process around handing off a design (what changed, which files to use, what to send to a manufacturer) often still looks like scattered exports and filenames you have to decode by hand.

When we built MakerRepo, we kept asking the same question: what can we borrow from how software teams work? We already treat CAD as code, run CI on every push, and host artifacts in the browser. The next step was obvious: shouldn’t cutting a product design release be as straightforward as creating a Git tag and pushing it?

Today we’re excited to announce Releases: tag your repository, publish a release on MakerRepo, and the platform packages the artifacts from that revision into a single, shareable snapshot, just like a software release.

Here’s a quick walkthrough:

Not sure about you, but I find prototyping with 3D-printed parts painful. When I iterate quickly over many revisions, I end up with a pile of parts that look very similar but differ in small ways. To test a snap fit, I might adjust a parameter many times to find the right value, and once they’re mixed together, it’s hard to tell which is which. Right now I’m looking at the panel prototypes I printed for the TinyRack.io mini server rack in the corner of my room, and I can’t tell which revision is which.

As a software engineer, this has never been an issue. When I change code and test the build, I can always see the version or build number on the executable or library. So I wondered: why not build hardware the same way? That’s the core idea behind manufacturing as code.

Today we’re excited to announce versioned model: tracking your prototypes and linking them to the digital design is now easier than ever on MakerRepo. Here’s a short intro:

We’re excited to announce Generators: a new feature that brings parametric CAD models to MakerRepo. While a plain @artifact function always builds the same model, a generator lets visitors on MakerRepo.com tweak dimensions, counts, or any other parameter and get a customized model built on demand.

Since I started my journey with 3D printing, I have built and shared dozens of 3D printable models to the public. Surely, TinyRack is one of them. You can find them on my MakerWorld profile here or on my Printables profile here.

So far, I have really enjoyed the process of designing and printing the models. If there’s anything I’ve experienced that feels most like it came out of science fiction, it’s 3D printing technology. When you realize that the physical form of objects can be defined by digital bits, it opens up unbounded possibilities for what we can do with the technology.

The more I design and print, the more I realize that while the printing process takes time, it runs smoothly in the background. But for design, it’s a whole different story. More often than not, it takes a huge amount of effort and countless iterations to design even for a simple snap-fit part. I often get lost when working with different revisions of the same part with slight differences. As printing technology becomes more and more mature, the bottleneck is not the printing anymore, it’s the design instead.

As a software engineer, I get very comfortable with writing code to define the behavior of a system. Setting up the CI/CD pipeline to automate the build and deployment process is also a common practice. While I work on my 3D printing projects, none of those exist. Then I wondered, given that now bits can shape atoms, why not use the same approach to build software for the physical world?

With that in mind, I spent the past few weeks building a prototype of a GitHub-like platform for manufacturing, called MakerRepo. Today I am very excited to announce that the project is now online and has entered the beta testing phase for the public. 😄🎉