3D Printing Inspires a New Wave of Entrepreneurship in Japan

Financial Review has a new article up about a wave of 3D printing ventures that is building in Japan, especially attracting young Japanese entrepreneurs. Here at Cool Stuff We Like blog, we wish them the best.

"Zero to Maker": David Lang & the Maker Culture

OpenROV Open-Source Underwater Robot

David Lang's life was upended when he lost his office job in 2011. In his telling, he felt that he'd lost not just a job, but his future with it, and consequently had to "rethink his entire entire career trajectory." He realized that by skipping high school shop classes, he'd never learned the fundamental, hands-on skills needed to make or repair useful things. His response was to learn those skills by plunging headlong into the maker culture. Within a few months he'd taken every class he could get into at the Tech Shop in San Francisco: wood working, laser cutting, CNC machining, and so on.

Within in a year of that intense learning experience, he became a partner in OpenROV, a business that has designed and developed and open-source underwater exploration robot. A successful Kickstarter campaign to fund the OpenROV robot project raised over $111.6K. Now David and his partner, Eric Stackpole, are busy keeping up with the orders for OpenROV kits that are pouring in from around the world.

David and Eric have started a blog at the OpenROV website to chronicle how and where OpenROV customers are using the robot around the world. It also serves as a place to exchange ideas about applications for the robot. The OpenROV is an open-source hardware project, so many users are already modifying the basic robot with new features, such as grappling arms and additional cameras.

David was also invited by the crew at MAKE magazine to blog about his experiences and other maker topics at the MAKE website under the moniker "Zerotomaker."  Now he's come back to Kickstarter to raise funds for a book about his transition from laid-off office drone to entrepreneur titled Zero to Maker. His Kickstarter campaign closed a week ago with a total of $49.5K, many times the target of $2,500.

We've embedded a video of the OpenROV robot in action below, check it out.

Wood Filament for 3D Printing from Formfutura

Form Futura LAYWOOD-D3 Filament

Formfutura sells 3D printing filaments in various materials, including ABS, PLA, and nylon. They are offering a new material, LAYWOOD-D3, that consists of wood fibers in a polymer binder. It is available for RepRap style printers in 1.75mm and 3.0mm diameters. The wood content is 45%.

Formfutura claims that objects printed with LAYWOOD-D3 will look and even smell like wood. They also say that interesting effects can be obtained by varying the temperature during printing: the finished material becomes darker as the printing temperature is increased. For example, the maker can simulate the appearance of a tree's growth rings or wood grain.

Check out the video below in which the print is controlled to give the printed object the appearance of growth rings.

Tip of the hat to Fabbaloo for bringing this to our attention.

Portland Mini Maker Faire, Pt. 2: Josh Tannenbaum

Josh Tannenbaum, Steampunk Fabricator

I have been a bit busy this past week and haven't done as much blogging about the Portland Mini Maker Faire as I was planning to do. So, here's a quick post with a pic from Steampunk artisan Josh Tannenbaum's booth. Josh and Karen Tannenbaum's Etsy store is here at Tannenbaum Fabrications.

Also check out their Tannenbaum Fabrications website. I like their tagline: "Fantastic Artifacts from the Future Past."

I will be following up with some more pics from his displays in another post. He had some very nicely designed and crafted work on display. More to come...

Buildatron 2 3D Printer from Buildatron Systems

Buildatron 2 3D Printer

Buildatron Systems in New York City designs and builds open source 3D printers. The basic design is apparently adapted from the RepRap printer, but is much more robust.

I believe the price for a fully assembled system is $2500, and a DIY unassembled kit is $1599. However, I went to the Buildatron online store page and could not see how to put a unit on order online. A contact number and email address is given there, so if you are interested in a printer you can give those a try.

Buildatron has several galleries of printer pics and parts pics here. Their blog is here.

If you would like to get into the research and design of 3D printers, Buildatron wants you to know that the company is looking for engineers and interns. You can contact the research and design department here.

I have embedded one of their YouTube videos here.

Portland, OR Mini Maker Faire, Sept. 15-16

The Portland Mini Maker Faire is coming up fast. It will be setup in the North parking lot of the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI), this coming Saturday and Sunday, Sept. 15-16. The Faire is open both days from 10am to 6pm.

Admission is $12 for adults, and $8 for kids 3 to 13 and seniors (63+). Two-day passes are available for a discount, $20 for adults and $15 for the kids. Seniors can get a two-day pass for the same price as daily admission, just $8. Admission for children under three is free. You can buy tickets online here.

A map and driving directions to OMSI are here.

OMSI is looking for volunteers to support the Faire. To volunteer your help, contact OMSI at volunteerservices@omsi.edu.

Check out MAKE magazine online while you're at it. See MAKE's online schedule of upcoming Maker Faire's all around the globe to find the date and time of a Faire near you.

UPDATE 9/15: Getting out the door now, heading for OMSI.

UPDATE 9/15pm: Just got back... took lots of pics. Had a great time. Will be blogging up a storm about it.

Steampunk Accessories from Brute Force Studios

Brute Force Studios Leather Corset

While googling around for pictures of brass steampunk goggles this morning I discovered Brute Force Studios, a purveyor of high-quality steampunk accessories, jewelry, and costumes. The product lineup is made-up of really top-drawer, professionally designed and artfully made stuff.

Thomas Willeford, the proprietor of Brute Force Studios, has been a prominent figure in the steampunk subculture and movement for two decades. His work has been featured in numerous magazines, websites, books, and television shows. I first saw Willeford's work in Art Donovan's excellent book, The Art of Steampunk, which has an entire chapter dedicated to Willeford's creations.

      Willeford's Ornithopter Backpack

Last fall, Willeford became a published author himself with the McGraw-Hill/TAB Electronics title, Steampunk Gear, Gadgets, and Gizmos: A Maker's Guide to Creating Modern Artifacts... see our link to his book at Amazon below. 

Willeford has also designed jewelry for Alchemy Gothic's "Empire Collection," a series of original steampunk-themed jewelry.

Willeford participates in steampunk events in the persona of "Lord Archibald Featherstone."

            

B9Creator 3D Printer Kickstarter Completed, Raised Over $500K

The B9Creator Kickstarter funding project we blogged about a few weeks ago is completed. Nearly 400 people committed a combined total of over $513,000, more than ten times the original $50,000 project goal. Amazing, and congratulations to Mike Joyce, creator of this innovative 3D printer.

Wire for the Maker & DIY Projects from Amazon Supply

All kinds of wire is available from Amazon Supply... magnet wire, Nichrome for heating elements, copper braid, heavy gauge, light gauge. If you need wire for an electronics product, car repair, brass wire for jewelry projects, whatever it is, you're likely to find it at Amazon Supply.

They are also really good for crimp connectors, spade lugs, ring terminals, and other interconnect parts.

               

B9Creator 3D Printer Fundraising on Kickstarter

A couple of weeks ago we posted a piece about the Bukobot 3D printer Kickstarter fundraiser, which has been quite successful, easily exceeding its maker's fundraising goal of $42K with more than a week left to go. Well, yesterday we found out about another 3D printer project at Kickstarter, the B9Creator fundraiser, which has done amazingly well: In less than a week, and with a month still to go, more than $123,000 has been pledged,  far exceeding owner Michael Joyce's original $50,000 project funding goal.

I think this one is so way-over-the-top successful because of its unique technical approach: Joyce uses a deformable mirror device to project a 1024x768 pixel image onto a layer of light-sensitive resin. The entire layer is immediately cured where the light hits it, so each layer of the printed object is created very rapidly. This is in contrast with Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) techniques, where the material is laid down in a raster pattern after the fashion of inkjet printing.

Joyce writes that each layer is typically calibrated to be .004" (.1mm) thick, but that the user can trade off speed for even greater resolution. Claimed printing rates are 12-20mm per hour. The resin used is said to be very inexpensive.

The B9Creator is an open source hardware project, so all of the CAD files and software source code files will be made available under an open source license.

On another fun note, check out Michael Joyce's life-sized models of the Lost In Space "Robot B9." (And now you know where the "B9Creator" name came from...)

Update 5/21: With three weeks to go at Kickstarter, pledged funds for the B9Creator total just under $170,000, well over three times the project goal. 

Jet Hobby Mill from Amazon Supply

Jet JHM-610 Hobby Mill

Jet Tools has recently brought this low-cost ($799) manual benchtop mill to the market. From what I've seen of their marketing for this unit, they have apparently recognized an opportunity  in the growing DIY/Maker community.

Bukobot 3D Printer Kickstarter Funding Drive

Bukobot 3D Printer

The Bukobot 3D printer from Deezmaker is derived from the RepRap open source hardware printer. Deezmaker is attempting to bring the Bukobot to market by raising funds at Kickstarter. The funding goal is to raise $42,000 by May 23; as of this writing, at $19,569 they are just about halfway there, with twenty days to go.

You can follow Bukobot news at their blog.

Update: The committed total is already up over $22,000 less than 24hours later!

Update May 11: The Bukobot is funded! As of this morning, $42,905 with 125 backers and still twelve days to go! 




         

The UP! Personal, Portable 3D Printer

UP! Personal 3D Printer

Another low-cost, 3D printer for the home, school, lab, and maker/DIY market has come to our attention: the UP! personal and portable printer from Delta Micro Factory Corporation in China. The research we've done so far indicates that the UP! printer has been on the market for about two years now. We have not been able to find a recent review of it, however, there are a number of Youtube videos uploaded by the company and by users.

The American distributor is UP! USA in Brooklyn, NY. Their listed price is $1,499 plus shipping and handling. (You may need to be patient when visiting their website... each page was annoyingly slow to load, at least for us this evening.)

The UP! has its own software environment for setting up the machine and running print jobs. It is claimed that the company is investing significant resources into software development, so that they are releasing frequent software updates that add new features. The software accepts the standard STL file format, so you can use a CAD program of your choice to create models. 

In our researches, we did find that ten UP! printers are being given away as prizes in the Instructables  "Make It Real Challenge" this year (we'll be doing a post about that soon... if you are a maker, take a look, you might want to enter). Meanwhile, check out the UP! demo video below.

"Making Things Move", an Excellent Book for the Maker

Making Things Move, by Dustyn Roberts

Making Things Move: DIY Mechanisms for the Inventors, Hobbyists, and Artists, by Dustyn Roberts

I found this excellent little book from prominent robotics engineer, consultant, and educator Dustyn Roberts on the new books shelf of our local library this past week. The Robby the Robot themed cover caught my attention right away, but after leafing through it for a few minutes, I found the content compelling and immediately tucked it onto our stack of the day's take-home selections.

This book teaches you how to apply basic mechanical engineering principles, and some basic knowledge of electronics, to your DIY projects without sending you back to school for an engineering degree. Perhaps you are an artist or graphics designer and don't consider yourself a "technical" person, or your technical experience is limited to the more abstract realms of software or chip design, but you'd like to get your hands dirty with a project using mechanical components, such as nuts and bolts, motors, gears, and solenoids. Maybe you have a great idea for a project that incorporates mechanical motion, but you just don't know how to get started. If so, this book can really help and guide you. From the introduction:

In this book, you will learn how to successfully build moving mechanisms through nontechnical explanations, examples, and do-it-yourself projects. Maybe you're a sculptor who wants a piece of art to come alive, a computer scientist who want to explore mechanics, or a product designer who wants to add function to complement the form of  your product. Maybe you've built projects in the past, but they fell apart easily. Or maybe you didn't grow up making things move but want to learn. The students in the class I teach at New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program in the Tisch School of the Arts have been all of those things, and they gave me the inspiration to write this book. 

Ms. Roberts deliberately goes light on the math throughout... you don't have to be a calculus or physics wiz to understand it, just some knowledge of very basic algebra and trigonometry is all that's required, and if you're rusty on those subjects, you can easily brush up with a little help from the many tutorials available on the Web.

The book begins with a presentation of six basic machines and mechanisms: levers, pulleys, wheels and axles, inclined planes and wedges, screws, and gears. The second chapter presents common project materials (metals, plastics, etc.), their basic properties, and how to choose the right materials for your applications. The third chapter outlines the basics of joining materials with screws, rivets, nails, adhesives, soldering, and so on. The next couple of chapters present some basic physics of mechanics, such as force, torque, friction, energy, work, and power, which lay the background for an understanding of the basic requirements --- strength, power, energy, and so on --- that a successful product will need to meet so that it won't fall apart or otherwise fail.

After these opening chapters concerning fundamentals, the real fun begins, with stepper motors, servos, bearings, bushings, springs, basic electronics, and how to combine them to make simple machines that are useful and fun. The final chapter details a handful of good projects that give you hands-on experience that complements the teachings of the book, such as a miniature wind turbine that powers an LED. Finally, the book closes with an appendix about the popular open source Arduino microcontroller board.

Dustyn Roberts has put together a website and blog for the book. Check it out, the website is very useful. I especially liked the "Resources" page set that is organized around the book's chapter, with videos and links to relevant external resources. Her professional website and blog is also interesting.

As indicated in the quote above, the book is an outgrowth of the author's real classroom experience with real students from diverse academic and professional backgrounds, many with very little or even no hands-on experience of technical work. In this book, she's showing you that you don't have to let this intimidate you and stop you from doing something cool that you really want to do. Study it, work the exercises, apply the principles and you'll get better results from your own DIY projects.

Meeblip Open Hardware Synthesizer

Meeblip Low-Cost, Open Hardware Synth

The Meeblip is an open hardware, open source monophonic music synthesizer with a MIDI interface.  It's ready to use as is, or, since it's an open, community-based technology initiative, you can hack it to suit yourself.  

The Meeblip is available in several configurations: a "quick build" kit with complete enclosure and an assembled printed circuit board for $149.95; a "build-it-yourself" kit for with enclosure but unassembled circuit board for $129.95; and a "micro" version for the experienced hacker, pictured below, which is a circuit board with MIDI interface but without the manual controls... think of the micro version as more of a software development board. It costs only $39.95.

Meeblip Micro Hacker's Kit

The Meeblip is open source hardware, so you are free to make your own version of the Meeblip and to sell them. You are also free to buy Meeblip kits, assemble and test them, then put them up for sale as finished units to buyers who don't want to go to the trouble of building the kit themselves. You are also free, of course, to modify the software, to add new features and functions to it.

The Meeblip hardware is based on the Atmel ATmega32 micro, so if you already have Arduino experience, you'll be up to speed on hacking and programming Meeblip to a great extent. 

To learn more about the Meeblip community, go to the Meeblip forum pages here at Noisepages.com. 

To find out more about the Open Source Hardware (OSHW) movement, check out their wiki.

3D Stuffmaker's RepRap 3D Printer

3D Stuffmaker "Allstar" 3D Printer

In response to our recent post about Cubify and the "Cube" 3D printer, one of our readers contacted us about 3D Stuffmaker and their RepRap-derived 3D printers for the DIY market. RepRap is an open-hardware, community-based project, so makers are free to create and market their own printers based on RepRap designs.

The engineers at 3D Stuffmaker have made it their mission t o improve on the RepRap technology, and to make it much more accessible to a wider range of home users and educators by offering DIY kits and assembled printers... at their website, click on the "Sales & Specs" tab to see what's on offer.

If you are in the market for a low-cost 3D printer, or just want to get a feel for what's happening in the 3D print community, check out 3D Stuffmaker.

We will continue to post here about 3D printing and other Rapid Prototyping technologies as things develop in those arenas.

Amazon Supply for the DIY Maker & Hobbyist

Amazon Supply is one-stop shopping for makers, hobbyists, and DIY aficionados. It gives you quick and easy access to thousands and thousands of items that might be tough to find in your neighborhood hardware store or Home Depot... Bearings, bushings, motion control components for robotics, tubing, all sorts of metal stock, seals and o-rings, scientific lab equipment, tools, abrasives, etc., etc. I did a search for bearings, which returned over 5,300 individual items... An impressive breadth of inventory is available all across the board.

Amazon Supply features industrial and scientific products from top-notch suppliers like 3-M, Mitutoyo, Norton, Dewalt, PanaVise, and many, many others. 

Check it out... before you run all over town looking for just the right fastener, or copper tape, or some aluminum bar stock, whatever you need, take a look at Amazon Supply.

Update: For Steampunk art projects, Amazon Supply is a good supplier of materials, gears, etc...

     

MAKE Magazine, the Maker Faire, and the Maker DIY Subculture

Beagle Board Multimedia Processor

Don't believe it when anyone tells you that Yankee ingenuity is dead... There is a growing subculture of creative people doing all sorts of homebrew tech projects, and it's spreading out from America to circle the globe. These folks have been dubbed "Makers" because they do hands-on crafting, construction, and fabrication of all sorts of gizmos and gadgets, mostly for fun, sometimes for profit. Some of the things they dream up and create are really useful, others are just cool fun.

The Maker movement has been driven to a large extent by the advent of open source software.  In a very real sense, I believe, the Maker movement is an outgrowth of the OSS community, and shares its spirit in the desire to share technology innovations at the grassroots level. In fact, there is a growing open source hardware community now. The Beagle Board multimedia processor board you see pictured here is a popular example of open source hardware. It is a very sophisticated, high-performance unit that can be used in all sorts of home-brewed audio, music, video, and wireless gizmos.

O'Reilly Media of Sebastopol, CA (otherwise well-known as home to the late, great cartoonist Charlie "Peanuts" Schultz) has taken a big leadership role in this movement through their quarterly publication, MAKE magazine, the MAKE website and blog, and the Maker Faire. They also have a lot of books that can help anyone get started as a maker... see our Amazon links below.

Makers aren't just about electronics and software, not by a long shot... maker projects seem to cover anything and everything under sun: automotive, robotics, rocketry, musical instruments, home remodeling, metals fabrication, affordable 3D printing... Go to this projects page at the MAKE website and see the categories in the upper right corner, there are currently 16 listed. 

The "Hennepin Crawler"

The Maker Faire is an annual event, or I should say, events, where hundreds of makers exhibit their work to thousands of attendees. For some years now there has been an annual Maker Faire in San Mateo, CA, just south of San Francisco, this May 19 & 20. This year the World Maker Faire will be held in Queens this Sept. 29 & 30. Additional Faires are being held in Detroit and Kansas City. Independent community-based "Mini-Maker Faires"  in other cities across the United States and in Europe, Egypt, Dubai, India, and others.

For kids, becoming a Do-It-Yourself maker can be a gateway to a career in science or engineering. If you or one of your kids wants to get a start as a Maker with electronic gizmos, a really great place to start is with the immensely popular Arduino board.