PechaKucha Night
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Pecha Kucha Night
Scratch space for assembling my March 31, 2010 presentation for Ottawa #2 - PechaKucha Night
Title
- Anatomy of a MakerBot
- A Brief History of Fabrication Made Personal
Possible Talking Points
OpenSource
Software origins
- Original UNIX - BSD
- Linux ecosystem
Licenses
- Proprietary
- GPL
- Creative Commons
Content Sites
- Flickr
- YouTube
- Thingiverse
- Instructables
- USPTO
- Museums and Science Centres
Hardware Foundations
- Arduino embedded computing platform.
- Off-shelf mechanical and motor parts.
Paying the Bills
- AdaFruit
- DIY Drones
- EMSL
- Lulu.com
- SparkFun
Value of Community
Forums, Wikis, Mailing Lists
- Source for new developments
- Heated Build Platform
- Replacement parts
- Improved extruder designs
- New materials
Design Flow
- 2D Software
- InkScape
- QCad
- 3D Software
- Google SketchUp
- Blender
- OpenSCAD
Services
- Ponoko
- 2D Laser-cut designs
- Cloth, wood, plastic, fabric, metal
- Shapeways
- 3D Printed designs
- Plastic, alumide, bronze-infused stainless steel
- Etsy
- Quickest way to set up shop.
- PayPal
- Buy and sell with a degree of separation from direct bank and credit card access.
Personal Fabrication
Technology shift from rapid prototyping with a view to mass production, to personal fabrication with some extra consumables thrown in Ikea-style.
Tired: Injection molding millions Wired: Rapid prototyping one.
How many other technologies sit neglected because they wouldn't scale to Industrial Revolution factory floors?
Rapid Prototyping
- The 'Mainframe' model
- Foundational patents expiring
- Follows the 2D printer model - proprietary inks/materials
RepRap Project
- Founding University project
- Machines that reproduce themselves from raw materials
- Challenge to source all parts locally
MakerBot Industries
- RepStrap kit
- Addresses challenge of pulling all the pieces together to build a functioning 3D printer
- Not unlike the original Apple Computer kit only based on OpenSource developments from the start.
- Used to make next generation RepRaps locally
Materials
- Recycling technology
- Bioplastics
- Open3DP
- ceramic
- glass powder
Models
- RepRap Wiki
- Thingiverse
HackerSpaces and FabLabs
- Using current tech in new ways and a-typical applications
- People who enjoy making things, sharing in the process.
ModLab at ArtEngine
- Small group of individuals gather every other week.
- Work on personal projects.
- Access to non-traditional tools
- MakerBot on order
- Long-term
- Laser cutter
- CNC mill
- Fusion of art and tech
Slides
Title Slide
Anatomy of a MakerBot - Slide 1
- APP_01
- Anatomy of a MakerBot
- A Brief History of Fabrication Made Personal
- Talking Points
- Rapid Prototyping technology has been around for decades.
- Substractive methods
- lathes and multi-axis mills
- laser cutters and water-jet cutters
- Additive methods more recent
- Stratasys - fused deposition modelling (FDM)
- Object - powder+binder
What is a MakerBot?
Adam, Bre, Zach and MakerBot Cupcake - Slide 2
- A little over a year ago, Bre and Zach showed up at SXSW 2009 with their prototype MakerBot in tow.
The Extruder - Slide 3
- This is the business end.
- A close cousin of the hot glue gun, you feed long filaments of 3mm diameter plastic in one end and a 0.5mm diameter noodle of 220C plastic emerges the other end.
Laser Cut and Off Shelf Hardware - Slide 4
- It's assembled Ikea-style from a mix of laser-cut acrylic, laser-cut wood and off-the-shelf nuts, bolts and threaded rods.
- In keeping with open source principles, the design files have been available under the GPL since the first cupcake shipped.
The Laser Cut Pulley; Just Because You Can - Slide 5
- On the first few batches they went a little over-board with the laser-cutting.
- While being able to laser-cut a pulley is interesting in principle, it doesn't scale as quickly when you have to get hundreds out the door.
- In later batches they experimented with crowd-sourcing by placing a bounty on printed pulleys. It had similar issues of not being able to scale quickly enough.
- Most recent batches make use of old-school injection-molded parts.
- Sometimes the old way is still the best way.
Upon the Shoulders of Arduino - Slide 6
- Finally, to control the machine they embraced and extended another popular open source platform; the Arduino.
Channeling Ikea - Slide 7
- As part of the early-adopting first batch, it took me a couple of months worth of late evenings and early mornings to assemble MakerBotNumberNine.
- I had to solder all the boards myself.
- They switched to US-manufactured and assembled boards early on.
- For more recent batches, they finally made the jump to China-manufactured boards.
- Another case of old-school approaches making the most sense for scaling.
What Can It Make?
Around the House (Part 1) - Slide 8
- One of my earliest from-scratch designs was a replacement part for a plastic clip that broke in our bathroom.
- I designed it in Google's free version of SketchUp.
Around the House (Part 2) - Slide 9
- It almost worked.
- The biggest problem I ran into was that fabjects made in this way, layer upon layer, tend to be weak at the layer interfaces.
- My mistake was mimicking the physical design of an injection molded part without taking into consideration the mechanical stresses at play.