Category: Cool Projects

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Project Operation completed

About a month ago, Body Worlds 2 (currently at The Franklin Institute) contacted the crew from Make:Philly about making a giant version of the board game Operation for an event at Body Worlds.

Make:Philly had the skill to build it, but no place to work on such a project, since their regular home (at the Industrial Design Department of UArts) is a presentation space, not a build space. So Make:Philly turned to their friendly neighborhood hackerspace (us) as a place to build the project.

So after 5 weekends of tinkering, tweaking, and painting, the Make:Philly and Hive76 crew(s) deliverer the finished game to the event last Friday. Unfortunately, the event got snowed out, and Body Worlds is working on snow date for it.

In the meantime, here are some photos of the project.

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“Handling” Hot Build Surfaces

photoSo when you use a silicone platform for the heated build stage, the heat doesn’t go all the way to the edges and corners of the stage (the material’s low conductivity which protects you from the 3 A electricity flowing is also the property that inhibits heat conduction laterally). This has a disadvantage in that effective build surface area is decreased, but a minor perk is that you can handle the stage with your hands by holding at the corners.

So tonight we realized that the 4″ putty knife we had been using to scrape off objects from the makerbot build platform was actually perfect for addressing BOTH of these problems. We put the putty knife between the heat and the build surface… The metal surface conducts the heat evenly to about 80% of the build surface now. So how do you pick up this hot stage? A huge bonus is that even though the stage is now too hot to hold at the edges, we have a sturdy handle that doesn’t interfere with printing!

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heated build stage success!

our custom made heated build stage for our MakerBot CupCake CNC is working extremely well. here you can see 4 pulleys being printed at the same time. there’s no raft (saves time, plastic, and headache), and ZERO warping. excellent! the etched acrylic may stick a bit too well. we’ll have to try regular, unetched acrylic next (which will be less expensive anyway).

say hello to mass manufacturing.

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Buckminster Fuller Challenge

Although it’s hard to find info on, Buckmeister Fuller spent some of his best years working out of The Science Center, an incubator system/building/thing near the University of Pennsylvania. Around the time he died, the Buckminster Fuller Institute was founded, to do great projects, and in general make the world more, uhh, Fulleriene. Somewhere along the way, it moved to Stanford, and then to NYC, but something about it’s “We have to do it ourselves, no one else is going to” attitude still says it has some Philly spirit at heart.

The Buckminster Fuller Challenge (BFC) is a competition that the institute runs for “Catalyzing the vanguard of a design science revolution” or in English “Make great things, because we’re screwed if we don’t.” BFC is awarding $100,000 to support the development and implementation of a strategy that try to solve and invent our way out of humanity’s most pressing problems.

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