Erik's Blog: Discussing IT, personal fabrication and a new and better world

The slides of our joint talk are now available. First up are Rhys Jones and Adrian Bowyer, the third section is my part:

You can also download the original OpenOffice generated .ppt file from here.

For some more details on the analysis, see my previous post: "Self-replicating devices: the statistics"
I don't think that a recording of the talk was stored but if I'm wrong, please tell me where to find it!

Today was our talk on RepRap at the FAB6 conference in Amsterdam at the Royal Academy of the Arts and Sciences. Rhys Jones introduced RepRap and showed his latest developments in multiple materials. Adrian Bowyer talked about the legal implications of widespread adoption of fabrication technology. My part was about community dynamics and growth. In an earlier talk, Bre Pettis had showed, through many examples, the amazing things people are doing with 3D printers like their Makerbot and how they're sharing them via Thingiverse. I built my talk on his great description of this open source community that innovates as a side-product of doing what they're passionate about. Especially I first published the statistics that were based on the input from the RepRap survey which so many RepRappers had diligently contributed to.

One of the question of the RepRap survey was about when an operator had joined the community. The RepRap survey was an effort to learn about the adoption, creation and diffusion of innovations produced by user/developers. The study was done in conjunction with prof. Eric von Hippel (MIT Sloan School of Management, USA) and Jeroen de Jong (Erasmus University, EIM). The study is also a part of my master's thesis on the viability of the open source development model for physical objects, in other words, the future of Open Source Hardware.

[Update] The slides from the presentation are available now:

OpenOffice source file: RepRap.ppt
[/update]

Disclaimer: the findings are preliminary results!

As shown in figure 1 (see below), most of the people who get involved the project and that adopt the technology have done so fairly recently. The adoption rate increases so fast that new adopters outnumber all previous adopters that had joined more than 6 months ago.

Since a significant proportion of the whole community is sampled (estimated between 10 to 20%), it is probably representative. It also hold another powerful message. An attempt to measure the size of the community is prone to be outdated when analysis of the collected data is completed. Yet, especially in the long run, the precise size is far less important than its growth rate.
What this figure also shows is that the community can attract new participants. Obviously this type of growth creates the challenge to integrate the efforts of a growing amount of individuals.





The doubling period of the amount of transistors that characterizes Moore's law, is 2 years. Moore's growth symbolizes one of the primary drivers of the digital revolution. It's the reasons why today, we are all carrying phones in our pockets with the computational power and capabilities of yesterday's PC. In a similar way, the trend towards better access to fabrication capacity is a driver for another revolution in the making: the digital fabrication revolution. With many participants that innovate 3D printing technology, 3D printers will become cheaper, more precise and introduce more capabilities like printing smart digital materials and a higher fraction of self-replication. With the technology becoming more appealing, more people will adopt them. For the open source machines, each user is also a potential developer and has an incentive to improve his machine in a way that he/she can. Solutions that are developed that can be produced with digital fabricators can easily be shared and developed collaboratively, allowing a great future for open hardware and its potential to generate civic value.

If the trend would go on uninhibited or even speed up more, it will not take long until there will be personal fabricators in most people's homes. The tools of production are about the be democratized!

Some notes about the numbers:

• Makerbot and RapMan operators were included (many of them using these machines to make a RepRap Mendel)
• The average operator has 1.5 different types of machines. In principle people with 4 printers of the same Model will count as 1 operator.
• On the left side of the logarithmic scale the graph is easily distorted even by small variations.
• Even if the estimates are an order of magnitude too smaller in reality, I would be off only by 20 months. The correct, complete entries that were sample constitutes the absolute minimum size of the population. Even based on this estimate, extrapolating the trend for a few years it will still be a pretty significant community.

I wanted to get this information out as many people have been curious. There is more coming in the form of my master's thesis, but I will try to add another update to my blog as well.

I just made a serendipitous discovery:
I printed a very narrowly fitting freely rotating Bowden coupling and it had such a good grip on the PTFE that I printed another with just a little more contact area. You don't need the nut anymore for the Bowden cable!
I had been looking for push to fit couplings ever since Charles Pax showed me how good they fit to 1/8" PTFE cables. Now it appears that they are definitely printable!



The current push to fit coupling can be removed sideways. If you pull it sideways at the top first, you can pull it out with the plastic filament inside. It's a huge benefit to not have to pull back the plastic first.

A variant with a clip that you can pinch with your fingers would perhaps be even better, but this one is so simple and very functional and it hardly takes up any space.

I also included a cable to cable coupling, you just put in two cables sideways.

When done correctly, this type of friction from printed parts could be used for the extruder drive mechanism too, replacing the metal pinch-wheels that we currently use. In any case it can already withstand more than the force the force that the filament is driven with, and that's with ultra-slippery PTFE!

It would also allow us to print fasteners! Though perhaps a simple plug and a cam mechanism will better do the trick. And if you get a similar friction fit on the filament itself, you can start ysing that as structural material too (with some creep, but you could re-tension things once in a while).

Which other non-printed parts can we eliminate by a superior (I'd like to think this is an improved part, but only time will tell) printed alternative? 


You can find more details on the Bowden extruder here. Search for the most recent implementations with this link.

Our wedding day was really unforgettably beautiful:

Below is my original post about "the making of the cake topper". It stood there perfectly because my best friends made a gorgeous cake (such a great surprise, and it tasted great too!).

For "The making of the 3D printed open source wedding Cake Topper", see this blog post.

Friday the 9th of July, I'm getting married to Esther! I'm really looking forward to this really special day. It takes a lot of preparation, but it's also been a lot of fun. At the wedding our guests get a piece of cake. But on every decent cake, there should be a cake topper! I wanted a personal cake topper that I could print on my 3D printer. While looking on the Google 3D warehouse I found several, but none were satisfactory. I wanted a simpler model that was solid and which had a personal touch.

On Kubuntu Linux, I made a video in OpenShot (open source video editor) documenting the process from Open Source CAD software to open source G-Code tools (Skeinforge) to my RepRap open source 3D printer!


The resulting 3D model is this (parametric) model (on Thingiverse here) with the following modules: bride, groom, arm, leg and hat. Everything is made from spheres, cylinders and cubes, as you can see in the exploded view:





I printed the groom in black, which went surprisingly well (none of the overhangs were problematic and with some active cooling, no slow down was needed for thin parts). When switching to BfB's white ABS (not the creamy/beige natural color) I had some problems. The white additive in the ABS plastic required a higher temperature than my extruder's equilibrium temperature when fully turned on. I used a laptop power supply to power the extruder's heater coil with 18 V instead of 12 V. The temperature started over and undershooting, so I implemented the PID algorithm that was in the Makerbot firmware branch. I did a little software PWM trick since the interrupt settings broke PWM functionality of the I/O pin I was using. The software PWM feature just rotated an 8-bit counter, incrementing it with every step of the motors. When it was equal to the PWM value, it turned off the heater. When it rotates, it's turned on. This gave me a much more reliable temperature and I could not just extrude the white ABS better, but probably any thermoplastic.

A source SVG file for the wedding graphics that I made can be found here (single Inkscape svg file).

License:

Wedding graphics by http://bit.ly/flossWedding is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at Erik's dropbox.

For higher res pictures, click on the slideshow:


If you'd like to congratulate us on our wedding, drop us a comment.

In December last year, I became the proud new owner of Leo (after Leonard Darwin), the son of Charly (Charles Darwin (my earlier machine)). It didn't take 9 months to fully develop, but it seemed like a long time (the second and third sets of parts tooks just a week). I wanted a second machine to be less dependent on my first Darwin, in case it broke. After Leo made a few test objects that were okay, I never really printed with it anymore... why?

Now that I have printed and assembled a third machine (a mini-mendel) and got that working, the benefit of having this second one isn't so big anymore (apart from that it's more prettier and tidier than my first one). I really "know" Charly, my first RepRap much better and has proven to be very reliable having printed hundreds of parts (and counting) in only a couple of years. This makes Leonard a bit lonely, it seems he's mostly idle which is making him depressed, as you can imagine. Also, I can't give him the attention he deserves because I'm writing my MSc thesis on RepRap, talks and travel... so:

It is time for Leonard to see more of the world, and be invited to the homes of other hackers who want 3D printers in their home!

You can have fun with Leo and print yourself a set! Have him send postcards once in a while (not entirely unlike the Dwarf of Amelie's father), or post pictures of his printing experiences on Thingiverse /derivative.

From RepRap Dev

Click on the picture to see more photos.

There is one 'catch', if you use it to print one set, the new owner of this set has to print two of them with their machine (the Mini Mendel also counts, which you can print within a day's worth of printing). You are encouraged to ask for the same adherence to the RepRap etiquette. If you print two sets with Leonard, you're freed from this obligation (there are some time saving to printing everything twice). Let me know who will be the happy owner of the set. At some point I'd like to have Leonard return home. My requirement is that it's not in a worse shape than the previous person to host him. If you're thinking of really big changes to Leo, keep me in the loop.

It includes a full Cartesian bot with a special modification I made to prevent jamming of the Z axis and so you're able to use a continuous loop. It contains the BitsFromBytes control electronics which may need to be replaced with more open electronics (RR motherboard) or someone has to follow in my footsteps working on the OpenRapMan firmware. In other words, you'll have everything to get it running.

The person who will loan my Darwin will have to convince me that he will be taken good care of and that he will be returned within an acceptable amount of time (shouldn't have to take more than 3 months). If I'm not happy with the loaning practices I have to right to retrieve my little baby. We can arrange how we want to share the costs that improved the machine (e.g. if replaced electronics are installed). You can buy some filament from me when you pick up the machine. You need to buy a 12V 5A adapter, if you want to use the BfB electronics. It has a working extruder drive mechanism and extruder, connected with the Bowden cable as documented here. Picture:


I'd like someone to be able to pick it up by car. I live in Tilburg, the Netherlands, so this offer is probably most attractive for people based in the Netherlands or Belgium, perhaps Germany. I want to see you in person before I'm letting you take Leo and I'm not shipping it since it's fully assembled and because of the large dimensions (~50x50x60 cm WxDxH). Also, face to face I can provide some instructions on what parts of the machine may need some attention to get printing quality up. I'm pretty confident that the quality can be even better than my current RepRap because this one is so much more tidy and better studding and more ball-bearings were used.


View Larger Map

If you're interested, please post a comment and tell me why you should be the first to host Leo!

In March 2010 I gave a talk at the MIT Sloan School of Management on RepRap and the democratization of Fabrication Technology and emergence of open hardware communities, entrepreneurial spin-offs, etc. Bre Pettis and Zach "Hoeken" Smith took the stage right after me and they really rocked with their Makerbot and Thingiverse story (due to form and substance)!

The Innovation Lab meeting was organized by Professor Eric von Hippel at MIT and author of Democratizing Innovation (available under Creative Commons license).

I finally took the time to upload the slides.


Source: OpenOffice

Feel free to ask questions or provide suggestions (other than about the formatting, which Slideshare messed up a little).

A while ago I put on my RepRap ambassador hat again which resulted in a newspaper entry in a Dutch newspaper. Since it's slightly old news now and I'm allowed to cite works that I'm mentioned in I believe it's okay to share it now:

From RepRap Misc

For those who don't read any Dutch, here are some highlights that the article mentions:

• What the RepRap is
• How much cheaper it is compared to conventional commercial machines
• That it can replicate itself, and has indeed done so
  
• Non printed parts are from the hardware store.
• That it can print a working whistle with the pea inside
• In the near future, losing a piece of the game Settlers of Catan is not a disaster anymore, you'll just print a new one!
• The power of the concept lies not in the technology as much as it lies in the community that collaborates in a Wikipedia-like fashion. Sharing results and experimentation outcomes and voluntarily
• contributing their improvements.
• A large collection of printable designs is generated by the community, for the community.
• The example of printing shoes for a child and later recycling the old plastics, adding some and printing a larger size.
• We still have to make a good recycling system, but the concept has been proven.
• I'm doing my Masters thesis on the economic impact of RepRap.
• The non-exclusive nature of the community project.
• Increasing the printing speed.

What I really like about the Thingiverse physical object repository is that people are not just adding awesome, innovative [1, 2] and useful [1, 2] new content. They also innovate in how they publish content and how to use the content, exploring and sharing new and innovative ways of (applying) digitally assisted making. They explore and share what works and doesn't work for them. They get other people excited to try their ideas and techniques and improve upon them. And... they find very original ways of packaging objects:

There is an interesting phenomena on Thingiverse lately: Surprise Boxes! It looks like an ordinary box right? But the secret is that there will be something 3D printed inside the box! What will it be? You won’t know until you make it become a reality on your MakerBot or other 3D printer!

The way it works is that it is a box with something special inside, but to find out what it is, you have to make it… and even then only you will know what’s inside because the surprise gets sealed in! What a awesome idea!

This is so cool. What an innovative idea by Conrad2468 and it’s already been repeated by Owenscenic!

From: Makerbot Blog

The important message is that this digitally assisted making around RepRap and the many derivatives is a social phenomenon as much as it is a technological one. Both are critical enablers. Thingiverse every day proves itself to be a sustainable source of creative ideas and value produced by a community. At the same time it endorses and is a showcase example of open source development beyond software. This makes it different from the platform products that most for-profit 3D printer vendors or service bureaus would set up, who have a more closed and organization-centric mindset. Of such platforms, not just the level of participation is different, also the degree of commitment and the motivations that drive the individuals are different. The more traditional for-profit companies have little awareness of communities and the value created around community-centric "products". Though there are some notable exceptions...

Together with Siert Wijnia from FabLab Protospace I gave a workshop and presentation at SHiFT 2010 in Lisbon, Portugal. The topic was Personal Fabrication while highlighting the roles of FabLabs and the RepRap project in making fabrication technology available to the (creative) masses!

Before going to Lisbon I shipped a batch of parts. A second Mini-Mendel machine was (partially) assembled during the conference. I will blog about this later!

From SHiFT 2010

Slides: PDF (web), PDF (print), PPT (OpenOffice, source).

Now, since the Icelandic Vulcano erupted I'm forced to spend my time on the Portugese beaches until my rescheduled flight departs on Thursday (hopefully).