Peter H. Diamandis on Google+ – 5 Steps to Cutting Costs Through Open Source: DIY Drones.

In this blog, I’m continuing my exploration of what Chris Anderson’s company DIY Drones has done in using open-source methods to create products that are exponentially less expensive to make.

Neoden TM240A Pick and Place machine – first impressions « Circuits@Home.

Some time ago I noticed that I’m spending more time building boards and less time developing and needed to increase my manufacturing capabilities. After thorough reading Dangerous Prototypes’ Chinese desktop pick and place machine forum thread I got in contact with a factory and bought TM240A – the big brother of TM220A. Earlier this week a DHL van carrying 70kg crate pulled in my driveway. After a day of hands-on learning I started building boards. This article was written after 2 days of using the machine and contains my first impressions as well as a couple of hints.

First, it is a real Chinese machine – well built, simple, and reasonably priced. At the same time, an owner must be prepared to fix mechanical issues and work around software bugs without relying on manufacturer’s support – the folks at Neoden are helpful but due to a time difference a reply to an e-mail would arrive the next day. Fortunately, the user base for these machines is expanding and the thread linked above as well as videos by Ian@DP and other people provide lots of useful info.

I was ready to face issues like air lines clogged by small pieces of styrofoam, non-functioning vacuum pumps and such; luckily, the only problem out-of-the box was racked gantry causing feeding fault. Thanks to this post in DP thread I was already aware about the symptoms as well as the fix – so I fixed it. While doing this I learned that to implement the fix no tools were necessary – a typical human finger jammed between the front support and the gantry works just as well as originally specified screwdriver.

Thirty Days (#10): Seeking zero% failure @ DIY Drones.

Looking for failure is a bittersweet endeavor — it goes against human nature to look for something that we don’t want to find. Our in-house process improvements are bringing us closer and closer to the goal of zero failures. Some days everything we make is perfect, but when it’s not, our job is to find the fault before it gets to the customer. These new gimbaled test jigs run every APM through a rigorous test cycle to validate its performance. In addition, we are constantly working on things like paste handling, material inspection, plus the addition of other super-bad-ass expensive machines that do stuff.

The Maker Movement Disrupts Brands, Provides Opportunities – Web Strategy by Jeremiah Owyang.

For my third year, I spent yesterday at the Maker Faire, in Silicon Valley.  Unlike any other year, the crowds were overflowing, suggesting this movement was growing faster than the cottage industry before.  To put this into context, the maker movement is yet (another) disruption to brands… The maker movement empowers people to build their own products, and share with each other –rather than buying from brands.

Adding to that – Maker brands are causes and businesses that people want to support. Smart brands (like RedBull for example) work within the maker community in productive ways to empower makers to do and share cool projects.

Hardware Startups Quotes: A Make HIW 2013 Anthology @ MakingSociety.

The 2-days event organized by Maker Media to talk about hardware startups and maker-entrepreneurs was filled by very interesting talks and discussions regarding all aspects of going from “maker to market”, as Dale Dougherty called it. Before going more in-depth into the biggest lessons learned from this second edition of Make Hardware Innovation Workshop, I’d like to share with you a number of quotes from the speakers. They are both straight-forward and inspiring, and I think they give a good overview of the main ideas that are currently in the air.

Shoshana Berger, now Editorial director @IDEO.

ReadyMade was founded by chief editor Shoshana Berger and publisher Grace Hawthorne in Berkeley, California. The inaugural issue was published in Winter 2002, with quarterly issues produced until the magazine moved to bimonthly issues with the March/April 2004 publication. In 2006, the Meredith Corporation purchased the magazine. In January 2009, Meredith announced it was relocating the magazine’s creative staff to Des Moines, Iowa due to company-wide budgetary concerns (though the ReadyMade title itself was reportedly successful). None of the editorial staff chose to relocate, and Better Homes and Gardens executive editor Kitty Morgan assumed editorial duties for ReadyMade on an interim basis. On June 16, 2011, ReadyMade announced on its blog that Meredith had discontinued the magazine.

Chris Anderson goes from WIRED to running 3Drobotics, MAKE Magazine is now a start-up spun off from O’Reilly, this is totally “inside baseball” but very interesting to watch the Maker movement “move” in various directions. We’re looking forward to Shoshana’s new project(s) at IDEO!

Mary Lou Jepsen encourages Google X attitude in hardware engineering – SlashGear.

This week at a fireside chat during Google I/O 2013, Mary Lou Jepsen – currently the head of the Display Division at Google X – let it be known that “there’s no more silicon in Silicon Valley – it’s all iPhone apps.” She quickly added – “or Android apps, I should say.” An overarching theme from her set of words in the extended chat made it clear: she’s not satisfied with the current atmosphere for hardware innovation, particularly when it comes to startup funding.

We did not know she is at Google now.

“Adding to the popular Make line of kits, like ‘Getting Started with Arduino’ the new cobranded product lineup from Maker Media and RadioShack combine Maker Media’s strength in cultivating and growing the maker movement with RadioShack’s strong retail footprint and DIY heritage,” said Dale Dougherty, founder and CEO of Maker Media. “Our new cobranded products are designed to give makers a path to making while they continue to develop their skills and push the limits of their creativity.” The new cobranded product lineup will be available in-store and online exclusively at RadioShack later this year. In addition, MAKE Magazine will join the MAKE book lineup and will be available in stores this fall.

RadioShack jumping completely in to the maker movement and Make as a stand-alone company co-branding with other brands – big moves in the maker business arena!

Commercial Drone Startup Gets $10.7 Million From Andreessen Horowitz.

Airware, a startup that is creating a software platform for commercial drones, said it had raised $10.7 million in a Series A funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Google Ventures also participated. As part of the deal, Andreessen Horowitz partner Chris Dixon will join Airware’s board.

Makers go to market with hardware startups for learning, play, and IoT.

Hardware accelerator HAXLR8R unveiled its newest class of startups at a demo day in San Francisco on Monday. This year’s crop of startups skewed heavily towards gadgets for learning, play, and the internet of things, with devices like a connected vibrator, bike handlebars with technicolor lights and GPS tracking, and the hardware hacker’s favorite product — a drone. The entrepreneurial teams hailed not only from the U.S. and China but also Singapore, Canada, and the U.K. After 111 days of perfecting their prototypes in Shenzhen, China, the ten teams returned to the Bay Area to pitch investors and enter the vanguard of the “hardware renaissance,” as HAXLR8R co-founders Cyril Ebersweiler and Sean O’Sullivan put it.

How to Price Your Hardware Product.

“The mistake most hardware startups make is they don’t charge enough because they don’t think of the problems they will encounter at scale. They don’t calculate the real cost to deliver their product to a customer’s door, they leave no margin to sell through retail down the road when opportunities arise, and they can’t easily raise the price after it has been set.”

Sebastopol’s Dale Dougherty is king of ‘make’ movement | PressDemocrat.com.

He’s been welcomed into the White House for recognition of his achievements as an innovator and agent of change. He co-founded a couple of cutting-edge businesses. And he was key to the creation of a madcap, hands-on festival that’s being emulated around the world.

It would appear that Dale Dougherty has it made. The truth is, he prefers to make it himself.

This is an especially busy week for the kinetic Sebastopol resident, who has just turned 58, as he prepares for the weekend’s Maker Faire in San Mateo. Dougherty and the fair and his Make magazine and Maker Media, a spin-off of O’Reilly Media, all pursue the same end:

To rekindle in post-industrial homo sapiens the primordial urge to tinker, create and advance the state of things we make with our hands and imaginations, and the technological extensions thereof.

Brooklyn Navy Yard Is Home to Manufacturing Cooperative @ NYTimes.com.

Across the partition from the roboticist who was making coffee tables with magnetized cubes, an artist was boxing up woodcuts that, when held to the ear, sounded like a forest. Beyond him, just past the software designer on the treadmill, a muscular man in a T-shirt tinkered with his design for a motorcycle.

In a smaller space that is to be unveiled on Thursday, Jessica Banks worked on a chandelier that expands and contracts in response to ambient sound.

This eclectic mix of entrepreneurs, among the first tenants of a communal space in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, did not in any way resemble workers in a traditional factory, but their landlords and city officials hope they represent the seedlings of a rebirth of manufacturing in New York City.

From Forbes blog: “3D Printing Could Be A Boon For Small Business” by Natalie Burg:

For small businesses that make things and for entrepreneurs who dream of doing the same, the greatest challenge is almost always the cost of technology for turning an idea into a tangible product.

Often, the chore of even creating a prototype is so daunting, great ideas are simply left on the table.

That common obstacle is exactly why 3D printing technology is a potential game changer for small business. While manufacturing was once a big money, big business proposition, these new gadgets can put the power of prototyping and one-off manufacturing into the hands of the little guy. With one machine and a digital design, 3D printers can build a three-dimensional object of virtually anything right on the spot.

The Advent of Affordability

One of the most surprising things about 3D printing — besides what they can do —  is that the technology isn’t actually new; it’s just newly affordable.

According to Bloomberg Businessweek, the large, industrial versions of 3D printers are now as relatively inexpensive as $5,000, though some cost as much as $1 million depending on their capability, and can print in a variety of materials.

The market for 3D printers is currently at about $1.7 billion. Contributing to the affordability of the more basic models has been a consolidation of the industry, with mergers between rival 3D printing companies, as well as hardware, software, and design businesses.

“As so often happens with industrial-grade technologies,” writes Ashlee Vance for Businessweek, ”3D printing has flowed downstream to consumers.”

One example is a product by 3D Systems called the Cube, an inexpensive and pre-assembled 3D printer for beginners.

“For $1,299,” says Vance, “anyone can now buy a 3D printer, hook it up to a wi-fi network, and begin downloading files that will turn into real objects.”

Expanding Capability 

What that means for small businesses is only limited by the imagination of each entrepreneur.

CNBC.com presents the example of London-based toy company Makielab, which has allowed customers to design and create their own real-life dolls with 3D printing technology.

“It is a big deal, especially for designers,” says Andrew Sissons of the Work Foundation to CNBC, highlighting the power of bypassing all of the middlemen normally standing between a designer and his or her end product. “These days you can just start websites, get a 3D printer, start making it, and start selling it to people.” …

Read more.

Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!

Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!

The Adafruit Learning System has dozens of great tools to get you well on your way to creating incredible works of engineering, interactive art, and design with your 3D printer! If you’ve made a cool project that combines 3D printing and electronics, be sure to let us know, and we’ll feature it here!

The Investors Who Want to Hear About your Open Hardware Startup @ MakingSociety.

I gathered this list of investors who are hardware specialists or have expressed their interest for hardware startups. Most of them are consumer oriented. Be warned that their position regarding open source hardware might still be unclear. Gather your best convincing skills, and rock on!

At Adafruit we received the most offers for funding as word got out we are a profitable self-funded company making hardware in NYC, so that’s another way to roll too.

Welcome to the hardware revolution @ Fortune Tech.

Major shifts in hardware design and production have allowed the “maker movement” to mature rapidly. The next generation of fantastic hardware could very well come from the startup up the block.

Just a few years ago, it would have taken a corporate empire to design, build, and market a hardware game-changer like Apple’s iPhone. Today, there’s far more hope — and excitement — surrounding the little guy, and for good reason.

Many people have noted a shift in the hardware landscape and the emergence of new, smaller companies. In his book Makers: The New Industrial Revolution, Chris Anderson writes extensively about the rise of the “Maker Movement.” Paul Graham’s recent essay “The Hardware Renaissance” mentions the recent uptick (7 out of the latest class of 84) in hardware startups at Y Combinator. In his blog, Erick Schonfeld wrote that “Hardware is the New Software,” and that VCs are pursuing hardware startups more aggressively as well.

In Praise Of Slow Hardware @ TechCrunch.

“When you off-shore hardware, every mistake, and there will be mistakes, causes a delay chain that multiplies by physically shipping prototypes, samples, tester units and more half-way around the world,” said Limor Fried of Adafruit Industries. “One of the best things you can do is keep your supply chain as close as possible.”

Warren Buffett is bullish … on women.

n an exclusive essay the Berkshire Hathaway (BRKA, Fortune 500)chairman and CEO explains why women are key to America’s prosperity.

In the flood of words written recently about women and work, one related and hugely significant point seems to me to have been neglected. It has to do with America’s future, about which — here’s a familiar opinion from me — I’m an unqualified optimist. Now entertain another opinion of mine: Women are a major reason we will do so well.

Start with the fact that our country’s progress since 1776 has been mind-blowing, like nothing the world has ever seen. Our secret sauce has been a political and economic system that unleashes human potential to an extraordinary degree. As a result Americans today enjoy an abundance of goods and services that no one could have dreamed of just a few centuries ago.

But that’s not the half of it — or, rather, it’s just about the half of it. America has forged this success while utilizing, in large part, only half of the country’s talent. For most of our history, women — whatever their abilities — have been relegated to the sidelines. Only in recent years have we begun to correct that problem.

Shenzhen is Like Living in a City-Sized TechShop – Hack Things – We help software people make hardware.

Today we toured just a few of the expansive electronics markets in Huaqiangbei, Shenzhen. Our tour guide was Zach Hoeken Smith, program director for HAXLR8R and former co-founder of Makerbot.

Imagine a Costco-sized warehouse densely packed with 10×10 stalls dedicated to every conceivable piece of the global electronics supply chain. Now imagine a building with 6 floors of that. Now imagi
ne 10 buildings like that. That begins to describe the electronics farmer’s market that is Huaqiangbei, located literately across the street from HAXLR8R in Shenzhen.

Oscilloscopes and multimeters, connectors of every shape and variety, LCDs and LEDs, motors, wheels and buttons, resistors, capacitors, miles of USB cables and row upon row of copper tape, soldering paste and every manner of specialized glue. Hundreds of stalls each with hundreds of components organized and displayed for browsing. You may never have seen a reel of PCB components for loading into pick-and-place machines. At Huaqiangbei you’ll see thousands upon thousands of them.

Vendor Bender @ ch00ftech Industries.

I found out this week that sometimes goods and services purchased in China can be of low quality. I just spent last weekend installing the LED modules on the QR clock PCBs that I discussed a few posts ago.  At the time of writing, I was really impressed with the overall quality of the soldering job on the PCBs I received from Myro, and although I wasn’t exactly looking forward to the prospect of soldering for 20 to 25 hours, I was excited to finish my QR clocks and ship them to my customers. Unfortunately, I ran into a few hiccoughs.

When a lot of people get excited to have all their sourcing and manufacturing done for them, they often don’t realize how often complications occur.

Where Mail With Illegible Addresses Goes to Be Read @ NYTimes.com.

Ms. Stark is one of the Postal Service’s data conversion operators, a techie title for someone who deciphers unreadable addresses, and she is one of the last of a breed. In September, the post office will close one of its two remaining centers where workers try to read the scribble on envelopes and address labels that machines cannot. At one time, there were 55 plants around the country where addresses rejected by machines were guessed at by workers aided with special software to get the mail where it was intended.

But improved scanning technology now allows machines to “read” virtually all of the 160 billion pieces of mail that moved through the system last year. As machines have improved, workers have been let go, and after September, the facility here will be the post office’s only center for reading illegible mail.

Jawbone Buys Sensor Start-Up for $110 Million @ NYTimes.com.

On Tuesday, Jawbone, which makes wireless headsets and music accessories, announced that it acquired BodyMedia, a company that sells wearable sensors, for about $110 million.

Jawbone declined to comment on how much it paid for the acquisition, but a source close to the deal who was not authorized to speak on the record confirmed the price.

“It’s a significant deal because it’s a significant opportunity,” said Hosain Rahman, the chief executive of Jawbone. “We looked at the market and what we thought about what we can do on our own or together with BodyMedia, and we found a deal acceptable to our shareholders.”

BodyMedia has been making and selling activity tracking armbands that can monitor exercise and sleep behaviors since 1999. Mr. Rahman said he was most interested in the company’s expertise, and its robust trove of data about how people use and interact with their body monitors and sensors. His plan is to continue to run and sell BodyMedia products and create a platform that will work with Jawbone’s line of wearable products and BodyMedia’s products and software services.

Trevor and Isabel have full-time jobs. Once upon a time, their little idea would have remained just that — an idea. But Marcel, who had considerable small-manufacturing experience, was convinced that they could create a company to make the Spuni, as they quickly named it. First sketched in the spring of 2011, the Spuni saw its first prototype within two months. Using a 3-D printer, they went through a half-dozen prototype iterations until they felt they had the Spuni and its packaging exactly right.

To raise capital, they relied on crowd-sourcing, generating almost $38,000 by preselling Spunis on the Web site Indiegogo. Marcel, meanwhile, cut a deal with a small German manufacturer he had used before. When we spoke on Friday, he was just returning from Germany, where he had supervised the first quality tests. Within weeks, some 8,000 Spunis will be available for purchase. Marcel expects to be manufacturing 600,000 Spunis within a year’s time. If all goes according to plan, Spuni will be churning out around one million spoons a year by 2015.

Brooklyn Navy Yard getting a lot of ink!

If you are thinking of doing a hardware startup, here are a few things to keep in mind:

- Manufacturing. Many hardware startups stumble when they try to go from prototype to large-scale manufacturing. There is no AWS-equivalent for hardware. To get manufacturing right, entrepreneurs often end up living in China for months and even years. The difficulty of manufacturing is one reason that hardware entrepreneurs tend to have more work experience than software entrepreneurs.
- Defensibility. Hardware companies generally have economies of scale but hardware products generally don’t have network effects. This means that as soon as you prove the market, you’ll face competition from lower cost manufacturers. The best startups complement hardware with software and services that have network or platform effects. Think of hardware as bringing the revenue and software/services as bringing the margin.

- Planning. The build-test-iterate model that is popular in software startups doesn’t translate well to hardware startups. Proper planning is essential because mistakes can be unrecoverable. For example, you might create a design that fails environmental tests but only discover this years later when you are about to go to market. (See all those symbols on the back of your phone? Those are regulatory certifications).

- B2C vs B2B. Consumer hardware tends to get more attention, but B2B hardware has a number of advantages. You’ll have fewer startup competitors, because entrepreneurs who have both hardware and business domain expertise are rare. You’ll also have fewer incumbent competitors, because B2B hardware usually requires local sales and service teams, making it harder for foreign competitors to copy you. Finally, manufacturing can be done locally because higher price points mean you can be less sensitive to labor costs.

Innovate with China.

Eric Pan and his company, Seeed Studio, are showing the future of hardware development: hackers around the world innovating on open prototyping platforms, raising funds through crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter and partnering with Chinese studios to create manufacturable designs in small batches using technology like 3D printing and open source hardware components.

The makers of hardware innovation @ O’Reilly Radar.

Chris Anderson wrote Makers and went from editor-in-chief of Wired to CEO of 3D Robotics, making his hobby his side job and then making it his main job.

A new executive at Motorola Mobility, a division of Google, said that Google seeks to “googlify” hardware. By that he meant that devices would be inexpensive, if not free, and that the data created or accessed by them would be open. Motorola wants to build a truly hackable cellphone, one that makers might have ideas about what to do with it.

Regular hardware startup meetups, which started in San Francisco and New York, are now held in Boston, Pittsburgh, Austin, Chicago, Dallas and Detroit. I’m sure there are other American cities. Melbourne, Stockholm and Toronto are also organizing hardware meetups. Hardware entrepreneurs want to find each other and learn from each other.

A Big Congratulations to GeekDad’s Ken Denmead! @ GeekDad.

Ken has accepted a position as the Editorial Director of Make.

If you’re not familiar with Make, here’s a quick summary. Make is a magazine (both print and digital). It’s also a blog – makezine.com. It has a retail arm — MakerShed. And it also just happens to be the host of an event that bills itself as The Greatest Show (and Tell) on Earth. And if you’ve never attended a Maker Faire, you’ll just have to take my word for it that it’s two days you’ll never forget.
And Ken is now a part of that family.

So, what does this mean for GeekDad? Well, it does mean a change in leadership. Ken will be stepping down as Editor-in-Chief, and taking charge will be Matt Blum. The writing staff at GeekDad isn’t worried, and while we’re all congratulating Ken, we’re also congratulating Matt. As I told Ken in an email, he’s now involved with two of my most favorite resources.

Big news in the maker world!

The third and final keynote at Inside 3D Printing featured Shapeways CEO Peter Weijmarshausen. He shared about latest developments throughout Shapeways including at their NYC factory.

Some interesting details he shared:

• Over 2000 new designs are submitted every day.
• The value of iterative product design — after you have released a product, customer by customer.
• How Shop Owners are paid for their designs.
• The new Shapeways infographic (above)

And from the Shapeways blog post today:

When we started in 2007, very few people had even heard of 3D printing outside of the engineering and design communities. It was mainly used for prototyping. Today, 3D printing has taken the manufacturing industry by storm and everyone is talking about this groundbreaking technology. President Obama even recently called out 3D printing as one of the important technologies that can bring manufacturing back to the USA.

We believe that 3D printing is fundamentally changing the manufacturing ecosystem in its entirety – how and where products are made and by whom. For the last century, big companies were in charge: they determined what consumers wanted and made those products in large quantities using mass manufacturing. Now, thanks to 3D printing, those days are over. This technology enables everyone to create unique products on demand, putting the customer in control and localizing the manufacturing process.

Peter Weijmarshausen

CEO and Co-Founder, Shapeways

Peter Weijmarshausen is the Chief Executive Officer for Shapeways, the online marketplace and community for personalized production where anyone can make, buy and sell their own products. Custom-made products are created one-of-a-kind and on-demand in a variety of materials using the latest 3D printing technologies. Prior to Shapeways, Peter was the CTO of Sangine, where he and his team designed and developed satellite broadband modems and Director of Engineering at Aramiska, where he was responsible for delivering a business broadband service via Satellite. Earlier in his career, Peter worked as ICT manager for Not a Number where he facilitated the adoption of the widely successful open source 3D software Blender. His global expertise is in the fields of Entrepreneurship, Internet marketing and business development, 3D printing, designing and implementing scalable Internet services.

Read more.

The Inside 3D Printing keynote this morning was a state-of-the-industry address from Terry Wohlers of Wohlers Associates. The Wohlers Report is the definitive independent resource for gauging the state of business and technology in the 3D printing field, so having a chance to hear the latest observations from Wohlers — without purchasing the $500 guide — was an excellent opportunity for all of us in the room with any background or focus.

A few observations that I’d love to share include thoughts on how the media has been responding to the subject. The mainstream media prefers the term “3d printing” over the technical term “additive manufacturing,” so as a result the industry now uses the two terms interchangeably. Also, the media has been calculated to have filed a massive 16k articles last year as opposed to 1.6K articles in 2011.

One helpful point of reference to offer to mainstream readers is the degree to which dentistry has adapted to and perfected the practical application of 3D printing in the field — Wohlers shared the data that they estimate that 15k printed parts for use in dental work are printed every single day.

My favorite part was his list of what he sees as the five central “Myths and Misconceptions” that plague 3D printing in the popular media. While his arguments to refute each misconception skew towards an industrial-centric notion of these topics, I felt his list is very solid and worth thinking over:

MYTHS: 3D Printing/Additive Manufacturing is:

• “Push Button”
• “Just as inexpensive to build one part at a time.”
• “AM will replace conventional manufacturing.”
• “AM can print guns.”
• “Everyone will own and operate 3D printers.”

Terry Wohlers, Principal Consultant and President of Wohlers Associates, Inc., has been named one of the most influential individuals in rapid product development and additive manufacturing.

Read more.

Shapeways: Manufacturing in the Cloud.

Today, I’m excited to announce that Andreessen Horowitz is leading a $30M investment in Shapeways along with our friends at Union Square Ventures, Index Ventures, and Lux Capital. We believe that technology is at its best when it enables human creativity. The Internet unlocked the world of bits. 3D printing is unlocking the world of atoms.

OSH Park will be taking over BatchPCB operations.

Starting May 1st, OSH Park will be taking over BatchPCB operations, including order placement and customer service.

Wow! This is pretty interesting news OSH Park is a great service! The post sales “sale of” – acquisition price was not posted. Here’s a previous interview John & Phil did with Laen.

I’ve been enjoying the first tutorial session lead by Practical 3D Printer writer and instructor, Brian Evans. He has been engaged with this stuff as long as I have, and has done a great job of introducing those brand new to 3D printing to what those desktop units are all about! In the above photo he quickly put together “3D” in OpenSCAD for the audience.

Here are some details about his session from conference guide:.

Tutorial 1: Desktop 3D Printers – From Start to Finish

A look at designing models for desktop 3D printing for artists, designers, engineers, and inventors looking to bring fused filament fabrication (FFF) to their desktop with a guide to the design do’s and don’ts for successful 3D printing, including an introduction to solid modeling and how to prepare digital models for printing.

Brian Evans

Assistant Professor, Metropolitan State University of Denver
Brian Evans is an artist working in electronic media and Assistant Professor of Art at Metropolitan State University of Denver. He is the author of Practical 3D Printers, 2012, and Beginning Arduino Programming, 2011, both with Apress Media. His work has been shown at the Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery at Barnsdall Park, the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, and the University Art Museum at California State University, Long Beach. In 2009, Evans was a resident and contributor to the Grounding Open Source Hardware residency and summit at the Banff New Media Institute in Alberta, Canada. He received an MFA from California State University, Long Beach in 2008, and a BFA from Arizona State University in 2005.

Read more.

Inside 3D Printing has kicked off with a conference session packed for the opening keynote from 3DS CEO Avi Reichental. Given how many different aspects of 3D this company interfaces with, this ended up being a helpful preview of topics that will be covered for the rest of the conference. And I think I saw my timelapse of Yoda being shared as a sign of dangerous trends in 3D printing (though MakerBot’s Annelise might have shot that one): warmed my heart to see that great model!

Reichental also shared about his beloved skunkworks project: printing chocolate in 3D and teased us with the promise of future results.

Check out the conference site for more details!

New Study Finds China Manufacturing Costs Rising to US Level.

Walk onto the shop floor at Prince Industries in Shanghai, China and it looks like most other manufacturing plants in this country. It’s busy running two shifts, cranking out components that will be shipped to major manufacturers like Caterpillar, Siemens, and Honeywell.
But change is in the air.
The cost of manufacturing in China is going up and rising quickly.
“It’s something that we anticipated when we went to China, we just didn’t know how quick it would happen,” said Mark Miller, CEO of Prince Industries.

ch00ftech has been on a roll lately with their blog posts documenting the process of building their new QR Clock.  In the latest blog post, ch00f talks about the process of having circuit boards fabricated and assembled by a third party.

The original prototype took about an hour and a half to assemble, and since I don’t feel like quitting my day job to take up a career in burning my fingers, I decided it might be a good idea to look at some other options for assembly.

This post outlines my experiences of ordering PCBs pre-assembled.  I decided to go into a lot of detail with this post because while the ordering process was fairly straight forward, there were some slightly confusing parts to it, and if there’s one thing you don’t want to be when you’re dropping a few hundred/thousand dollars on PCBs, it’s unsure.  I figure this will be a rich resource for anyone planning on placing a similar order.

EFF and Partners Challenge Six 3D Printing Patent Applications. (Or check the amusing write up about this announcement on The Verge.)

If there’s something that drives us crazy, it’s when patents get in the way of innovation. Unfortunately, we often don’t find out about the most dangerous patents until it’s too late—once they’ve been used to assert infringement. That’s why we were encouraged by the new provision of the patent law that allows third parties to easily challenge patent applications while those applications are still pending.

But, here’s the rub: it’s hard to identify those dangerous applications. And, once you do, it’s even harder to find the right information to challenge those applications during the window that the law allows. So we partnered with the Cyberlaw Clinic at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society and Ask Patents and—most importantly—you.

As of today, we’ve now challenged six pending patent applications that you helped us identify as applications that, if granted, would particularly threaten the growing field of 3D printing technology. Harvard’s Cyberlaw Clinic hand delivered the first two submissions to the Patent Office earlier this year, and we’ve since sent in four more.

The prior art we’ve submitted so far thanks to your submissions ranges from patents and blog posts to research papers and symposium proceedings. Each prior art document gives the Patent Office tools to reject patent claims for obviousness. That in turn helps protect the diverse, exciting uses of 3D printing that are gaining in popularity each day, from small hobbyist printers to large-scale, high-quality commercial fabrication using materials ranging from titanium to chocolate.

Here are copies of what we submitted to the Patent Office. The good news is that so far, the Patent Office has accepted our submissions (because of that, if you’re thinking of making your own preissuance submissions, you might want to use these as a model). Now we wait to see whether our input influences the examiners…..

Check out their first six submissions here!

And, just because I couldn’t resist, here is a piece of the write up about this annoucement from The Verge:

Since Julie Samuels joined the EFF as the Mark Cuban Chair to Eliminate Stupid Patents, she’s spearheaded the movement to keep 3D printing free by challenging new applications with crowdsourced prior art. Today, the EFF is announcing that it and its partners including Harvard’s Cyberlaw Clinic and Ask Patents have now submitted documents on six pending applications, including one for a “Ribbon Filament and Assembly for Use in Extrusion-based Digital Manufacturing Systems” — i.e., using a filament that’s fettucine-shaped instead of spaghetti-shaped because it melts more quickly.

It’s the same information, but…with more humor.

Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!

Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!

The Adafruit Learning System has dozens of great tools to get you well on your way to creating incredible works of engineering, interactive art, and design with your 3D printer! If you’ve made a cool project that combines 3D printing and electronics, be sure to let us know, and we’ll feature it here!

BBC News – What happened to Japan’s electronic giants?.

Japan’s electronic giants once ruled the world. Sony, Panasonic, Sharp were household names. Now those same companies are in deep trouble, losing billions of dollars a year. How have the mighty Japanese companies fallen so low? The BBC’s Rupert Wingfield-Hayes in Tokyo looks at what went wrong.

The end of the article says it was software that caused the decline (lack of developing and creating it).

Analysis: Pricing Hike Post-Merger in Two Cases – Blog – Octopart.

Last week, Vishay announced that it’s acquiring MCB Industrie S.A, a manufacturer of specialty resistors. Acquisitions have been a key piece of Vishay’s strategy, so we took a look at its track record to see the effect on market pricing of the target company’s products. (We used Octopart’shistorical pricing data.)

If you are in the San Francisco area in May, checkout the HAXLR8R Demo Day just before the MAKE Hardware Innovation Workshop.

Read more about HAXLR8R below:

The Intro

HAXLR8R is a venture fund which focuses on entrepreneurs building hardware devices. It offers seed funding ($25,000), office space as well as mentorship along with the other opportunies for 2-4 person startups to take an idea to a product.

HAXLR8R selects startups to work with twice a year and has a dual location (San Francisco and Shenzhen). Its first batch ran from March to June 2012 and has been widely received as the start of a new hardware revolution. 

The Genesis

While it seems this ‘makes much more sense’ these days, the idea came up a little while ago…

Founded by Cyril Ebersweiler, Sean O’Sullivan and Eric Pan, the roots of the program started way back when China.axlr8r was born in 2009. For a reason we still ignore as of today, the summer program for startups based in China incubated not one, but two startups working on hardware startups (including two foreign entrepreneurs coming from abroad).

With a backpack full of lessons learned, Cyril had the chance to meet with the founders of LEAP (David and Michael) and subsequently invested in the company. The experience coming out of this relationship was a final training ground for HAXLR8R, and a final proof of concept at Techcrunch Disrupt with Nextgoals (part of China.axlr8r batch II) convinced us there was a problem to be solved, for entrepreneurs and the sake of innovation.

If you are curious about China.axlr check things out on their website.

HAXLR8R is brought to you by Cyril Ebersweiler and Zach Smith.

Read more.

Each week on the Adafruit blog we post up about amazing companies, people and articles about being a MAKER and a business. Over the years we’ve shared how we run Adafruit, published code from our shopping cart system and given presentations on running an open-source hardware company. Every Monday we’re going to try to collect some of these resources and tag them #makerbusinessmonday & #makerbusiness. They’re in our popular Maker Business category as well, enjoy!

Some of our most advanced technology products have helped finance the deadliest conflicts of our time. Perhaps, if tech companies change some of their habits, that can change.

An essential part of most cellphones is the mineral tantalite, which is frequently obtained from the Democratic Republic of Congo under murky circumstances. Tin, tungsten and gold also finance armed groups in Congo on their way to our laptops and tablets.

Hewlett-Packard on Monday is expected to announce that it is publishing a list of 195 ore smelters, located around the world, that are identified with the minerals inside the company’s products. Within about two years, the company says, it wants its parts suppliers, which buy from these smelters, to make sure its minerals were not obtained from conflict zones.

“We believe the upshot of this is, over time, to lower violence and repression,” said Tony Prophet, who runs the global supply chain for H.P.’s personal systems group. “The smelters are the chokepoint. Once you locate them, you can start to pressure them to set a standard.”

While H.P. may be as much as four steps away from the smelters in the supply chain, Mr. Prophet said, as a major purchaser it can still compel good behavior.
In August, the Securities and Exchange Commission also adopted a rule requiring all publicly traded companies to disclose their use of certain conflict minerals beginning next year, although that rule is facing a court challenge.

Update from the Raspberry Pi Foundation about the process of shifting more and more Pi production over to Wales since last fall — and they have reached the milestone of 500,000 Pi units in Wales! (And check out the short article linked below for more of the story!)

As you’ll know if you’re a regular reader of this website, production of the Raspberry Pi started in China back at the start of 2012, but has been gradually moving to Wales since last September. One of our distributors, Premier Farnell/Element14, already makes 100% of its Pis in the Welsh Sony factory in Pencoed, where Pis are built under licence. The other, RS Components, is in the process of moving the vast bulk of its manufacture to Wales as well (although they will continue to make a much reduced number of Pis in China for the Far East market).

Sony’s only been making Pis for us since September, but today they announced that the 500,000th Pi has just rolled off their lines. At the moment nearly 40,000 Pis are being made in Pencoed every week, and that number is set to climb further (I have some projections I’m not allowed to share, but they did make me swallow sharply when I read them) – even at these numbers we’re still having trouble meeting demand around the world. We sold our millionth Pi in January. Soon there will be more Made in the UK Pis in the world than their Made in China cousins.

This is wonderful news for us; and it’s great news for Welsh manufacturing. I wrote a short article about our decision to move to Wales for IT Wales last week; if you’re interested in why we made the move, it’s worth a read. I apologise for the awful portrait picture.

This group photograph is of all the people at the factory who have a hand in making your Pi – I had a go at counting them with my cursor, and I came out with a fairly astonishing 68 people. Thank you so much for all your hard work, everybody (and hi, Ricky!).

Read more.

Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit, be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Have you tried the new “Adafruit Raspberry Pi Educational Linux Distro” ? It’s our tweaked distribution for teaching electronics using the Raspberry Pi. But wait, there’s more! Try our new Raspberry Pi WebIDE! The easiest way to learn programming on a Raspberry Pi.

…The grind that consumes all founders completely. The grind that means managing a big company. The grind that means parting ways with your co-founder. The grind that means dealing with constant naysaying, haters and giants who exist to copy your ideas, poach your people and generally make you miserable.

Those of you who have started a company know what I am talking about — the constant, daily upheaval of emotions. There are days when you don’t want to get out of bed, when you whimper without tears and then shake it all off because deep down you know you would rather be doing this than something else. Founders live to capture lightning in the bottle: sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but we still keep trying. And that is the part the non-builders don’t get.

Building things that are different, inventing the future and creating a real business is a long and often very lonely slog. But you don’t hear about that. Instead what you get is a lot of babble about startups from so-called mentors, advisors and startup gurus.

If you are within reach of DC on April 24th and passionate about the present and future of 3D Printing, you should head over to the second installment of the Public Knowledge 3D/DC event:

When: Apr 24, 2013 05:30 PM – Apr 24, 2013 07:30 PM

Location: Cafeteria of the Rayburn House Office Building

Come see the remarkable, disruptive technology of 3D printing in person. Chat with some of the people and companies that make it happen. Mingle with other 3D printing fans and curiosity seekers.  

This is the second time PK has hosted the 3D printing community to come together in Washington, DC. Don’t miss your chance this time around!

Read more.

The Makery.

The future needs people who can creatively Make.

The Makery is a pop-up Makerspace – part shop & part workshop. A movable and temporary venue where youth and adults are encouraged to be curious, to tinker, to experiment, and to make with technology. The Makery is a portable digital playground, a place where communities can gather to play with the creative power of digital design and fabrication, physical computing, and computer programming.

While the Makery has no permanent space…yet, we aim through a series of pop-up makerspaces, to experiment and design new experiences and workshops that explore the joy and power of making with technology. Someday soon, we hope to have our own homebase from which we can grow and share. But until we do, look for us to pop up in your community soon.

Great news from GitHub! Taking a look at this new option, and considering projects like Gary Hodgson’s Githubiverse templates, it is reasonable to expect that GitHub might well be on its way to being the place where many of us develop and share our 3D printing works-in-progress, particularly for procedural and parametric design files that benefit more from Git versioning than massive meshes.

Having seen how successfully Sketchfab has been integrated into Kickstarter, this new development over at GitHub speaks to how we expect to experience our design files online.

Will this prove a benefit for the existing social/repository model sites such as GrabCAD, 3D Warehouse, and Thingiverse as code-savvy designers develop and iterate their designs within their accounts on Github before publishing more share-worthy documents to their repository of choice?

From the GitHub blog:

Here at GitHub, we’re always excited to see people using GitHub to collaborate on all sorts of things, code or non-code. Today, we’re adding a third dimension by making it easier to view some 3D models, specifically STL files, on GitHub.

You’re able to spin the model by clicking & dragging, zoom in/out by scrolling, and change the view modes with the links at the bottom. This viewer is powered by Three.js and uses WebGL when available, but will fall back to the slower canvas renderer. If you have further questions, check out the help article.

There are a bunch of awesome 3D projects on GitHub, and more every day. We hope you enjoy a new way of viewing these complex files!

Read more.

And here, for those who haven’t seen it before, is a screenshot from Gary Hodgson’s Githubiverse project:

Every Thursday is #3dthursday here at Adafruit! The DIY 3D printing community has passion and dedication for making solid objects from digital models. Recently, we have noticed electronics projects integrated with 3D printed enclosures, brackets, and sculptures, so each Thursday we celebrate and highlight these bold pioneers!

Have you considered building a 3D project around an Arduino or other microcontroller? How about printing a bracket to mount your Raspberry Pi to the back of your HD monitor? And don’t forget the countless LED projects that are possible when you are modeling your projects in 3D!

The Adafruit Learning System has dozens of great tools to get you well on your way to creating incredible works of engineering, interactive art, and design with your 3D printer! If you’ve made a cool project that combines 3D printing and electronics, be sure to let us know, and we’ll feature it here!

Jon Wheatley / Blog, Making a physical product..

I had been kicking around the idea for some kind of space themed dice game for a while. I thought it would be a really nice metaphor for what actually happens when galaxies are formed. The dice represent balls of matter floating around the universe. Sometimes they bump into other balls of matter and become stuff.
I decided to design the game around the “press your luck” genre. The concept of these games is usually pretty simple. Some things are good to roll and some things are bad. The goal is to roll as many good things as you can before rolling a bad thing and resetting your score. The first person to get X good things is the winner. 

“5 lessons I learned at Apple about how to design and build hardware”.

No matter how brilliant or beautiful your new gadget may be, it’s doomed if you can’t figure out how to make it efficiently, consistently and economically. An ex-Apple supply guy offers insights on how to make that happen.

Grand St., an Online Boutique for Electronics, Raises $1.3 Million @ NYTimes.com.

Grand St., a new start-up based in New York, wants to be the one-stop shopping destination for all of these quirky electronics wares. Every other day, it lists a new product for sale. Previous choices have included at-homesous vide cookers, smart watches, portable phone chargers and headsets that monitor brainwave activity. The company, which has slowly been building its audience since it put up a Web site this year, announced on Tuesday that it had raised $1.3 million in venture financing for the site. The round of investment was led by First Round Capital, Collaborative Fund, Betaworks and David Tisch, among others.

This is dangerous at a time when there is increasingly no such thing as a high-wage, middle-skilled job — the thing that sustained the middle class in the last generation. Now there is only a high-wage, high-skilled job. Every middle-class job today is being pulled up, out or down faster than ever. That is, it either requires more skill or can be done by more people around the world or is being buried — made obsolete — faster than ever. Which is why the goal of education today, argues Wagner, should not be to make every child “college ready” but “innovation ready” — ready to add value to whatever they do.

Early bird pricing before April 15th for the MAKE Hardware Innovation Workshop coming up this May at the College of San Mateo!

Join MAKE for its second annual Hardware Innovation Workshop.

This award-winning business event shines the spotlight on the most interesting and innovative tools and technology, platforms and projects, and devices and designs based on open source hardware.

The 1-1/2 day event kicks-off Tuesday with a VC panel, “Pitch Your Prototype,” and “Getting Started,” case studies of maker pros with early stage products. The Innovation Showcase follows, a unique opportunity to casually engage with over two dozen makers who have their cutting-edge products and devices on display. Creating an almost magical atmosphere where hardware innovation and creative genius generates spirited ideation, the Innovation Showcase is not to be missed.

An All-Star Maker Pro Lineup

Wednesday is an all-star lineup with over 30 speakers representing leading entrepreneurs and thought leaders at the forefront of the maker movement. Investors, industrial designers, product development teams—anyone looking for insight into the early stage companies with the potential to change the global business landscape—should attend. Register today for early bird prices.

Speakers at the 2013 MAKE Hardware Innovation Workshop include:

• Chris Anderson, CEO of 3D Robotics and founder of DIY Drones
• Massimo Banzi, co-founder of Arduino
• Robert Faludi, collaborative strategy leader at Digi International
• Bunnie Huang, co-founder of Chumby
• Ben Kaufman, founder and CEO of Quirky
• Dave Merrill, co-founder and president of Sifteo
• Scott Miller, CEO and co-founder of Dragon Innovation

New! Maker Pro Digital Manufacturing Workshop

This year we’ve added a half-day session for maker pros looking for guidance and insight into getting their projects and ideas to the next stage. Beginning at 10am to 1pm, Tuesday, May 14, the three-hour manufacturing deep dive is designed for makers exploring options for getting to scale with their final prototypes. Presented by experts who can facilitate the transition and have extensive experience in small, medium, and large scale manufacturing for startups. Participants are encouraged to bring their designs and prototypes to the workshop.

Read more.