Hasta La Ideas

The jury’s still out on the growth of 3D printing this year, but recent reporting suggests that the industry will extruding, fusing and sintering way towards the proverbial tipping point yet. A new “Low-Cost Desktop Personal Fabrication Device” (LCDPFD, anyone?) strikes a nice balance between price, practicality, and sheer versatility for the maker on a budget.

It’s not quite as slick as the previously-seen PopFab, but if its success thus far on Indiegogo is any indication, the FABtotum is a few steps closer to becoming a reality. Competitively priced at $1099 for the fully assembled machine, the personal fabricator was nearing its $50K funding goal as of press time, with nearly six weeks to go in its 50-day campaign (a build-it-yourself kit comes in at just under a G; a $699 conversion kit allows a savvy DIYer to convert their old 3D printer into a FABtotum).

Where the likes of FormLabs and Mike Joyce offer higher-end stereolithography machines at prosumer prices, we’re also seeing several interesting new developments in low-cost 3D printers (i.e. the $300 Printrbots used in the SAIC summer intensive) to multi-functional solutions such as the FABtotum:

Finding the right conditions where you can have both decent subtractive and additive manufacturing in one small envelope is no easy task. we think we reached a good compromise between speed precision and strength thanks to unconventional movement transmission methods and structural solutions.

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Ford research engineer Zach Nelson hacked up an Xbox 360 controller, and used an out-of-date MakerBot Thing-O-Matic, to make a rather interesting mod to a Shelby GT500: A haptic shift knob. When the RPMs hit a mere 3,000—god that car must have some awesome low-end torque—Nelson’s 3D-printed custom knob vibrates, telling you it’s time to shift (rather than informing you that you just ate a grenade in Call of Duty).

It might sound gimmicky, but Nelson’s experiment provides a glimpse of the future. OpenXC is Ford’s program to make vehicle data available to the user in realtime, with the diagnostic system beaming it to a tablet or smartphone over Bluetooth. By tapping that info, installing an Arduino controller, and programming in some simple values, Nelson was able to go from concept to execution in a matter of weeks.

While some tech blogs have breathlessly been reporting that Nelson’s device “will teach people how to drive a stick,” that’s obviously incorrect, and not the real point of the experiment; nor is the LED indicator going to be a gamechanger, as few of us who drive stick have ever been driving around going “Gee, what gear am I in?” Rather, Nelson is demonstrating that by simply opening the floodgates of a vehicle’s information, Ford is enabling you customize your driving experience in a manner of your choosing. And it points towards the future: Open-source vehicle telematics, combined with digital manufacturing devices and Arduino, should open up a world of interesting possibilities.

Nelson has posted the technical details of how he did it here.

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CNC mills live in shops, and power tools are things you can carry around. That’s been the paradigm. But building on their successful 17 years of producing and refining CNC mills, ShopBot Tools has now combined the two worlds with their new, portable, crowdfunded Handibot. (The Kickstarter campaign went live about fifteen minutes ago.)

The Handibot is what they’re calling a “smart tool,” and it’s essentially a 3-axis CNC mill that you can carry (and run via PC, tablet or even smartphone). But don’t let the small size fool you: By “tiling” your digital files and registering the Handibot from one location to the next, you can work on surfaces of unlimited size with total CNC precision—it’s even “capable of high precision such as on PC boards.”

The benefits to builders seem obvious: Haul a Handibot to the jobsite and this thing will cut rafter tails and stair stringers all day long. Templates and pattern bits will stay in the truck. In one demo I saw, a ShopBotter hacked up Handibot wall rig, where he programmed it to precisely cut outlet holes into vertical sheetrock. For one outlet hole, sure, that’s overkill; but in a commercial building where you’re cutting hundreds of outlet holes, the Handibot would be your new best friend.

The benefits that aren’t yet obvious, however, is what company founder Ted Hall is curious about: The uses that you would put the Handibot to. ShopBot is looking to expand the user base by reaching out to consumers, building their already-formidable user community out into an ecosystem of shared designs that all users can easily access; something akin to MakerBot’s Thingiverse, and with the added value of smartphone- or tablet-run apps that spur the Handibot into specific actions.

That is what makes creating digital fabrication tools so fascinating. If I design a tennis racket, I know what you’re going to use it for: You and the missus will play doubles with the Browns, and maybe you’ll swing it around your living room when a fruit bat gets in through the window. But when companies like MakerBot and ShopBot release their offerings, they know that the collective cleverness of the user base is going to surprise them with unexpected and unforeseen applications.

“We’re enthusiastic about exploring the ‘open innovation’ concepts behind the tool,” says Hall. “And we’re excited about the Handibot tool itself – it is just enough of a new twist to offer a utility that really goes beyond both what power tools traditionally do and what people usually think of for CNC. I love that one can just whack away at real construction lumber with it.”

Not that lumber is the limit. The Handibot will cut through wood, metal, plastic, paper & cardboard (with a drag knife attachment) and can even be used to etch glass.

Hit the jump to see the pitch video:

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Here’s one sound that librarians won’t be “shushing” in Chicago: The distinctive whining-and-grinding of a CNC mill. The Chicago Public Library has announced that their centrally-located Harold Washington branch, inside the Loop, will be getting the Windy City’s first free maker space.

The pop-up fabrication lab will offer the public access to 3D printers, laser cutters, a milling machine and a vinyl cutter as well as a variety of supporting design software.

How rad is that? The CPL’s Innovation Lab is a new initiative to give Chicagoans no-cost access to digital manufacturing, and it’s the first that we know of located smack-dab in the middle of a large American city. The six-month run of the Harold Washington maker space, which starts on July 8th, is intended to be a trial run; should it prove successful, the CPL will consider expanding it to other branches around the city.

“The maker lab is the first of several ideas we plan to test over the next few years in the Innovation Lab,” said CPL Commissioner Brian Bannon, “as we focus on expanding access to 21st century ideas and information to our communities.” We’re pretty psyched that they’re starting off with digital manufacturing, and we hope the pilot program causes other big cities to take note. American libraries have been dying on the vine for years, and we can’t think of a better use for the typically cavernous and underused spaces.

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It seems like nearly every video from the MIT MediaLab is bound to be come a “holy-crap-technology-is-awesome” viral hit, and the latest one from the Mediated Matter group is no exception. Unveiled last week, the Silk Pavilion “explores the relationship between digital and biological fabrication on product and architectural scales.”

Inspired by the silkworm’s ability to generate a 3D cocoon out of a single multi-property silk thread (1km in length), the overall geometry of the pavilion was created using an algorithm that assigns a single continuous thread across patches providing various degrees of density. Overall density variation was informed by the silkworm itself deployed as a biological “printer” in the creation of a secondary structure. A swarm of 6,500 silkworms was positioned at the bottom rim of the scaffold spinning flat non-woven silk patches as they locally reinforced the gaps across CNC-deposited silk fibers.

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