The Founding Fathers were do-it-yourselfers, from Jefferson’s explicit idealization of the self-sufficient yeoman farmer to Franklin’s intrepid experimentation with electricity. Over the centuries, a return to this kind of independent DIY spirit has helped fuel the Industrial Revolution, the radio era of the early 20th century, the hippie movement (the part of it exemplified by the Whole Earth catalog, anyway) and punk rock.
Along the way, America became the greatest industrial nation on Earth, creating airplanes, cars, electronics, computers, and eventually the Internet.
The Hardware Summer Camp teaches early-stage hardware entrepreneurs the actionable skills they need to go from prototype to sellable product. Industry leaders will give talks on all the topics (listed below) that you need through every stage of the process. Participants will also have the chance to meet one-on-one with hardware pros to discuss goals / challenges within their company.
The Hardware Summer Camp will take place on June 15th-16th at O’Reilly Alpha Tech Ventures in San Francisco.
Speakers Include:
- Ariel Braunstein & Scott Kabat, founders of Flip Video
- Dale Dougherty, founder of Maker Media
- Eric Migicovsky, founder of Pebble
- Dave Merrill, founder of Sifteo
- and many more!
Topics Covered:
- Prototyping and Human Centered Design
- How to Pitch your Hardware Startup
- Preparing for a Crowdfunding Campaign
- Finding / Working with your Contract Manufacturer
- Functional Testing & Certification UL/CE
- Packaging & Kitting
- Marketing / PR / Branding
- Order Management & Fulfillment
- Getting into Big Box Stores
- Community & Customer Service
- Building a Hardware Platform
Nick is answering questions about the event on Reddit.
While there have been a number of news pieces reporting Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos’s claim that 3D printing is “super interesting…but not a threat,” as you might expect there are some fun reactions and pushback from those who are in the middle of the “3D revolution.” (Also, some have pointed out that Bezos is a MakerBot investor, as well as other vendors from this space.)
Here’s a fun piece from solidsmack that brings up some provocative questions:
While 3D printing may not be disrupting entire distribution chains, there are quite a few people who will be printing their next iPhone case, or glasses, or headphones, or toy set…rather than purchasing one off of Amazon. While it may be a drop in the bucket, it is still real, and it is a threat. During the open-question session of last Thursday’s annual shareholder meeting for Amazon, CEO Jeff Bezos was pegged with the question of how 3D printing could disrupt Amazon’s distribution of products and reduce the need for traditional delivery methods. Here’s what he had to say.
IS 3D PRINTING A THREAT TO AMAZON?
“I think the answer to that is, not anytime soon…that’s far, far in the future.”
While current day 3D printers may be limited to few and specific materials, every day seems to bring rapid new developments that break down the barriers and change the rules of personal manufacturing. What if it isn’t about 3D printers creating complex objects but rather, a shift in the consumer mindset that simplifies everyday objects?
While citing the capabilities of 3D printing today, Bezos stated that you can’t build ‘interesting objects’ with limited materials. He specifically referred to a a toaster having dozens of materials that would come across as a ‘very complicated object’ for 3D printing whereas in the traditional manufacturing world it is actually quite a simple product:
“Any objects that get built in volume are already built very efficiently.”
There’s no point in arguing with Bezos about that. Even if you could theoretically print a toaster at home, the upfront costs of the materials alone would be too astronomical to even consider printing a toaster instead of picking one up for $29.99.
However the point here is that 3D printing isn’t just about recreating existing products—it is about creating new ones, and even, simple ones. While nobody will be creating a traditional toaster anytime soon, few people considered that we would be living in a time of 3D printed structures, either.
“It will be an exciting world, though, when it happens someday.”
To some degree or another, isn’t it already happening?
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!
Pegatron Corp. named after the flying horse Pegasus, will be the primary assembler of a low-cost iPhone expected to be offered later this year. Foxconn’s smaller rival across town became a minor producer of iPhones in 2011 and began making iPad Mini tablet computers last year.
Pegatron’s rise means an end to the monopoly that Foxconn Technology Group — the trade name for Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., the world’s largest electronics contract manufacturer — has held over the production of Apple’s mobile products.
Founded in January 2008, Pegatron is a worldwide leader in electronic and computing DMS (Design and Manufacturing Service) with extensive experience in product development and vertically integrated capabilities. With equity of US$2.7 billion, Pegatron boasts a diversified product line, including motherboards, desktop PCs, notebooks, broadband, wireless systems, game consoles, networking equipment, Set-top boxes, multimedia, LCD TVs, and more. At Pegatron, we take pride in our well-diversified product portfolio, unique designs, flexible manufacturing capabilities and reliable after-sale services.
(And I enjoyed Bruce Sterling’s reaction to Bass’s piece, so I wanted to share it here as well: “*It’s quite interesting, although whenever industry insiders write opinion columns, it’s always everybody else’s company that is (a) overhyped and/or (b) holding things back.”)
From a major VC firm’s recent $30 million investment in the industrial-grade 3-D printing space to the news that Staples will become the first major U.S. retailer to sell consumer-friendly 3-D printers, it’s clear that 3-D printing has reached its inflection point.
And perhaps its hype point, too.
The technology is decades old, but now there’s an ecosystem in place (which includes my own company) that moves it beyond the maker edges to mainstream center. So now more than ever I’m asked for an insider’s view on the hype vs. realities of 3-D printing — and where it’s going.
3-D printing won’t replace other manufacturing technology
3-D printing is indeed an important fabrication technology, because it has the marvelous ability to make anything regardless of the complexity of the form. Other fabrication techniques, honed over decades of industrialization, struggle with geometric complexity — where 3-D printers can print either the most intricate shapes or simplest cube with equal ease.
The fact is that 3-D printing is really, still, an immature technology.
Never before have we had a technology where we can so freely translate our ideas into a tangible object with little regard to the machinery or skills available. Yet just as the microwave didn’t replace all other forms of cooking as initially predicted, 3-D printing will not replace other manufacturing technologies let alone industrial-scale ones for a variety of reasons. It will complement them.
The fact is that 3-D printing is really, still, an immature technology. We’ve built a magical aura around it — sci-fi style replicator! — but as soon as anyone actually uses a 3-D printer for any period of time, they immediately wish for faster build times, higher quality prints, larger build envelopes, better and cheaper materials … and so on….
…These are the important research directions
With so much buzz around every latest announcement in the 3-D printing space, it’s hard to tell what’s commonplace and what’s really interesting to pay attention to. Because constant improvements are happening in everything and especially in what you can print — whether replacement part or novel design, inert or organic material, at scales from the microscopic to a house, on earth or in space.
I think two important areas to watch here are printing electronics — i.e., not just objects but logic and function — and the burgeoning field of bioprinting. The latter represents some of the most exciting work employing 3-D printers. For example, Dr. Anthony Atala of Wake Forest University has pioneered work that includes the successful printing and implantation of human urethras. San Diego-based Organovo prints functional human tissue that can be used for medical research and therapeutic applications. And companies like Craig Venter’s as well as Cambrian Genomics (which I have a small personal investment in) are printing DNA — yes, DNA! — one base pair at a time.
Another important direction in the 3-D printing landscape involves the shift to architectural-scale 3-D printing. Examples include the work of Ron Rael at U.C. Berkeley, who has been working with new, low-cost organic materials and the work of Boris Behrokh Khoshnevis at the University of Southern California who has been experimenting with 3-D printing full-size buildings.
The European Space Agency and Foster + Partners have teamed up to design a moonbase structure 3-D printed with Monolite UK’s D-Shape, though the beauty of their concept is that it would draw entirely on materials found on the moon. This is important since it helps push the materials limitations of 3-D printing from what is supplied to what is found. And someone out there has already hacked a 3-D printer to use only waste materials — imagine the possibilities of using 3-D printing for true recycling and reuse….
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!
“So if you are making a hardware product, what should you do about retail?
Staying out of retail is the first answer. Post your Kickstarter campaign and sell direct to the customer online through your own website or ecommerce channels like Amazon. This is a great way to build a healthy margin businesses while you figure out which initial marketing tactics are working. Once these sales channels are exhausted, retail is still a real option. Some of had success by launching their own stores, like Warby Parker and Chrome Industries, or in selling through existing retailers like Apple stores. Retail offers a touch-and-see experience that online can never provide.”
Fabule Fabrications visited a number of factories during our participation in HAXLR8R, a hardware startup accelerator based in Shenzhen, China. During a three-month period we designed and prototyped a cute and deeply adaptable lamp, lining up component sources and manufacturers as a part of this process. Emerging from this program, we’d like to share some of our experiences visiting various factories and learning how many of our everyday things get made. This is the first in a series of posts on this topic.
I had the chance to attend the Hardware Innovations Workshop a few weeks back. It was both an eye opening and inspiring experience, reminding me that when I started Contour nine years ago, none of this community existed. The resources available now are unreal, enabling makers to bring new products to market faster and with less risk.
Despite all of this I left the event concerned.
I probably listened to six or seven companies and although each of them had a different focus there was a theme that didn’t change. Every one of them wanted to be a platform.
The Postal Service lost $1.9 billion between January and March, and $15.9 billion last year. The 238-year-old institution loses $25 million each day, and has reached its borrowing limit with the federal Treasury. Daily mail delivery could be threatened within a year, officials say.
Kmart and Sears are renting out their old space for datacenter, the postal service could be renting out the tops of their trucks for “Street view” mapping and more…
Sony, it is suggested, might be better off just selling insurance.
Or just making movies and music. But not electronics.
A new report from the investment banking firm Jefferies delivered a harsh assessment of Sony’s electronics business. “Electronics is its Achilles’ heel and, in our view, it is worth zero,” wrote Atul Goyal, consumer technology analyst for Jefferies, in the report, released this week.
“In our view, it needs to exit most electronics markets.”
The maker of the Walkman and the Trinitron without electronics? What would it do?
Although Sony sells hundreds of products as varied as batteries and head-mounted 3-D displays, it so happens that Sony’s most successful business is selling insurance. While it doesn’t run this business in the United States or Europe, Sony makes a lot of money writing life, auto and medical policies in Japan.
The line between software and hardware startups has dissolved alongside the boundaries between our physical and digital worlds — now the only question is whether or not these companies will continue to embrace hardware, or if physical goods are simply a stop-gap between our barely-connected present and our hyper-connected future.
The problem for SparkFun is that while it has experienced phenomenal growth, it’s also worried that it’s seeing a plateau. Lara Boudreaux, the project manager for the marketing department at SparkFun, said the company had sales of $27.5 million in 2012 but only grew 9.6 percent year over year.
The fear is that while the marketing interest in DIY and the maker movement is still high, the typical customer has been reached. Growth may now come from getting the established clientele to buy more. And while many DIY hackers are willing to spend on their hobby, growing in a saturated market is tough.
A block from the Mariposa on-ramp and in the eye-line of 90,000 cars whizzing by on 280 sits an old warehouse that was home to the San Francisco Bay Guardian, a local alt weekly, and Digg. Most of the building is gutted, and inside they are working on the “greatest enabler of hardware on the planet,” according to PCH International head Liam Casey. It will be the new home of Lime Lab, a hush-hush design consultancy that Casey bought in 2012 for an undisclosed amount and, most important, the U.S. gateway to Asian PCH’s manufacturing might that allows hardware startups to access stem-to-stern services in design, coding, manufacturing, packaging and shipping.
Dehmlow says Kickstarter has even transformed the TechShop. He started to notice the difference about a year ago, when the scope of the projects came a lot bigger. The workshop’s clientele falls into three evenly divided categories: people from existing companies experimenting with new prototypes, artists and craftsmen, and entrepreneurs. He said that since the breakthrough of Kickstarter, the entrepreneurial set that frequents the place have become a lot more aggressive about the business ambitions of their projects. He can’t give a percentage of how many members have or are planning Kickstarter campaigns because it’s all anecdotal and the company doesn’t keep records of that sort of thing. But he says it’s a common occurrence.
The makeshift launch ceremonies at TechShop almost sound like the CEO of a newly public company ringing the opening bell at a stock exchange on IPO day. And while the scale is nowhere near the same, there are some parallels to the daunting challenges ahead for companies in both situations. For a newly public company, a new type of work emerges with your freshly issued ticker symbol. In the same way, when a Kickstarter campaign launches and – God willing – closes successfully, the entrepreneurs begin to fathom the mountain of work ahead after the dopamine wears off.
“They come in the next day and realize what they have to do,” Dehmlow says. They go from having to build a few units to building hundreds or thousands, and TechShop is no longer the place for them. But Dehmlow says he tries to make the transition as easy as possible. He gives those members advice on where they can buy tools to mass-produce, gives them tips on cheap places to rent out space, and shares contacts in TechShop’s network.
He hopes that over time, TechShop can formalize that process. He says he doesn’t want to charge for it, but wants it to work in an organized manner. “We want to help them cross that chasm,” he says.
You might recognize Chris Anderson as a world renowned journalist. Former editor-in-chief atWired, author of The Long Tail, and recent author of Makers, he has traded in his pen to become CEO of 3D Robotics, a manufacturer of unnmanned aerial vehicles (UAV).
So when I saw he was speaking at the annual Hardware Innovation Workshop, I was intrigued. Just how does someone go from being an editor to CEO of a robotics company? I knew he was an awesome writer, but seriously, a CEO?
Chris’s story starts five years before he quit his job at Wired. Passionate about hardware, Chris was spending his weekends building products with his kids, hoping they would gain his same affinity for science and technology. Like any Dad he wanted to impress his kids, but unfortunately most of his projects ended with them saying, “Is that all it can do?”
Wanting to step up his game, Chris decided it was time to build a robot that could fly!
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