Maker History

Zach via spikenzie on Flickr. CC

Zach has been an active part in the development of the RepRap project for many years. In 2007, he was introduced to the concept of Open Source Hardware (OSHW). OSHW is a growing trend in manufacturing where the designers release all of the files needed to replicate the object once it’s up for sale. This allows customers and supporters to build upon the product, and maybe sometime in the future, provide crowd-sourced support. Once he realized the potential OSHW had to revolutionize manufacturing, he thought, “whoa that’s everything.” Since then everything he has worked on has been released onto the web in some form for others to build upon. One of his most successful OSHW designs was the RepRap Generation 3 electronics that eventually controlled the Mendel and MakerBot’s Cupcake CNC. Zach has been making bootstrapped 3D printers, or RepStraps, starting 5 years ago. He says you can comb through old email threads and see his “total n00b” struggles to get a machine going.

At some point after a few startup failures,  he began looking for a few new friends and found them in MB co-founder Bre Pettis and other smart nerds in NYC. They eventually founded the famous hackerspace NYCResistor in Brooklyn. Once they secured a space, Zach brought in his RepStrap stuff to show off and hack on. He also got a RepRap Darwin kit and assembled it at NYCR, but they didn’t function too well. After some successive failures, and fortuitous access to a laser cutter, Zach, Bre and the third co-founder Adam had an idea to make their own RepStrap kit. There are others that have done the history of MB, and none better than Bre himself. MakerBot is now one of the most successful 3D printer companies around today, but for Zach, it “didn’t end on a good note.”

Chinese Vacation

Zach moved to China about a year ago, I assume to help MakerBot’s supply chain. But these days, Zach spends more time running up mountains than running a supply chain. After his break with MakerBot in May, he has been traveling around, exercising and eating well. Zach he got the inspiration for this creative reboot  from Bunnie Huang:

“The coolest piece of hardware you’ll ever own is your body, and if that’s not working well, there’s no hope for anything else. Once I’m done with my aimless wanderings, hopefully I’ll have a better idea of what’s next.”
via MAKE magazine

If he is not feeling the best physically, he won’t be the best mentally for his next big thing. Zach is on a much needed vacation in order to explore a bit and play around with old ideas left on hold. One old project he wants to pick back up are the Keyboard pants. “The world needs keyboard pants” he says.

Falling Out

The story of how Zach left is one that has been told a millions times. It came down to a basic struggle for who’s running the company. In his words, he “got pushed out.” Unfortunately, this happens to a lot of founders. Bill Gates and Larry Ellison are exceptions while the vast majority of founders routinely get displaced. From Inc.com:

“Robert Adelson, a partner at the Boston-based Engel & Schultz law firm who represents entrepreneurs in this situation, says founder succession happens most often when the venture capitalist—who has most likely invested with the company under the stipulation that he or she can remove the founder if necessary—feels the company needs to scale faster.” via Inc.

Zach is quiet on the details, but it could be this push to scale big or the style of development at MB that made the divide. Makerbot has a history of developing new products in secret. The Thing-O-Matic and Replicator were complete surprises to the printing community when they debuted. This is odd behavior in a community that is so accustomed to sharing every tiny development. Whatever MakerBot is working on new will be a surprise too. Zach found this closed development frustrating, when after working on a project for a year and not sharing any details, MB would release it, get some feedback, and Zach would go back into the lab to toil away for another year.

MakerBot also just raised $10M in VC funding and that amount of money changes the work dynamic. The people with the money call the shots. Like I said, Zach did not divulge any details so we can only speculate that this was one of the divisions that led him to leave. When I asked him what different direction he wanted to go in, he couldn’t say, but recalling his parting, Zach said “I thought I was going to be working there for the rest of my life.”

Bright Future in China

Zach’s home for now is Shenzhen, a place he calls a maker paradise. He says it’s incredible living in a different country, especially one that has rapidly industrialized. Shenzhen has grown from nothing to 10 million people in 30 years, and the best part is, they are almost all focused on manufacturing.

The ingredients for anything you want to make come from China, and they are sold by the bucket in SEG electronics market. This building has stalls with suppliers for any component you can think of. There’s even a dedicated LED building. Even though you can get anything you want, there is language barrier to overcome, so Zach is learning mandarin. In the meantime, he has a trick. After all, part numbers are part numbers, so he researches on Digi-Key, finds a few compatible components, then asks around around in the market for parts.

So what’s next for Zach? He’s got a “bajillion ideas” and Shenzhen is place to make them. He describes how amazing it is when you can look up an Alibaba supplier and then go visit them in person. Whatever project he starts next, he wants to be active during development. During his RepRap and early MakerBot years, the process of blogging, getting feedback, and directly engaging the user base was really exciting for him. But is it possible to do product development even more open than it was at MakerBot? Can he go beyond simply publishing a data dump of source code and actually collaborate with the people who will use the design?

When discussing his love of 3D printing, Zach made a comparison to compilers, critical pieces of software design. Well, “3D printers are the compilers of the hardware age.” They actually make the things you think up. But he doesn’t want to stop at plastic parts, which are OK for fancy shapes and toys, he has been eying up the world of CNC mills. When you use a mill and make a part out of metal, you get a high precision part for the small investment of materials, design, and robot time. The possibility of making a useful object is much higher when using a CNC mill.

Also, he has shed some light on the purpose of the RepRap project itself. RepRaps are biological entities in the eyes of RepRap founder Adrian Boyer, and  they are designed to show that with terms like “vitamins” and “self-replicating.” But it’s hard to cram all that self-replication into one machine. You’ll never be able to extrude the metal parts of an extruder. Even making electronics on a RepRap is still tricky.

Keyboard pants via brucesflickr on flickr. CC

But a new way of thinking about biological machines is to consider the whole lab as self replicating,  and the machines as organs, born out of specialization. Each machine could make some part to reproduce another machine. Having a full lab of open source hardware machines is fundamental to the future of makers. Once Zach is refreshed from his well-deserved vacation, maybe we’ll see a new line of maker-friendly CNC mills, all controlled by keyboard pants.

Option 1) Lasercut, Laser engrave, and LED-light-up your very own Snowflake

Join us on TUESDAY, December 20th, 7 pm – Midnight

Meet-and-Make, Hive76 and NextFab Studio Members
@ http://NextFabStudio.com/ @ 3711 Market Street

This “Maker Collider” event will be a great opportunity to make awesome stuff.

We had proposed these projects:
All details are here on the Wiki

After reviewing the projects here and those proposed by NextFab members it sounds like we will be doing some form of the Chess boards, the snowflakes, some robotics, and a bunch of laser-engraving. But what if you don’t like those? Come by anyway and you can rally troops for helping you on your own project(s).

NextFab Studio will have these staff members on hand throughout the event:
Chrinstine : Textile and Industrial Design ( fabric knowledge, product design,cad, sewing )
Ian : Electronics (pcb design/fabrication, coding, wiring, soldering, etc.)
Seth : Mechanical Engineer (handtools, cad, product design)
Brandon : Multi-Media Designer ( 3d printing, graphic design, product design, cinematography, cad)

Anything you want to do, you can do. AWESOME.

Check out all their equipment.

Oh, and there will be food too. Be there at 7 pm!!

To Join in on the Discussion, please join our mailing list

I really had an interest in how almost everything worked, picking up as many things as I could. One day my dad brought home the first Magic Eye picture I’d ever seen, and after struggling with it for an hour it was an incredible feeling when the image of the earth finally popped out at me in all its 3D splendor, and I’d been bitten by the 3D bug. Living where I did, we didn’t have access to hardware stores or Radio Shack, but there were petrified forests, ripe with geodes and other marvels of geology that I loved to learn about. In slightly later years I learned some interesting things about chemistry, and am probably fairly lucky to have all of my fingers and toes. After figuring out how to make a surprisingly effective blowgun with quite nasty darts, I got a taste of what fun working with projectiles can be, going on in much later years to build a high-power rocket that is fired from a pneumatic cannon.

I was always interested in computers, and had a burning desire to learn how to write my own software. In elementary school I stumbled onto HyperCard (an incredible thing at the time), and I was off and running teaching myself some basics of algorithms, and writing simple tools and games. (I was never particularly interested in actually playing games, much preferring to explore and learn, or take things apart and dream of what I could do with the pieces.) Discovering programming was a bit of a boon for me, because it was a way of inventing for free — no materials to buy or wait for in the mail, no tools to wear out, if I could dream it and if I had the motivation, I could make it happen for nothing. From that point on I think I just assumed that I would go on to major in Computer Science when I got old enough. Little did I know that when that time came, I would abandon it after feeling like the educational system was beating all the fun out of it for me.

I’ve always found myself wanting to understand things, but having to teach myself. While that has been frustrating, usually taking much longer than simply being taught by an expert, I think it has been valuable for shaping how I approach challenges. Making things can be a puzzle, an adventure, or a game, and it’s so much more rewarding in the end than something you’ve bought or watched on TV.

Enter: TOPS Science.

TOPS is brilliant. It’s a combination of comic book and pragmatic science lab. Everything in a TOPS science workbook can be done with house hold items. The topics cover a wide range: electricity, chemistry, biology, geology, meteorology–I wouldn’t be surprised if they eventually came out with a nuclear physics issue. I couldn’t get enough of them.

The materials were always simple, and something you probably had lying around anyway. For example, the electric circuits module used aluminum foil backed with scotch tape for wires, paper clips to connect them, and clothesline clips and rubber bands to make a flashlight bulb holder. There were never any exotic parts or chemicals in a TOPS module, and if something was slightly out of the ordinary, it would show you a convenient source for scavenging it from some thing else.

Even after all of the worksheets were done, I would still continue to play with the left over pieces, hooking up DC motors vultured from broken toys, making LEGO gears, testing out rubber-band belt drives, building switches made from bent-up paper clips and aluminum foil, and winding solenoids from ballpoint pens and wire from who-knows-where.

Some things that resulted from a combination of my boredom, ingenuity, and youthful ignorance:

• A small catapult with a surprisingly long range and a poorly thought-out target area (i.e., a plate glass window).
• A coil gun that scared the family dog into knocking over a ceramic vase.
• Experiments in electrolyzing water for basic hydrogen and oxygen that resulted in several toxic chemicals as well as one small explosion.
• Experiments in electroplating objects with metal from nails and paper clips that looked suspiciously a lot like the previous entry with largely the same results.

It was that second, small explosion that prompted my parents to buy me a computer as a compromise to prevent me from continuing with my increasingly dangerous pursuits in the physical sciences. But, I still carry the basic principles of analog circuits because of these awesome, little books. I don’t know what I ever did to deserve them because it would often lead to new ways for me to endanger my life/the carpet, but they are perhaps the most significant part of how I came to be a builder and maker of things.

Pipeworks wrench

I visited my parents at home this Thanksgiving in Hillsborough, NJ and rummaged around the house I grew up in. One of the things I found was a Pipeworks wrench from my childhood tinkering. Pipeworks was a wonderful system that used basic PVC pipes with special connectors to make 90º and 45º angles and seat to snap in. They were like LEGO furniture. I created a wheelbarrow and lemonade stand as in the instructions, but of course quickly moved on to my own designs. The last and best being a small cart I dragged around on my bike until it fell apart. Here’s a video of kid actors having fun with the set. Good times.

Of course, the Pipeworks were only one in a string of awesome toys that encouraged making. As any kid, I had LEGO (that is the proper collective noun apparently.) A true LEGO collection is measured in mass, and I still have about 40lbs of LEGO in my parent’s attic; the ABS plastic withstanding the seasonal temperature shift, but the forgotten batteries corroding the contacts of the battery box in my super-awesome death robot on wheels.

Construx helicopter

But every kid had LEGO. I also fondly remember the more obscure Construx. This set was like a smaller Pipeworks with beams that could be connected to make stuff. I had a set like the one pictured here with pulleys and wheels, and I kind of remember breaking those beams quite often with the wrong amount of torsion. It was very architectural though.

I had some K’nex too, another beam toy, but a bit more flexible and durable than Construx. K’nex came out in 1993, and by the time I got some, it was a bit too late for my tinkering age. I was sliding into the deep abyss of adolescence and the darkness of CompuServe image boards.

As a kindergartner I would also play with the lacquered wood blocks at Grandma and Grandpa’s house. Grandma had a special set of blocks that she kept high on the mantle away from kids hands. They were heavy stone and rounded from years of play; she played with them when she was a kid. It’s amazing that while researching this post, I found those same blocks: Anchor Blocks, or Anker-Steinbaukasten as they are known as in Germany where they are still made. They are quite expensive now too. Is this the best present for my pieces and nephews? Maybe they can share a set.

Zaks

There was also a crazy toy called Zaks that I had a bag of. Zaks are equilateral triangles and squares that snap together at the edge. When completed, these polyhedral models look a bit like the STL mesh files I build today with the makerbot at Hive76. What made this set especially cool was that some pieces has a 4-stud LEGO pattern on them that allowed for easy attachement to LEGO models. I don’t know why I didn’t use this mind-blowing connection more in my models, but I remembered it just fine. Maybe I didn’t want to get my toys mixed up. I should have been building super intensive toys with Construx and the frame, Zaks, the moveable skin over a upper skeleton of K’nex with all the inner workings and details handled by LEGO attached to the top of a Pipeworks cart. Sigh. These are the regrets of a youth misspent. Today you can print out a Duplo block to Brio track adapter which to me seems like the greatest thing in the world. I wonder if I can print a Zaks-Construx adapter, or a new line of Pipeworks connectors with LEGO studs …

I got to get to work making stuff!

In this short class/discussion group, we’ll be covering a bit of the flora and fauna of the hackerspace movement—for new and old members alike—and its growth in popularity throughout the world. We’ll look at some notable spaces and what they are known for, how different spaces organize themselves, the pros and cons of such arrangements, and how new members can get involved, have fun, and make new friends quickly and productively. Afterwards, established members are encouraged to introduce themselves, share their stories of Hive76, and talk a little bit about their projects.

Join us on Wednesday, September 22nd and/or Wednesday, October 6th, at 7pm. Come for the class and stay for the open house afterwards to experience the full buzz of a vibrant community of creators in action.

Did you know that the first electronic computer, ENIAC, was built in Philly at UPenn?  Bet you did.  Did you know that it was built to calculate ballistics trajectories for fighter pilots during WWII?  And did you also know that the first mathematicians and programmers to work on the new machine were women, mostly from the Philadelphia area?  Hive76 is really, really excited to invite you to a presentation about these “female computers”.

On Wednesday, August 18 at 7pm, Hive76 and the Rotunda are teaming up to bring an illustrated lecture and movie teaser called “Hidden Her-story, the Top Secret Rosies of WWII”.  Documentary filmmaker LeAnn Erickson will give this talk based on the research she’s done for her film “Top Secret Rosies” which is nearing post-production.

Wouldn’t you know it, one of our members’ grandmothers was part of the all-star math team that gave ENIAC its start. You know, before it went mainstream and sold out.

Flyer forthcoming for this awesome event.  Spread the word to the history, math, science, and engineering buffs in your life.

Who are your favorite women in science and tech? Maybe Hypatia, the Egyptian mathematician and astronomer? Are you in luv with Ada Lovelace, considered the great grandmama of modern programming? Can I get a hell yeah for brilliant evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis? How about the team of women who programmed ENIAC? Myself, I’m partial to one Voltairine DeCleyre, an anarchist, feminist, BFF of Emma Goldman, and the namesake of Philadelphia’s own Radio Volta.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/45705704@N00/ / CC BY 2.0

Dr. Clelia Mosher debunked Victorian myths about womens’ frailty and out-Kinseyed Kinsey by about 50 years

Is there a professor, colleague, friend, kin, internet celeb, garage inventor, or other brilliant lady in science and tech, ancient or modern, living or dead, local or halfway around the world, who you just have to shout out? Let us know! If you want to write or record a snip about someone you <3 during Women's History Month, get in touch and we'll make it easy to get your thoughts to our blog.

In the meantime, here's a laundry list of inventive women that will keep you Wikipedia-ing into next week.