VOTE FOR NEXT FAB STUDIO AND THE FOUNDING FLYERS

Vote for the People’s Choice Craft. Text “(Team1″) to 72855. Vote up to 15 times, standard text and data rates apply. Participants will have a chance to win concert tickets from Live Nation. Voting opens Friday, Sept. 3rd at 11:00am

One of our members, David Holly, is working on making looms more affordable and accessible.  I think this is a great project.  Find out more at his website, pvcloom.com.

This has been in the works for a while.  I am very pleased to invite members and non-members to attend the Laser Cut Business Card Class.  Those are a few staff laser cut business cards (my website is down, just wait a week or so).  Did you know that people impress their friends and enemies with laser etched beef jerky business cards, or even an etched leaf?  Sign up here (good ole classes page on the website).  Specifics below.

Requirements:

• 5 person limit.  First come first served.
• Saturday, Sept. 25 from 2-4 p.m., and Wednesday, Sept. 29 from 6-8 p.m.
• $50.00 members/$75.00 non members.
• Class fees include an hour of machine time.   This is enough time to cut about 30 cards, however machine time varies widely with media.
• This is a 2 part class.  We will meet as a group and learn about laser cut business cards.  Then we will individually schedule a later time on the laser cutter to cut the cards.
• Class will go more smoothly if you’re proficient in some kind of CAD program.  NextFab Studio supports both Mac and PC platforms, the Adobe Creative Suite, Rhino, Solidworks, Corel Draw and many other programs.  If you have a specific software need let us know before class.
• Bring a sketch and media.  Paper and pencil sketches are great, but a digital file is best.  We can etch and cut just about anything in the laser.  Beef jerky, leaves, acrylic, poster board, but nothing with chlorine in it.  No pvc films or moleskine notebooks.  Let us know ahead of time what media you plan to use so we can research it.
• We will show examples of laser cut business cards then go over file setup and materials testing.  After the initial class meeting we will individually schedule an hour of supervised machine use, and you can come back and laser cut more cards.  This machine hour is included in the course fee.
• This course is not a substitute for Trotec I and II and does not include formal training on the laser.

18 servo walker, by Edwin Dertien

Hi Everyone! Sorry that it’s taken me this long to continue blogging about Fab6, but I’m a little intimidated about how many notes I have on what happened between Wednesday and Friday. The text document I created is somewhere between 3,500 and 4,000 words, to give you a little idea. Anyway, I’ll start off with Wednesday and go through the events chronologically, like I did before.

The morning began with a quick recap of the previous two days, and a short ceremony to celebrate all the people whose birthdays would occur during the week of the conference. To make things a little more interesting, Dhananjay Gadre put together a small project using a microcontroller to make a group of LEDs resemble quivering candle flames. Then after we all sang the birthday song, the group leaned in and blew on the circuit board which slowly made the “candles” go out, then played its own monophonic version of the birthday song.

This was followed up by more presentations from labs participating in the conference. Highlights included:

• Ghana’s mobile FabLab, as well as their current work on a charcoal generating process using biomass rather than wood as an input;
• Kelly Snook, who is fortunate enough to run a FabLab for NASA scientists and engineers, but is also working with Imogen Heap outside of London to create a FabLab in the small community of Havering-atte-Bower;
• A student from Prague named Dalibor, who is working on starting a FabLab in the Czech capital;
• And a fabber from South Africa who has been working on an initiative to create an “interactive booklet” which runs on an mp3 player in order to teach children about road signs and moral issues in their community, among other things.

After some more logistics, the group split up and traveled to various local labs in order to attend various workshops. I stayed in Amsterdam to be able to attend a workshop entitled “Open Technologies”. The workshop was rather small, but we all agreed that this was advantageous, because it would allow for a more intimate discussion without having to divide into smaller groups. The workshop facilitators introduced themselves as the minds behind the Instructables Restaurant, which I attended on Sunday (it is always in a different location). Of course, this being a workshop on open technology, they reminded us that organizing an Intructables Restaurant is something anyone can do.

Creative reuse of an inherantly South African design

From there, we went around the table introducing ourselves, and the conversation moved to a discussion of what open design actually is, and how the internet has facilitated the sharing process. More specifically, we discussed how the internet initially made the sharing of intangibles (music, pictures, etc) easier, but now the focus is shifting towards the sharing of information about physical things. This information could be an STL or SolidWorks file which parametrically defines a part or product, or it could simply be a step -by-step process guide. Another interesting result of this has been a move back toward decentralized manufacturing (that is, a large number of spread out workshops, rather than a few very large factories). A great example of this is the 100kgarages project.

This prompted one of the members to point out that it is important to extend our focus to include local craft processes, and not just focus on capabilities that most FabLabs share. For example, the Dutch have a tradition of beautiful blue and white “Delftware” ceramics. When designing, one can take inspiration from the techniques and merely use the same color scheme to mix old and new, or one could incorporate the actual ceramics techniques into their design. From there we moved onto a discussion of the impact – designers are able to get to market much more quickly, leading to a cambrian explosion of designs for the community to tweak, pare down, and validate.

This prompted the question, “what are you sharing in open design?” It was agreed that it would be nice to be able to share something as standardized as a recipe, which combines information about the raw materials, the processes used, and the end product. Two corollaries of this are the recurring problem of critical mass, and the need for recursive recipes/instructions that can tunnel down generally to include information about each step (for example, someone writing a recipe for a micro controller assembly will not want to cover ’soldering tips and tricks’ every time they write a recipe – with hypertext and a wiki, this is not necessary). The bigger problem is that sharing recipes is not incentivized. Instead, with the traditional focus on copyrighted design, the opposite is actually true. However, this is starting to no longer be true with the increasing popularity of the Creative Commons license. For those of you not familiar, I encourage you to take a quick look at the Wikipedia article, rather than read a poor description written by myself. I would however like to add a quote I found in the foreword of Little Brother, by Cory Doctorow, which I think makes an important point:

“If you’re not making art with the intention of having it copied, you’re not making art for the twenty-first century. There’s something charming about making work you don’t want to be copied, in the same way that it’s nice to go to a Pioneer Village and see the olde-timey blacksmith shoeing a horse at his traditional forge.”

One of last year's entries to the (Un)limited Design Contest

The workshop finished with a discussion of why people enjoy kits so much (sourcing parts from all over is annoying, the joy of assembly is huge), and explanation of the (Un)limited Design Contest (one category requires the designer to reuse, remix, or improve a design that was previously submitted). Finally, Edwin Dertien showed us two robots which can be made entirely from plans he has released online. The original design was the flatpack walker, a simple two servo robot. The new design (pictured above and to the right) is more ambitious, utilizing 18 servos. One nice aspect of both designs is the flat parts have been made to fit on one A4 sized piece of acrylic or plywood.

The rest of the afternoon was spent setting up for the academic symposium taking place the next day at the Royal Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW, in Dutch) and working on submissions for  the (Un)limited Design Contest.

The symposium began early the next morning with some opening remarks from the director of the KNAW, who commented on the buildings historical significance as a meeting place for Scientists, and the fact that the building dated back to the 17th Century. He was followed by the director of the Waag society who proudly reminded everyone that the building housing the FabLab in Amsterdam is older (I guess it’s some sort of competition). He briefly covered the large number of FabLabs in the Netherlands and Belgium, saying they were a result of the government commitment to doing positive things in the public sphere.

Next, Neil Gershenfeld took the floor, and emphasized that the program is “an experiment on an experiment on an experiment.” The first experiment was the CBA (Center for Bits and Atoms), which seeks to merge physical and digital science (with an end goal of personal fabrication). The second experiment was the FabLab created at the South End Technology Center in Boston, which led to the surprising growth of the program. The third experiment was taking Fab1 (which was not called that, and basically just a meeting around a table in Boston), and continuing the process, leading to Fab2 in Norway, Fab3 in South Africa, all the way to Fab6 in Amsterdam, and Fab7 in Lima. Neil stressed how easy it is to take all of this for granted, and urged us to take a step back in order to take it all in. Finally, he went over the schedule of speakers for the day, before giving the floor to Ron Weiss, from MIT, who spoke about Synthetic Biology.

While quite a bit of the specifics of Ron’s work was well above my head, the overall ideas were simple enough to grasp. Basically, Ron and his colleagues are figuring out how to write DNA sequences which contain the information required for a cell to build the necessary circuit. The challenge is finding a way to design and create a reliable digital circuit from “messy, imprecise biological pieces.” They accomplished this by using proteins to represent signals; essentially a high concentration of a protein represents a positive signal (a 1), and a low concentration represents a negative signal (a 0). Using modules which they have created in series, they can generate output signals which get more and more discrete (closer to 0% or 100%) or digital. He went on to show some examples of modules they had created: an inverter, inverters in a cascade, a pulse generator, and a few modules which allow communication between cells. The idea is to put these sort of capabilities into stem cells so they can talk to each other and decide what sort of cells to differentiate into, allowing for tissue regeneration. Another possible use is for smart viruses, which can identify and destroy cancerous cells, or smart tissues which create insulin.

Ron Weiss then handed off to Adam Arkin at Berkeley, who spoke about “Scalable Synthetic Biology.” One idea I found quite interesting is that most of the mechanisms being used in synthetic biology are “found” parts, which researchers then put together, trying to accomplish something useful. Adam pointed out that as a result of this, there are no “standard parts” for people to use in synthetic biology. He has been working to take the P181 attenuator gene, which is a found RNA object, and create a family of inverters from it. By making small changes to the gene, he has been able to create 4096 different inverters which all work the same way, but are orthogonalized, meaning they won’t interfere with each others functioning.

He was followed by Joseph Jackson, who gave a presentation on the past, present, and future of biotechnology. He spoke about his work on the Biocurious project, and the LavaAMP, which is a pocket PCR device. Basically, PCR is a process which allows someone to take a very small sample of DNA and copy it millions a millions of times, in order to be able to do experiments. He also talked about BioFab, which is the biotechnology equivalent of a FabLab being opened in California. Joseph handed off to one of his colleagues in Venezuela, who has been working on the CruziELISA project, which is working to develop a test for a syndrome common in Latin America which only requires easy to find chemicals as reagents. Some other cool projects they have been working on are tools like an egg beater centrifuge, which are cheap and easy to make. He also mentioned that the Tech Shop has been working on prototyping a “Dremelfuge.”

Next Tom Ran in Isreal spoke about Molecular Implementation of Simple Logic Programs. What this means in simpler English is that they have developed bio computers able to use propositional logic (i.e: All men are mortal and Socrates is a man, so he must be mortal). What they have been able to do is create small systems of proteins which can answer questions like ‘Is Socrates mortal?’ If the answer is yes, then the system creates green light as an output. For me, the most interesting but of information to take away from his talk was that a 1 Liter bucket containing between 10^9 and 10^11 cells (each completing one operation every ten seconds) is theoretically equivalent to a 30GHz computer!

Up next, Hod Lipson spoke about Rapid Assemblers and the problem of how to automatically assemble huge numbers of parts quickly. He summed up current work using a lattice of voxels (volume pixels), where the precision of the additive process arises as a result of the precision  of the components, not the system placing them. This is analogous to LEGO or Duplo, which can be put together to create shapes much more accurate than the motor skills of the child doing the assembly.

After lunch, Larry Sass from MIT spoke about projects he’d been a part of which involved the digitization of building fabrication. According to him, they had found interlocking parts to be really great because they require less skill to put together. In the summer of 2005, he worked on the “Instant Cabin,” which was made of 1000 unique parts, only 2 of which needed to be refabricated! In 2008, he worked on a digitally fabricated New Orleans style house for the MOMA. This design had 5o00 parts, and only 3 or 4 needed to be recut. His goal is to start work on the “Instant FabLab” next summer, which is a project that seeks to allow labs to make new labs.

Larry was followed by Vicente Gaullart, from the Barcelona FabLab. His talk focused mainly on their entry to the Solar Decathlon two years ago. The design came from the idea that the form of a house should be optimized for the location in which it is built. To do this, the team used Rhino to create a parametric design, which output a form for the house based upon the amount of sun the location receives over the course of a year. This form was translated into a set of parts designed to be cut from flat sheets of wood (wood because it is readily available all over the world). The house was also elevated off the ground to provide some shade, and additional passive cooling. Finally, the roof was covered with flexible solar panels, which funneled the solar power to batteries below the house. Unfortunately, the judges at the event chose square, boxy designs as their winners, but the design from Barcelona did win the people’s choice award. More information can be found at the FabLab House website.

The next speaker was Matthias Kohler, from Switzerland. He briefly discussed some of his previous work, like the mTABLE, a parametrically designed table which you could modify and order directly from your cellphone. More recently, he has been working on using a robotic arm to place bricks in order to create some very cool looking walls. One was  made at the Winery Gantenbein, producing some very organic shapes from rectangular blocks. Another example is the installation he did at Pike Loop in New York. He has also done some interesting work using foam. For example, they created some chairs using varying sizes of foam blocks, which were placed around their campus. If the geometry of the top face doesn’t suit the way you would like to sit, you can roll the cube onto another face, until you find something comfortable.

The next speaker was Dale Dougherty, the Editor of Make Magazine. He showed a video and then spent some time discussing what makers are, and how they hack the physical world. He concluded by talking about the upcoming Maker Faire in New York (which we will be attending). After another break, Neil quieted down the crowd by playing some Ramones. Once he had everyone’s attention, he introduced the next group of speakers, covering the implications of personal fabrication.

The implications section was led off by a ten minute video by Bill Foster, the Congressman sponsoring the National Fab Lab Network bill which I mentioned in my last post. In the video, he discussed his background, the bill itself, and his high hopes for the NFLN.

He was followed by Kamau Gachigi from the Nairobi FabLab, who discussed the work they have been doing in their community, as well as describing some of the tech companies they are helping to incubate. These include: Tekno International (which refurbished an old munitions factory and converted it into a workshop where they make digital to analog converter boxes for people who are stuck with older TVs), Bawa Industries (which makes sanitary towels out of natural, local, sustainable materials), 24X7 Mwalimu (who make educational software), and several others (including a flexible vest with integrated solar panels for wearing on a bike, evaporative cooling systems, and a homemade CNC router).

The next speaker was Tim Lynch, who spoke about the difficulties of operating a FabLab in Afghanistan, where conflict is such an every day part of life (several bombing took place less than a mile from where the FabLab is located). There is hope however – Tim pointed out that with 75% of the population younger than 23, there is a real thirst for knowledge in the area. The key is to introduce yourself to the locals, maintain your faith in what you are doing, and let people fix things themselves (they won’t learn anything if you do it all for them). Tim was followed by Pat Colgan, who briefly spoke about the challenges of starting a FabLab in Northern Ireland and dealing with the aftermath of the Protestant/Catholic conflict.

The final speaker was Jan Morrison, who spoke about working with FabLabs in order to advance STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) Education around the country.

The day-long symposium concluded with an open house event at the Amterdam FabLab, which was crowded, but very fun. Having written another 3000 (almost) words, I think I’m going to wrap up this post and save my notes from Friday for a third post. If you read this whole post, I appreciate it!

]]> http://nextfabstudio.com/fab6-part-2/feed/ 0 http://nextfabstudio.com/very-informative-page-about-when-to-replace-bike-helmets/ http://nextfabstudio.com/very-informative-page-about-when-to-replace-bike-helmets/#comments Sun, 22 Aug 2010 20:47:38 +0000 Stephanie http://nextfabstudio.com/?p=1171 I happened upon a refreshingly thorough page about how frequently a bicycle helmet ought to be replaced.  From the Bicycle Helmet Safety Institute.  Of course.  Have a listen:

“The better 1970’s helmets were reasonably good ones, but were not quite up to current standards. It is probably time to replace that old Bell Biker, Bailen, MSR, Supergo or similar model from the 70’s or early 80’s. (We have a page up on replacing the Bell Biker.) The hard shells were great, but the foam liners were not thick enough to meet today’s ASTM or Snell standard. The Bell V-1 Pro was designed to today’s standards, but the foam is very stiff, and if you are over 65 you probably should replace that too. If you have one of the 1980’s all-foam helmets with perhaps a cloth cover, we would recommend replacing that one. Lab tests showed some years ago that bare foam doesn’t skid well on pavement, and could jerk your neck in a crash. The cloth doesn’t help much. In addition, some of them had no internal reinforcing, and they tend to break up in a crash. That’s not serious if you just fall, but if you are hit by a car the helmet can fly apart in the initial contact and leave you bare-headed for the crack on the pavement.”

Here’s the new electrostatic flock guns.  I’ve got a smaller one up at the top there and a medium sized one.  Medium is my favorite.  It’s now smeared with adhesive and looks like I’ve flocked for years with it.  The flocking is still a work in progress.

Here’s a detail shot of the smallest one. It’s also know as the Pocket Flocker (Pock Flock for when one is in a hurry).

And lastly, a snapshot of the flocking work station.  Sorry for the iPhone shots, I really wanted to get flocking.

Back in the days — especially during the British Colonial empire, in tropical Africa and South Asia — when tonic water was called such because it was, in fact, a tonic to fight malaria, the taste was overwhelmingly bitter for some people. Gin-and-tonics were created to make the consumption of tonic water more palatable. Nowadays, tonic water isn’t used for malaria, but medicinal quinine still is. However, the amount of quinine in modern tonic water — that is, when it’s actually quinine and not quinine flavoring — is a quarter- to half-percent of what a medical quinine concentration would be. The local bar is not, sadly, staving off malaria.

But back to the Monell study.

Some people enjoy the bitter taste of quinine and tonic water, while others dislike it. The researchers found that differences in taste perception can be linked back to differences in genetic makeup. People who have similar perceptions share the same pattern of DNA — it was linked back to a region on chromosome 12 that is near a bitter receptor and associated with perception of quinine’s bitterness. But bitter receptors are located in both the mouth and the gut. The big question now is if the perception of bitterness can also be traced to how effectively a person’s body can metabolize quinine-based anti-malarials.

“We wonder whether people who are less sensitive to the taste of some bitter medicines might get less pharmacological benefit from them,” lead author Danielle R. Reed, PhD, a behavioral geneticist at Monell, said in the article.

The entrance to the FabLab in Amsterdam.

Before I get into the meat of the post, I thought I should put in a link to the “polycom” (EDIT: This link doesn’t work. THE LINK HAS BEEN FIXED, GO AHEAD AND GIVE IT A TRY) set up by MIT for people to stream the conference live. Unfortunately, Amsterdam is six hours ahead of Philly, so when we get started at 8:30 am, it’s 2:30 in Philly. Either way, give it a try between now and Friday, and maybe you can catch some Fab talk or see a little bit of what is going on.

It’s been an exciting few days so far at Fab6 in Amsterdam. After an opening night dinner at a restaurant built almost entirely of IKEA furniture, and an extremely DIY meal, we started bright and early Monday Morning. Unfortunately, I think I lost a page of notes from my first day at some point today (I think someone sketched something on the back of the page and then tore it out of the book during the projects session today), but that’s what inspired me to get a blog post done tonight, while everything is still fresh in my mind. I also have quite a few pictures (sorry for the lack of really quality pictures, these were all taken with my phone), which I will sprinkle liberally throughout the post.

Instructables Restaurant in action

The conference opened with some comments from the hosting FabLab, which may hold the title for oldest building containing a FabLab (although there is a FabLab in the Design Museum in Barcelona, which may be an older building, according to one of the employees), considering the original parts of the building date back to 1488. After being used as a location for weighing goods coming in and out of the city, it was used as a guild house for local workers, including the surgeons, who used to operate in the room in which this all took place.

Niel Gershenfeld gave some opening remarks then, reflecting on how unexpected the almost exponential growth of the FabLab program has been such a welcome surprise, and briefly discussing the road map for where the program and the so-called new industrial revolution is heading. He made an analogy comparing the free libraries Carnegie set up, and the expansion of literacy to the average person that was created, to the growing number of FabLabs and the “new literacy” (with technology, and fabrication know how) they foster.

He also mentioned a very exciting bill which is being put before Congress by Bill Foster (a physicist and a Congressman), which would set up a nationally funded National Fab Lab Network, with a goal of one lab per 700,000 people (roughly 443 total). Let’s hope this bill gets passed soon.

After some quick logistics explanations, representatives from each lab were given about 3 minutes each to describe themselves, and what they are up to. Some standouts were Delhi (represented by Dhananjay Gadre, who is publishing a book called “Tiny AVR Microcontroller Projects for the Evil Genius), Ian from Cleveland (who recently played in Croatia with his band, the Tesla Orchestra, featuring two giant Tesla Coils, built at the LCCC FabLab), the LCCC Fab themselves (if you do a google image search for  the terms “Obama” and “Shopbot”, you can see Obama taking a close look at their Shopbot), a community art space in Providence, RI called AS220 (one of the representatives also happens to be the founder of the One Theremin Per Child project, which I think only consists of a bumper sticker at this point), and the Groningen FabLab (where they teach a papercraft workshop!).

After lunch, I attended a workshop entitle FabLab Community Building, which I’ll distill down to, for brevity’s sake, the Three Pillars of FabLabs. Together they form a triangle, and all the cool stuff that  goes on at fab labs happens inside this triangle:

• the general domain (the FabLab),
• the people (that’s You!), and
• things that matter (around you).

That was followed by a workshop centered around reviving and revamping the FabFolk website, in order to keep the content fresh and useful. One thing I found rather interesting is a service called Yammer, which is essentially a clone of Twitter, although it restricts the userbase to a group which all share one e-mail domain (in this case @fabfolk.com) Addresses are free, so sign up for one and try Yammering to the Dutch Fabbers – don’t worry, they only write in Dutch on a subset of the site. A lot of the talk centered around the question of how to achieve a critical mass of users on sites like these, which is generally required before they become really useful.

From there, the conversation drifted to the subject of documentation, the amount of associated work, and reasons why people don’t go the extra mile to document their work and share what they have made. It was decided that at the very least, something ought to be done to reduce the amount of work required in order to get a decent photograph of ones work. In essence, the idea is to create some sort of permanent station for photography, featuring a camera secured somehow (10 feet of aircraft cable? a pivoting arm mounted to the wall? integrated completely into the wall?) in some sort of well-lit space ideal for taking photos. This will eliminate the need to check out a camera or get it out of a storage locker or something, as well as the need to clear space, position lights, etc. Beyond that, by using an Eye-fi memory card which uploads photos automatically to a Flickr account, much of the hassle of transferring and uploading photos can also be avoided. Not to mention the photos are instantly available online from anywhere!

This morning began with rain and more 3-minute presentations from the FabLabs in attendance, and then everybody boarded buses to attend workshops located at other FabLabs around the country. I chose to visit the Protospace in Utrecht in order to attend “FabLab 2.0″, an appraisal of the current state of machines you can make in a FabLab. Representatives were on hand to describe the current state of development from:

• Fab@Home – Hod Lipson discussed improvements to expect in v3.0
• RepRap
• The Mantis Milling Machine – gotta love the “eat your face” project
• MakerBot
• Fab in a Box
  

  Vacuum Bagging a parabolic dish for a rural wifi network

That workshop continued after lunch, but I chose to instead attend a project session entitled “Casting with Green(er) Composites”, which covered the use of natural fibers from plants (like cotton) with resins derived from plants, rather than the harmful ones made from chemicals. One example is the oil produced by cashew shells, which can be used as a phenolic resin. Others can be made using corn starch or even sugar. One drawback, however is that a lot of these are water soluble.

Partially for this reason, the resin we used that afternoon was a polyurethane epoxy, which is one of the safer ones to work with. I did still manage to get some in my eye, but after ten or fifteen minutes of rinsing with water, I was happily back at work helping Keith from MIT make a boat.

Mold for lay up of a boat using polyurethane and cotton fabric

The first step was creating the mold. For the parabolic dish, a laser-cut press-fit mold was put together out of cardboard. Ours however, would be a lot like the papier mache ball formed around a balloon.  The only difference was that we would only be using one side of our homemade, football-shaped balloon. While the pump slowly worked to fill our makeshift balloon with air, Keith and I set about cutting the cotton fabric into strips.

With the strips ready and the balloon inflated, all that was left to do was mix resin and begin laying strips of resin-soaked fabric on the balloon. About two and a half hours and one big roll of fabric later, we were as finished as we would ever be (we had run out of fabric, and it was beginning to rain again). We covered the last layer of fabric strips with a thicker coat of resin, and then some thin clear trash bags to keep the water out, cleaned up, and headed back to Amsterdam. I hope to see on Friday weather she’s canalworthy!

Another mold, still not ready for lay up.

The finished boat, curing

This looks to be a laser cut cross stitch pendant.  I don’t know anything about it, except that you could make that here.  Via The Laser Cutter.  Another flocking post is on the way.

Also in the Laser Cutter post,  something called the workroom.  It’s a space  in Toronto, kind of like NextFab, but for sewing.  Sounds good to me.