A couple weeks back, I gave a talk at the Dorkbot Seattle chapter meeting about the ecosystem of digital manufacturing. You can check out the video of the event below. You can also check out the slides, and links for the presentation in this previous post. Click through for part two after the break.
Showing posts with label tools. Show all posts
Showing posts with label tools. Show all posts
Last week, I gave a talk to Seattle's local Dorkbot contingent. The meeting was awesome: around 90 dorks, all ages and backgrounds, all talking fab. What more could you want? The talk was about the state of the Digital Fabrication Ecosystem today, and I think that this topic is hugely important to the development of Humblefactories in the future, particularly because digital fabrication puts more power in more people's hands. Mark Ganter gave a great talk about his Open3dP powder printing formulas. Willow Brugh also gave a great introduction to Jigsaw Renaissance in Seattle -- you can read more about why she's a maker here. And, Matt Westervelt from Metrix Createspace in Seaettle gave a demo of a Makerbot makerbotting. You can download the slides of the talk in PDF form here (or browse them above), but there are plenty of links that I couldn't include. Read on for a more thorough linkfest and discussion.
All this talk about fabricator tools has got me fired up about exploring some fabrication of my own, potentially using a Makerbot, or a send-away service like Shapeways. Though these aren't close to fully humble methods of making, they are useful steps to master on the path to a true humblefactory. As free cad packages go, Google's Sketchup is pretty great. You have decent control over meshes, and you can easily edit dimensional information. However, the limitations of the free version don't allow export to any format but Google Earth's proprietary .KMZ format, which can't be used by 3d printers, or imported by Blender for conversion. Previous recommendations of users involved using the 30 day trial of the "Pro" sketchup, which can export various formats. Amazingly, though, this extra step isn't necessary, because .kmz is just a renamed .zip archive! That's right -- renaming the extension and opening in a Zip extractor will yeild a .dae file, which can be imported by Blender using an included import script. Check out a more in-depth tutorial here. This is a huge boon for modelers looking to share files on Thingiverse, or to looking toward making their first open, humblefactured objects.
There is a persistent dream (or self delusion) among eco-minded product designers that somehow, manufacturing before the industrial revolution was "better"; Cottage industry was safer, or cleaner, or fairer, or used fewer resources -- or all of the above. Often, this ideal is backed up with anecdotes of textile mills replacing home-spinners, or IKEA replacing cabinet makers. Certainly, these stories of machinery displacing or invalidating jobs (The British still use the mechanistic term "made redundant" to describe layoffs) are true -- but does this mean that a socially sustainable future must involve some return to pre-agricultural cave dwelling? Of course not. But charting a path to such a future requires a re-examination of the human difference between a tool and a machine.
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