Hasta La Ideas

Although our friends at Teague tipped us off about their Labs’ latest project prior to Tad Toulis’s unveiling of 13:30 at Maker Faire this past weekend, his presentation was our first time seeing the 3D-printed headphones. It’s both a thought experiment and a case study for personal fabrication, challenging the convention of “the current consumer electronics paradigm,” which is “all about mass production and distribution.” “Using 3D printing technology and consumer-sourceable components, 13:30 creates an equivalent product at an equivalent price, but made on demand—just for you.”

And while we’ve been admiring (and using) the prefab pair they sent us over the weekend—complete with custom packaging—they’ve also posted the plans on none other than Thingiverse.

With 3D printers becoming more accessible we decided to have a think around the concept “life in beta” as a future scenario. What if printed prototypes could become actual products? Meaning, once off the print bed an object could be assembled without any tools and be made functional by readily attainable components. Electronically simple yet functionally complex, headphones seemed like a good fit to stress test the premise.

Our first go resulted in a good-looking functional model created on a professional ABS FDM machine (Dimension 1200ES: print time 13 hours and 30 minutes, hence the name). It worked out well, but the machine we used isn’t accessible to the average maker, and two of the critical parts relied heavily on soluble support printing—a non-issue for professional 3D printers, a major issue for desktop 3D printers.

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We’ve just returned from a press conference in Brooklyn, where MakerBot founder Bre Pettis pulled the wraps off of what you see above: Their new Replicator 2, done up in snazzy black. Gone is the wood paneling of the previous model, replaced here by removal PVC panels fastened to a powder-coated steel frame.

Aside from the more stable frame, the new model features an improved leveling system; just this morning I was visiting a digital fabrication house in midtown that was complaining about their MakerBot’s four-point leveling rigmarole, but now it’s down to three points. And although the machine is the same external size, the build area has been increased to a fairly huge 11.2” L &times: 6.0” W × 6.1” H. (That’s 410 cubic inches there for you to play around with.)

The printer’s “resolution” has also been improved, nearly by a factor of three; for those who’ve experienced the previous model, that one printed out at 270 microns, while they’ve got the new box down to just 100. The samples they circulated at the press conference were pretty darn smooth. You can still see the lines, of course, but you really have to look pretty closely, and drag your fingernail across the surface to feel them. Otherwise they registered as perfectly smooth under my fingertips, and I was damn impressed.

All of these improvements come at a price: The Replicator 2 rings in at $2,199 and ships fully assembled.

After running down the new machine’s features, Pettis hit us with three more pieces of news:

First up they’re simultaneously releasing another machine, the Replicator 2X, built for those “who like to experiment;” this one looks identical to the other but features dual extruders, a heated build platform, and will set you back an extra 600 bones.

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Not to be bested by their Oceanic neighbors, Australia now boasts a community digital fabrication shop of its own. Core77 forum member sanjy009 recently posted a news item about the Innovation Lab at a public library in Adelaide, officially opened by Lord Mayor Stephen Yarwood just three weeks ago.

Funded by the Adelaide City Council, the lab is billed as a space “to build digital literacy and give Adelaide’s ‘hacker’ community a place to toy with technology.” To that end, they’ve bought a brand new Makerbot Replicator and an UP Plus 3D Printer.

An InDaily article and video (below) declares that “technology that can put the tools of mass manufacturing into the hands of the average person has been made available to the community in a city library.”

“To give the community the chance to work with cutting edge technology is a real coup for Adelaide,” Yarwood said… The Lord Mayor said libraries were the natural home for places such as the innovation lab. “This is about libraries being at the edge of innovation,” he said. “This is about libraries reinventing themselves and being hubs of technology, hubs of innovation, hubs of creativity.”

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As with many of my fellow fledgling philosophy students, I was awed by Kant’s so-called “Copernican Revolution”: in order to reconcile the epistemological conflict between rationalism and empiricism, Kant determined that we experience the world from a point-of-view, as dictated by a priori categories of space, time, causality, etc. Thus, our unique ability to know and learn about the world as it is given to perception comes at the expense of the naïve belief that we could somehow discern its essence.

Just as it’s only a loose (possibly even backwards) metaphor for the dawn of modern Western philosophy, we’re taking some liberties with both the Renaissance astronomer’s hypothesis and its Kantian canonization here. Where Computer Numerical Control (CNC) devices have long been restricted by the size of a multiple-axis stage, a team of engineers and designers are looking to put digital fabrication tools squarely in the hands of the users. Don’t the let academic title fool you: “Position-Correcting Tools for 2D Digital Fabrication” by Alec Rivers (MIT CSAIL), Ilan E. Moyer (MIT MechE) and Frédo Durand (MIT CSAIL) might just represent the next step for digital fabrication. Per the abstract:

Many kinds of digital fabrication are accomplished by precisely moving a tool along a digitally-specified path. This precise motion is typically accomplished fully automatically using a computer controlled multi-axis stage. With that approach, one can only create objects smaller than the positioning stage, and large stages can be quite expensive.

We propose a new approach to precise positioning of a tool that combines manual and automatic positioning: in our approach, the user coarsely positions a frame containing the tool in an approximation of the desired path, while the device tracks the frame’s location and adjusts the position of the tool within the frame to correct the user’s positioning error in real time. Because the automatic positioning need only cover the range of the human’s
positioning error, this frame can be small and inexpensive, and because the human has unlimited range, such a frame can be used to precisely position tools over an unlimited range.

Made in the USA

In other words, they’re looking to combine the best of both worlds: “our goal is to leverage the human’s mechanical range, rather than decision making power or guidance, to enable a new form factor and approach to a task that is currently fully automated.”

Before we dig into the short but dense paper [PDF] that Rivers, Moyer and Durand published for SIGGRAPH 2012, here’s the video:

A bit of nitty-gritty after the jump…

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New Zealand has done well for themselves in terms of attracting Hollywood productions and the resultant job-creating support clusters. Now, as the result of a collaboration between Massey University’s School of Design and MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms, they’re hoping to put themselves on the map for another industry: Digital fabrication.

The ribbon’s been cut on Fab Lab Wellington, a digital fabrication facility stocked with CNC laser cutters, milling machines, 3D printers and the like. By joining MIT’s Fab Lab network, which seeks to spread Fab Labs worldwide, Fab Lab Wellington will now be part of a projected 130 other Fab Labs worldwide all sharing information. And local designers will of course benefit from having access to production machinery too expensive for small design firms to acquire.

“We can provide access to technology,” says MU Industrial Design Lecturer Chris Jackson, “but also help people make connections between disciplines and industries, and that should be a catalyst to more innovation in New Zealand.”

From their home base in the Boston area, MIT’s CBA has Fab Labs as far-flung as India, Norway and South Africa. Fab Lab Wellington is the first in the Australasia region but, Jackson hopes, will not be the only. “We want to be a hub to get labs across New Zealand, Australia and the South Pacific,” he explains. “We’re already talking to other universities, wananga [Maori schools], secondary schools and public libraries.”

Fab Lab Wellington isn’t limited to designers, by the way; it will also be open to the general public and will feature workshops by Massey industrial designers.

Massey industrial design lecturer Chris Jackson and MIT Professor Neil Gershenfeld prepare to cut the ribbon at the inauguration of Fab Lab Wellington.

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