Open Hardware
The power of sharing
I just published a derivative to a project on Thingiverse.com (http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:18918). I love sharing designs! This is the foundation of a new way to make stuff. You need to understand the real power of sharing when time comes to decide if you keep your project for yourself or if you publish it on a sharing site like Thingiverse or Instructables.
Parametric airless tire derivative
Derivatives on Thingiverse are a good way to understand the dynamic behind design sharing. Take the “Wade’s Geared NEMA17 Extruder” by Wade as an example. This project has resulted in fourteen direct derivatives from Thingiverse users, each of which brings it’s own addition or modification to the original design, making it better and usefull for more peoples. Fourteen derivatives of a project is pretty impressive but the best part is yet to come.
One of these fourteen derivatives, the “Accessible Wade’s Extruder” by GregFrost became one of the most popular thing on Thingiverse and spawned four more variations of the extruder. That doesn’t stop there … GregFrost had better ideas for this extruder and published the “Greg’s Hinged Accessible Extruder” thing. This thing became a huge success with thirteen new derivatives and tons of “like”. The list continues with the “Tom’s guided Greg’s accessible hinged Wade’s geared extruder” from Thomas Sanladerer and then, GregFrost published again with the “Guidler for a Gregs Wade“.
The branch I followed is one among many other branches of the original project. All together, all branches are getting close to 50 different derivatives of the original design. The last version to show in this branch is the “Greg’s Wade reloaded – Guidler, Tilt Screws, Fishbone Gears” by jonaskuehling who merged different versions from other branches of the original Wade’s extruder.
But, wait, one more derivative has just been published! “Chri” just posted a new derivative called “Greg`s Wade Universal Reloaded Edition !“. As the name suggest, we are converging toward the ultimate Wade’s Extruder. How many new derivatives are yet to come? No one knows for sure. What is sure though, is that the whole process have greatly improved the original design in a very short period of time. It would have been impossible for a small or medium size company to achieve this at reasonable price.
Compare by yourself the difference between the original and the last designs. Browse trough all the derivatives to appreciate all the work that have been done in such a short time. That’s the power of sharing.
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The Maker Faire World in New York
Following the Open Hardware Summit I went to the Maker Faire World in New York city. This event was held in the same location as the OHS, at the New York Hall of Science.
Maker Faire World 2011 in New York city
3D printers were all over the place! Of course there was the 3D printing village where Makerbot, Makergear, Ultimaker, Botmill and other companies were exposing their stuff but you could also see a Makerbot in almost every booth of the exhibition.
Tony Buser at the Makerbot booth
3D printed Molecules
Of course, there was not only 3D printers at the Maker Faire … We had a gigantic dinosaur/dragon throwing fire, a car covered with dancing fish and lobsters, bamboo bicycles and much more …
Steel and Fire
Fish/Lobsters Car
Bamboo bike in construction
These are only 1% of all the great stuff you can find at the Maker Faire. This alone totally worth the trip from Montréal to New York!
For more information visit the Make Magazine website at makezine.com.
Open Hardware Summit
This was my first time at the ohsummit. The day was filled with great quality talks from speakers of all disciplines.
Open Hardware Summit
I first want to thanks Alicia and Ayah, the organizers for their great work. Everything was planned with details and efficiency.
The day had a great start with the presentation from Eric Wihelm, founder of Instructables. He demonstrated the power of kids creativity by presenting kids projects using Kinect blocks. These young members of the Instructable community have designed, built and improve Kinect guns, ranging from the pistol to the machine gun.
All the legal stuff has been packed in the morning sessions so that the afternoon talks were much more practical and, from my point of view, more interesting.
Gabrilla Levine presented a sailboat drone intended to clean up oil spills in water. The talk was loaded with project management experiences and tips.
Zach Liberman presented an earth touching talk about a device that allowed a paralyzed artist to make painting for the first time in years.
A few talks later, Bre Pettis talked about the creativity of the Thingiverse members by showing the evolution of some fun prints. The gangsta man transformed into a gangsta rabbit, a rabbit with a Colbert head, etc.
There were lots of other talks in the afternoon. I loved the presentation by the Lasersaur team. They managed, with very little fabrication skills, to build a fully functional four by two feet laser cutter. Great project!
The last talk has been made by Mitch Altman, the inventor of the TV B Gone. That was a very inspiring presentation where he invited the audience to invest their time in project they love!
To close the day there was breakout sessions and demos of the attendees projects. Our breakout session was about how to build and maintain a collaborative community of makers. Three speakers presented their projects and the way they managed their respective open source project.
Makerbot Headquarter
Passed 20h, Hugo and me took a cab with two other peoples to the Makerbot party at their headquarter in Brooklyn. I met with great quality peoples from all over the world. I discussed my stars tracker with three members of the Makerbot team.
Tomorrow is off and Saturday I’ll head to the Maker Fair!
Maketbot and Open Hardware
Five months ago I wrote my last article on this blog … Five months ago, I also got my brand new Makerbot! I love so much making stuff with it that I forgot to write on my blog.
Now I am ready to share this with you. I am preparing some nice articles on this topic but you can visit my page on Thiniverse to see what I did so far.
I’ll be at the Open Hardware Summit next week (Sept. 15) in NY and at the Maker Fair the following weekend. I’ll post here some articles ant pictures if I can manage to get some free time.
