Simen Svale Skogsrud has posted a remarkable bit of laser cutting on the Thingiverse website: a working Air Vane Motor. I just love how simple the thing is.

Simple Air Vane Motor by Simen Svale Skogsrud

Watch a video of the motor in action here.

This kind of project really excites me because it is a dynamic object, and it is really addressing the problem of driving small scale laser cutting towards more complex and functional applications, both of which are quite unusual to see. Plus its a cool mechanism!

There appears to be a burgeoning community of makers on Thingiverse, posting and remixing each other’s designs, many of which, like this one, aren’t complete products by any means but the building blocks towards other things. Quite literally in the case of wizard23’s Parametrized Lego Bricks, for 3D printing. Indeed, Thingiverse user Matt has already posted a 3D printable version of the Air Vane Motor.

Another of may favourite things about this one is Simen’s motivation for the thing:

After seeing some kids playing with a little air plane powered by compressed air from a soda bottle, I decided to see if I could make a laser cuttable version of such a motor.

Simple, straightforward and playful!

via Thingiverse blog

Technion, Israel Institute of Technology’s Biorobotics and Biomechanics Lab is working with 3D printers from Objet to create robots that move like living creatures. A recent video features the lab’s founder Dr. Alon Wolf speaking about his work in the field, the benefits of rapid manufacturing to the lab’s research, and a robotic snake made from 3D printed parts.

The robots developed by the BRML are intended for defense department search and rescue missions and medical applications such as minimally invasive surgery. 3D printer developer and manufacturer Objet was previously mentioned in connection with the animated film Coraline. They offer seven different printers and will be present at this year’s rapid manufacturing trade show RAPID2009 May 12–14 in Schaumburg, IL. (I’ll be doing some posts on site at RAPID as long as they let me in on a press pass.)

Greg J. Smith has written an article for Rhizome.org entitled Means of Production: Fabbing and Digital Art concerning “digital fabrication (aka fabbing) at a variety of scales which include the curatorial questions raised by these new hybrid industrial design/sculpture objects as well as the implications on the practice of individual artists.”

Greg introduces some terminology and goes on to describe how digital fabrication is reaching wider audiences through projects like RepRap. He discusses a recent exhibition in Berlin of 3D printed objects and poses questions that challenge us to think about the effects of digital fabrication on contemporary art:

“If this new creative class blurs the line between artist and industrial designer as well as code and artifact it only follows that the manner in which we exhibit and consider this work will require rethinking as well.”

Read the full article at Rhizome.

The future is demanding more of materials; we need materials that are ecologically safe, superior in performance than in the past, and shed their usual restrictions.  To meet these new standards artists, designers, and engineers need to push the boundaries and go beyond the typical expectations of what a material is made of and what it can do.

One such designer is Kathy Schicker. Having received her MA in Design for Textiles Futures at Central St. Martins, it follows that she is now challenging the commonly held assumptions of textiles. She specializes in Jacquard weavings that incorporate or involve light as a transformative element.

Her glow textiles are constructed with yarns that glow in the dark, rendering the invisible patterns visible. Continuing with the theme, what first appears as solid white fabric turns to color with exposure to sunlight. The colors reveal the printed and woven patterns which were previously hidden.
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The interactive design group SOUNDS.BUTTER renders songs visible with a programmed sewing machine stereo. The concept behind this prototype was to take the visual data generated by sound and automate a physical representation.

The interactive design studio / duo behind this idea is Patrick Li a.k.a. FULLfat and Ian Gallais a.k.a. LOWfat. Much of their work incorporates sound in unexpected ways, such as an umbrella that uses ultrasonic technology to break the water particles on the fabric so you never have to shake it dry and a flower pot with a wireless microphone that picks up vibrations which are translated into musical notes– allowing someone to play a song by simply tapping on a surface underneath the pot.

Visit the SOUNDS.BUTTER site.

It sounds good in theory, a robot with a CNC head, until you see it working.

There is something deeply creepy about the way an insectoid robot moves, especially if it has a routing bit rotating at 22000 rpm as a head.
Matt Denton AKA: Winchy_Matt from MicroMagic Systems using B.F.Hexapod with an additional floating pen attachment, and a utility to convert DXF files into translation commands for the p.Brain controller, has built a walking CNC router!

The implications of this are huge, and a little scary, perhaps it is the fatalist in me but I can just imagine the robot crawling over a human head and inflicting some unwanted neurosurgery, or perhaps a little trepanning? I am sure there are other applications in the mining industry where these little guy’s could crawl in, drill core samples and crawl out. Or perhaps it could be a way to rescue people trapped in an earthquake type situation, but I keep thinking back to the trepanning….

Worse still if this was incorporated with the BigDog robot, previously mentioned on the Ponoko Blog

via Dave via Boing Boing

Instructables publish their first compilation in print this week, with 300 pages of top instructables voted for by the community and selected by the website editors. I got an advance copy, having an instructable in there, and have been devouring the book at every opportunity. Somehow instructables are even better suited to book form (or maybe its testament to the work of the publishers, O’Reilly). The book is easy to navigate and lucid yet still packed with both the original instructables plus selected comments and interspersed commentary from the website creators.

The book is available from Amazon and the Maker Shed - a fine Christmas pressie for any maker I’m sure. The great thing about the book is it is much more manageable than the website for the viewer - its all too easy to get lost among the 10,000 projects that have been uploaded, and the book seems to be a good representation of the variety of projects on the site.

One instructable that I had never seen before opening the book but that blew me away is the Universal Lamp Shade Polygon Building Kit. Steven blogged about this project way back - it’s a great candidate for laser cutting and indeed the author, Dan, (of Squid labs, incidentally), provides a .dxf for doing this very thing. Even better are the responses in the comments however, including this corker from Travis:

TV-B-Gone inventor Mitch Altman was quoted on the Make blog today with some interesting experience on open sourcing his product:

“Even though my project was not open source, I benefited from the open source community. People hacked TV-B-Gone remote controls in wonderfully creative ways. (Search online for “TV-B-Gone hacks” and you’ll get the idea.) These hacks increased the product’s popularity, resulting in more sales and more people around the world experiencing the satisfaction of turning off TVs.”

a TV-B-Gone - image from Maker Shed

Read more here at Make. Its interesting that when Mitch set out, he was going very much down the patenting route and it was only when he went to a hacker meet that he was first exposed to “people who are very critical of patents and other forms of intellectual property law”. Now the TV-B-Gone (a remote for switching off any TV you aim it at) is sold open source from Maker Shed and the source code, board layout, TV power codes, and all documentation, will be available online.

via Make

At the design office where I work you can almost guarantee that during the course of the day, two or three people at a time will be waiting for the printer to slowly churn out their print job. Sure it is a way to socialize, catch up on gossip and unite us all against the common enemy in the printer.

Silverbrook Research, based in Sydney Australia, may have developed THE print technology to end the print bottle neck, and get our designers back where they belong, the coffee machine. The Memjet printer technology (when released) will be 10 times faster than other technologies at the same price point.

The Memjet technology, which has been in development for more than 10 years, is backed by more than 1,400 U.S. patents; about 2,000 more are pending. The new technology prints full color images at 60 pages per minute (ppm), many times the inkjet industry standard. The technology, which will be a fraction of the price of high-speed color laser devices, will soon be available for OEMs targeting the home/office, photo-kiosk and label markets. A business-class, 60 ppm Memjet-based printer is expected to retail for under $300. The ink pricing is expected to lead the market and help eliminate the price penalty for printing color.

The Memjet technology is comprised of three highly integrated components: page-wide printheads, driver chips and ink.

The printhead consists of a continuous row of 1mm x 20mm silicon print chips connected end-to-end. Each chip contains 6,400 nozzles, equaling 32,000 nozzles in total for a 100mm (4î) printhead and 70,400 nozzles for a typical lettersize/A4 printhead. The nozzle density is 17 times higher than the nozzle density the market leaders offer in their leading printhead designs, which contributes to the cost effectiveness of the new technology.

The ultra-compact, continuous color printhead stretches from one edge of the page to the other. Unlike traditional scanning inkjet printheads, the Memjet printhead does not move, reducing vibration, noise and mechanical complexity, while dramatically increasing performance.

The technology can print full-color, photo-quality images (4×6 or A6) at 30 ppm, full-color and black-and-white business communication (8.5×11 or A4) at 60 ppm, and draft mode at 90 ppm. In the label, tag and ticket market, this translates into 6 inches per second for full 1600×1600 color printing and 12 inches per second for 1600×800 color printing. This compares to industry standards of about 1 to 2 ppm for 4×6 photos, 10 to 15 ppm for cost-effective ìbusinessî color, and 30 ppm for draft mode. The technology also replaces similar-speed, 200 dpi label-printing technologies with a high-resolution color alternative.

The latest kit from Adafruit appears to be another banger. Ladyada writes on her blog about Drawdio:

“Originally designed by J Silver, when I first saw the Drawdio at Maker Faire I knew it would be a great project for beginners: A lot of fun with instant gratification! Essentially, its a very simple musical synthesizer that uses the conductive properties of pencil graphite to create different sounds. The result is a simple toy that lets you draw musical instruments on any piece of paper.”

I am unfathomably excited by this project, combining as it does two loves of mine: abstract expressionism and atonality. Sorry, I mean sketching and music!

Ladyada posts a great video presumably taken at Maker Faire showing Mr. Silver and a whole host of people playing with the invention - there is a great social aspect to the experience too as users can create more possibilities by holding hands whilst interacting with each other’s doodles. It is worth noting that Jay Silver comes straight from that hotbed of maker talent, MIT’s Media Lab, specifically the Life Long Kindergarten group.

I wonder if there is potential for a Drawdio/Photomake mashup? You could certainly have any sketches that you think are worth preserving converted into a lasercut outline without much effort..

via ladyada’s ranting