National Makers Faire 2015 - Washington DC

I attended this event with Phil Oles, a fellow member of make717 ( www.make717.org ).

It was crazy steamy hot and humid!  But we had some great conversations with makers and got some face time with Matt of www.PrintedSolid.com and Sophia of www.Morphiapp.com

Pictures from the event:

This lady has some really amazing "folding" works of art.

Phil and I met a scouting troop that specializes in EN-able 3d printed hand workshops.  Seems like a no brainer for them to visit make717! (from the DC area).  www.crew2013BSA.weebly.com 

 I was impressed with these 3d printing demo's of material properties.  www.kt421.wordpress.com

NIST was showing the Watt balance made of legos, which uses magnets made by a local company, Electron Energy.

 I love this design project, kids create positive/negative or neutral aerodynamic objects in the air up-flow tubes.

Phil and I ran into Dickinson multimedia specialists, Brenda Landis and another person that I didn't get contact info for.  They are responsible for makerspaces on campus, they have also realized that they already had maker areas throughout their campus.  This is probably also true of Stevens College!

We spoke about laser cutters/engravers from Epilog with John Ketchem.

Riverpoint Academy has a makerspace in a public school in Pacific NW, operated by TREP STUDIO.  They told me they are big fans of Bright Star lasers .

I met a director of LVL1.org the home makerspace of a valuable source of info, Caleb Sheehan who studied 25 makerspaces last year and is visiting more this summer.  We hope he stops by our space!  We are supposed to email directors@LVL1.org and they will help spread the word for our social venture pitch.

In the vein of Caine's arcade we saw a kickstarter cardboard pinball game from Pinbox 3000 .  Their prices seem high...

I got some great e-textile help for my next TechGyrls summer camp project from www.alevasi.com and www.threadwitch.com .

A great day, too bad it was such a sauna.

3d Printshow 2015 NYC

http://3dprintshow.com/

I attended this event on Saturday, April 18th with Matt Gorton of PrintedSolid .  It was a very relaxed event covering 4 floors of the venue.  Lots of good vendors of printers, filament, services, etc.  Another event was going on during the NYC 3d printing week at the Javits Center.  Those that had been in both venues said that event was slammed with people, but you could barely get to the booths...and the people walking the aisles were more curiosity seekers than active 3d printer people (that venue was probably also more focused on certain brands of 3d printers).

One point of buzzworthy news was the announcement that Makerbot was closing all its retail stores and laying off 100 employees...I think a vindication of the open source hardware market.

Ultimaker had an impressive booth, including a motorcycle 3d printed on an Ultimaker:

I was very impressed with Tinkerine (Canada), a very nice printer with nicely developed 8th grade to post HS curriculum:

 An example of their curriculum (hovercraft using recycled cans and 3d printed parts:

Bigrep, a $40k machine with an envelope that goes with that price tag (and a CE mark!):

 This Bigrep printed vase had an amazing texture, just like it was woven:

 Somehow I only got the current Dynamo3D (Spain) current model, they have a EVO version that is amazingly fast (Claiming 450 mm/sec!), Matt is currently testing this fast printer.  It needs more development and they appear committed to proprietary software and hardware from Denmark.  Which is probably justified to accomplish that type of acceleration and speed performance.  Print times will be amazingly faster on this machine!

Printrbot is not resting...they had the Metal Simple, a new Play version, and Metal Plus...the Play version is apparently brand new...not even on the website, so I may have the name incorrect on this one.  Brooke was talking to users of all ages, an example of the relaxed event dynamics.

 These guys have software eco system, seemed like a good solution for make717 when we have multiple printers, or a classroom with various printer models from different manufacturers:

This was in BE3D (German I think) booth, 3d printed, then coated in graphite then chrome plated:

One floor wall 3d printed art, I was hoping to win something from #52shapes, but didn't...I at least should have selfied with the make717 t-shirt :-(

This is a company from Portugal trying for the classroom model (Beeverycreative):

I met the US represtentative for 3d Hubs and she was excited to hear about make717, I hope we can get her to some events at make717.

Another great connection was with Sophia Georgiou of the "morphi" iPad app.  I am hoping to use it in upcoming summer camps with middle school girls.  They will be able to create their own 3d print models!

A related app is a mincraft style 3d model creation software called 3dSlash, you have to try it!

Highlights of 2015 NoVA Mini Maker Faire

WOW, what a Mini Maker Faire...of course it helps to be in a tech centric area like Reston, VA...but I was impressed with the quality of makers I saw while "helping" +PrintedSolid .

My mentions in no particular order:

Josh (I think) of MakeDesignTeach and #3dprintgumball Hall of Fame had this cool color process for 3d Printing:

 I don't think I helped PrintedSolid much, but at least Matt got some food and walk around time.

This iTapArcade project was one of the coolest I have seen...would be a great bike build module:

This was a mosaic at the beginning of the day...hopefully I returned to get the end of day pic!

Sponsors...

rubberbands and dowels...nice build system!

small dowels and color bands like kids make bracelets out of...really cool build system.

Nova Labs I believe:

A really cool thing that The Lancaster Science Factory should add:

more building inspiration:

Wylolum had some amazing and cool clocks, game systems, etc.

 more building, newspaper and tape is all it takes!

I did return to the mosaic done by visitors!

Great conversation with the Synthetos ( TinyG motion control board)...a force to be reckoned with, I want the Inventables CNC mill!

Wyolum again, these LED grids can be bought from SEEED studio.

Embrio, easy to learn programming without a ceiling!

This looks like my new favorite recipe to introduce students (middle school aged and up?) to Arduino, programming, and physical computing.

www.embrio.io

and

http://www.jechavarria.com/2014/02/27/k4s-keyboard-arduino-use-scratch/

I have tried everything along the way, preferring S4A over all others.

But when the web based Scratch (2.0) launched this created a problem for me.

Along came Embrio, and my initial thoughts are WOW!  The beauty of Embrio is the ceiling is much higher than all previous entries in the "easy to program" world.  You have so many options without living life inside the Arduino IDE.

Try this new Embrio software out and tune in tomorrow for updates from NoVA Mini Maker Faire.

Don, make717

Lets measure success in new ways...Luddites vs. Engineers

"The Luddites were 19th-century English textile artisans who protested against newly developed labour-saving machinery from 1811 to 1817. The stocking frames, spinning frames and power looms introduced during the Industrial Revolution threatened to replace the artisans with less-skilled, low-wage labourers, leaving them without work." Per Wikipedia.


versus Dilberts version of Engineer:

I just experienced this ongoing dilemma with a dry wall finisher. I was asking about some of the technology breakthroughs. He would describe them and I would ask about the downsides (too heavy? lower quality finish?) but he kept coming back to it eliminated jobs.

The dilemma going back to 1811 and maybe even earlier is that as innovation occurs, some people's livelihood is displaced.

In Chris Anderson's book MAKERS, he quotes the CEO of Etsy, ..the rise of small business leads to opportunities for us to measure success in new ways...(my paraphrase)

Why US manufacturing struggles?

I have gradually come to realize that manufacturing in the US has lost its risk taking soul.

Clayton Christensen talks about the only true job creation is via innovation.  Nearly all of my 20 plus years in manufacturing I have seen excellent lean 6 sigma optimizations, and mergers/acquisitions lead to great shareholder profits...but the problem for our country, no incremental growth in employment comes from these 2 activities (as Clayton points out).

One of the most productive times for me grew out of a manager willing to get some "no ROI" required capital funds for a factory operation.  This slush fund allowed good engineering discipline and the engineering group was able to drive great improvements for the factory.  The point is that my boss, his management, and the accountants/MBA's had to "let go", take a risk that the engineers could create value going after things that seemed risky and uncertain.  Seth Godin would call this "art."

Today almost all companies, large and small, incorporated, and privately held;  they all are so risk averse that they gradually give away any competitive advantage.

Michael Araten president of the K'nex company on a new robotic technology:   "we did a little more research and felt that these robots might be able to learn," he said. "And given the fairly disruptive price point that they're available at, we could make some investments, and if we're wrong, obviously, the downside was not super high, and if we're right, the potential upside is dramatic."

Why don't we see this kind of risk taking thought process more?

Introduce Plastic Injection Molding (PIM) into a classroom/shop?

Really cool kit at www.techkits.com

I wonder if a low melt plastic could be molded into a mold that was 3D printed in a higher melt temperature plastic?