Lots Of Links

Here are a lot of links I think are relevant to open hardware. The first is that apparently RepRap has its own magazine now!

Zero Cost Modeling of Space Frames – Julian Edgar demonstrates how to predict the failure mode of a complex frame (in this case a recumbent bicycle) without FEA software. The process involves making a scale model by soldering together copper wire then pulling on it to see where it bends or breaks. It’s a quick and easy way to see where the structure is mathematically weak.

XYZ SpaceFrame Vehicles – This is a principle for building modular bicycles and a few functional real-world examples. Here’s a pdf describing how to make one of the bicycles.

Open Source Government & Engaged Citizens: The Death Star Inspiration – Matt Micene writes, “Innovation doesn’t always result in direct business value, but can improve business in general. Innovating in the open means you can garner additional expertise you need to transform a marginal value into a direct value.”

A Guide For 3D Printing With a RepRap – ArvidJense has put together an infographic to help makers build things, specifically musical instruments, but the ideas can be applied to anything.

Someone Needs To Buy Makerbot Already – Steve Symington is talking about financial investment stuffs, but the interesting thing is that Makerbot only seems to have attracted serious financial interest after (or based on the promise of) abandoning open source principles.

Party Robotics – They are a startup focused on making open source drink mixing machines.

Using OpenSCAD for 2D Machining – Matthew Venn gives a brief overview of his process for modeling a multi-piece part in OpenSCAD and then using the projection() function to export DXFs for CNC milling.

Designing For Laser Cutting In OpenSCAD – This is a similar (but more extensive) set of instructions from a Dutch FabLab.

Make Your Own Arduino – streetjerk shows you how to put together a thru-hole Arduino from raw materials. This is particularly useful if, like streetjerk, you want to incorporate additional components (like a motor driver) into the board itself rather than use I/O ports.

Prepper Movement Embracing 3D Printing – PosserteusMaximus has compiled a list of links on how the preppers/survivalist community is becoming aware of, using and contributing to open hardware and 3D printing.

RepRap Generation 7 Electronics

This design is by Markus (Traumflug) Hitter and should be of particular interest to the RepRap side of 3D printing. RepRap stands for Replicating Rapid Prototyper because Dr. Adrian Bowyer’s project was focused on creating a machine that could more-or-less reproduce itself. We have the RepRap project to thank for the recent explosion in amateur interest in 3D printing and it was the RepRap’s self-reproducing feature that made the explosion possible. The more parts the machine can make, or process, on its own the easier it will reproduce. Traumflug’s Gen 7 electronics are simple and single-sided, so the board can be milled on a suitably equipped RepRap.

You can buy the electronics from Traumflug or find the files at github

The Prusa i3 Is A RepRap That You Can Flat Pack

You may or may not already know who Josef Prusa is. If you’re reading this…odds are you know.

He’s taking his “3rd Iteration” (i3) RepRap to the Open Hardware Summit, and the coolest thing is that it breaks down into two flat sections!

Finally it’s easy to travel with a 3D printer. Don’t print on your desktop, print WORLDWIDE! [from Josef Prusa’s twitter]

For those who are interested in the ever increasing diversity of the RepRap family tree, the i3 seems to be based mostly on the design of Nop Head’s Mendel90.

There isn’t much information available at the moment, but it looks like Prusa has created some special components, particularly in the extruder. Here are some notes, and the github. And here it is printing a giant vase…

Makerbot’s Lawyer Explains Thingiverse Terms Of Use

Apparently Makerbot’s in-house lawyer has more important things to do than explain legal jargon to the public.

In a concise and coherent post, Rich McCarthy explains how Makerbot has structured their legal relationship with Thingiverse contributors. The short of it is that they are using roughly the same terms as sites like Youtube.com, they make no claim of ownership on anything uploaded to Thingiverse, and whatever license you attach to your work (like Creative Commons) they respect.

Well…that’s it. I don’t like doing tiny posts, so here is Josef Prusa explaining how to use the “new” Makerware program with old “unsupported” Makerbot printers.

The Definitive Makerbot Open vs Closed Source Discussion

I did my best to document all the different points of view that are relevant to the open source hardware world but are spread all over the interwebs.

The original Makerbot founders.

This post got big, fast. Really big. After the jump you can find key quotes from Bre Pettis, Zachary Smith (Hoeken), Adrian Bowyer, Josef Prusa, etc.

Makerbot Might Be Going Closed Source

When I saw the Replicator 2, and Makerbot’s slick new marketing, and the glaring lack of ANY reference to providing the design files, I asked the question.

So did a lot of other people, including Josef Prusa, the guy who put together the Prusa Mendel and and sells the Ultimaker. In the tweet heard ’round the open source hardware world, Prusa reported that he called Makerbot support and was explicitly told that Makerbot’s new printer is not open source.

The silence from Makerbot was deafening. They obviously didn’t simply forget to mention that the Replicator 2 is/isn’t open. Unfortunately, when Bre finally did address the issue, it was to use 1,000 words to say “maybe.” Or, in Bre’s own words, “We’re working that out and we are going to be as open as we possibly can while building a sustainable business.” There’s a pretty good timeline over at Tales of a modern life.

So far Josef Prusa seems to be leading the “give me open source or give me death” charge with an Occupy Thingiverse Test Cube and an open letter to Bre/Makerbot.

What finally motivated me to write this article is a something very sad that happened today. Makerbot turned closed source, or at least all the signals lead to it…And you know what is the biggest, sneaky move? Not mentioning it while they announced it. My guess is, that they will mention it when first pre-orders ship out. Which is after OPEN HARDWARE Summit where Bre gives a talk (I wonder about what, lol) and Makerfaire and all magazines writes about them as Open Hardware heroes.

To put things into perspective, Prusa is so committed to the ideals of open hardware that he has an image of a RepRap infill-ed open hardware logo on his wrist, and he’s tweeting stuff like this glassdoor.com page with negative reviews of working at Makerbot.

Things might be a little personal.

It looks like this Replicator 2 release is shaping up to be a real turning point for the infant open hardware community. We’ve got comments going back and forth on slashdot, Make Magazine, and reddit. I wonder how much impact the community will have on Makerbot’s business decisions. Back when Makerbot was as just the team of Bre, Adam and Zach they talked a really good game about not only being part of a community, but being motivated by the goal of “as open as possible.” That Open Source FTW page was last edited back in October 2001 (325 days to be precise). I hope their goal hasn’t changed since then, but it’s hard to be optimistic when Bre (just Bre) says that building a sustainable business is more important than being open.

WikiWeapons – To Print A Gun Or Not

3D printing, when it works, is a remarkably easy way to turn a very complicated design file into a physical object.

Open source, when it works, is a great way to innovate on and distribute an idea quickly.

What if that idea was a design for a gun?

The Defense Distributed project seems to be coming to open source 3D printing from a philosophical perspective. They assert that designing a 3D printable personal defensive weapon system is a challenge to numerous entities that they either disagree with or believe don’t go far enough in their beliefs.

More after the jump.

RepRap Used to 3D Print Molds For Blood Vessels

Additional Links

• Miller J. S. (and friends). (1July2012). Rapid casting of patterned vascular networks for perfusable engineered three-dimensional tissues. Nature Materials. DOI: 10.1038/NMAT3357

RepRap 3D Printer Color Mixing Nozzle by James Corbett

If you’ve done any desktop 3D printing and, lets be honest, who hasn’t, right, then you’re aware of the limitation imposed on your creativity by the color of the plastic you’re printing in. Makerbot has sort of addressed the issue with their dual extruder, but it’s really only a tease. Being able to switch from one color of plastic to another only highlights the fact that you can’t print in any of the colors in between.

At first people tried to solve the problem by coloring white ABS filament with markers just before it entered the extruder. This approach worked. For example, the Filament Colorizer by cyclone holds two sharpies and makes your prints new colors. Dry erase markers also work, as demonstrated by scocioba. Also RyGuy. As an alternative, James Corbett has developed an extruder that mechanically mixes different colors of plastic. The idea is that you could have a roll of plastic in basic colors (like CMYK and black) that you just push into the mixing chamber in different proportions to create the full color wheel.

This slideshow requires JavaScript.

Testing the marker thing was pretty straight forward. People just rubbed a marker on the plastic filament and it did pretty much what you’d expect. Testing the mechanical mixer was an entirely different story. Corbett went through several passive and active designs before he found one that successfully mixed the plastic. Follow the jump to read the conclusion and way ahead from his paper on the subject.

Selected Quotes From RepRap Inventor Dr Adrian Bowyer

Read this stuff. Then get your RepRap supplies from the man himself.

3D manufacturing, or printing, is the most versatile production method humanity has yet come up with.

The role of the core team is to design the mechanics, electronics and software for the ‘standard’ RepRap….My role is to scratch my head and to wonder where it’s all going…

We estimate (though this is probably not a very accurate figure) that there are about 2,500 RepRaps and RepRap derivatives in the world. That’s from a total of four at the start of 2008. So there are almost certainly thousands of hobbyists doing exactly that. Things will get interesting when it becomes hundreds of millions, and to get there is my vision for the project.

The interesting thing about a widespread takeup of this technology is the way it would bypass conventional finance. The machines would be creating great wealth, but would be almost valueless themselves…A manufacturing machine that can copy itself can create goods like no other technology we have – it is the only way to do so with exponential growth, for example. But by that very fact, both the machine and those goods have a value that, as the technology spreads, asymptotically approaches the value of the raw materials used.

Conventional manufacturing produces goods in an arithmetic progression. But a self-copying 3D printer produces goods – and itself – in a geometric progression. And, no matter how slow it is, any geometric progression overtakes every arithmetic progression, no matter how fast, eventually.

I think that OS is in general a good thing anyway. The alternative is various forms of intellectual monopoly, and I can see no real justification for any of them.

When one has a machine that self-copies, logic compels one to make it open-source. The alternative is that one will spend the rest of one’s life in court trying to stop people doing with the machine the one thing it was most designed to do.

If this technology becomes very wide-spread, and if a large number of personal users have them in their homes, what’s going to happen to the whole idea of patents and copyrights? Of course, the answer is found in what has happened over the last ten years in recorded music. Nearly every country on Earth has laws protecting copyright and nearly every 17-year-old has 30 gigabytes of illegally-downloading MP3s on their hard drives. You can’t sue the entire human race.

The interesting thing about 3D printing is that it doesn’t replace one manufacturing industry, it could replace them all.

I expect RepRap will be resisted by many industries, but I’m far too old and uninterested in that aspect of the world to take on any fights. If the idea works the resistance is bound to fail, if not the resistance will have been pointless.

Related Links

• Andy. Interview with Dr. Adrian Bowyer. 3D Printing is the Future.
• Dr. Bowyer, Adrian. (26 June 2007). Why Accountants are Dull and Guitarists are Glamorous – The End of Intellectual Property. RepRap wiki.
• Pierce, Cal. (1 June 2012). Interview with Adrian Bowyer, founder of the RepRap 3D printer project. opinno.
• Interview: RepRap. open business
• Gordon, Stephen. (22 April 2005). An Interview With Dr. Adrian Bowyer. Speculist.