"Don't worry about what anybody else is going to do… The best way to predict the future is to invent it. Really smart people with reasonable funding can do just about anything that doesn't violate too many of Newton's Laws!"
Tomorrow night, New Yorkers will have the chance to see The Replicator in action at The Apple Store Fifth Avenue! Explore the emerging world of 3D printing with MakerBot Industries and see a live product demonstration by CEO and co-founder Bre Pettis.
Welcome to the world of Whitelabel goods. What’s that, you ask? Well, have you ever noticed how every hip California startup has a branded steel water bottle, without having had to go design a steel water bottle and figure out how to get someone to produce it, someone to supply the steel, someone to check the quality (and on and on)?
That’s because someone else has figured all of that stuff out, leaving only the selection of What Particular Things for the carrier or distributor – or whomever is going to slap a brand on and resell it.
I got to tour a whitelabel gallery (can’t say when, can’t say where) while out and about in China, and it’s positively creepy. Everything is incredibly.. familiar. And thus you realize that everything you’ve known and loved that formed the background and setting of your life was made in one place, waited here for someone to strike a deal and order in volume, then sent to the four corners of the earth for you to keep in your home. It’s also doubly disturbing to not find a brand anywhere — and to realize you are reflexively looking for them. Here’s a short video
This is why Adafruit doesn’t just “slap our logo” on just anything, there’s no value putting your own logo on every odd-and-end. Anyone can put their logo on anything, and when they do – it means nothing special. When you see the Adafruit logo it’s because we made it, or it’s special to us un some way, it’s something we’re proud of.
When we get “generic” products like cables, tools or high end stuff like our calipers from Mitutoyo, we’re not going to paste over our own logo all over those things. We’d rather make it clear who made what and when we do make something – we want you to love it, and know it came from Adafruit.
We’re so excited for today’s big Super Sunday, because it’s the anniversary of our favorite athletic event, the “lunar olympics”. Today we’re celebrating the _other_ sports people like to play, like golf on the moon. Apollo 14.
The astronauts also engaged in less serious activities. Shepard brought a makeshift six iron golf club and two golf balls to the Moon, and took several swings (one-handed, due to the limited flexibility of the EVA suit). He exuberantly, and somewhat whimsically, exclaimed that the second ball went “miles and miles and miles” in the lunar gravity, but later estimated it actually went 200 to 400 yards (180 to 370 m). Mitchell then used a lunar scoop handle as a javelin, creating the first ‘Lunar Olympics’. Before the flight, backup crew members Cernan, Evans and Engle played a joke on the astronauts by stashing their own crew patches in every single locker and compartment in the spacecraft. Whenever one of the patches would float out of a locker during the mission, Shepard would say, “Tell Cernan, BEEP-BEEP my ass!”
This is the real deal, no derivatives here. These are the real Printrbot in it’s current version. I have a bunch of these printing all day, every day…. it works. It is expandable to larger widths and heights easier than any other reprap out there. Period. Its the most inexpensive bot out there being mass produced. And, its now yours to print, build, improve, change…. whatever you like. I can’t wait to see what you do with it. I will post pics of all the various forms it takes, news, etc at printrbot.com
-enjoy
Brook
On a related note, Brian at HaD has been rocking out lately, great posts.
The University of Hasselt (Belgium) announced today that Belgian and Dutch scientists have successfully replacing a lower jaw with a 3D printed model for a 83 year-old woman. According to the researchers, It is the first custom-made implant in the world to replace an entire lower jaw.
The lower jaw of the elderly woman was badly infected and needed to be removed. Considering the age of the patient, a “classical” microsurgical reconstructive surgery takes too long time and can be risky. Therefore a tailor-made implant is the best choice.
Normally it takes a few days to produce a custom implant, but with 3D printing technology it takes only a few hours.
Pictured above a prototype from 2008. We are looking forward to Bre announcing MakerBots for hospitals soon
The Lower East Side Ecology Center in Manhattan, a longtime promoter of recycling and composting, is expanding operations by opening a new, permanent drop-off site for electronic waste in Brooklyn.
The site, a warehouse at 469 President Street (at Nevins Street) in the Gowanus section, is scheduled to start accepting electronics from households, nonprofit organizations and small businesses on Tuesday. (A list of acceptable materials is here.) The warehouse can accommodate 260,000 pounds of unwanted electronics.
The Ecology Center, an educational organization, has organized e-waste collection events citywide since 2003, but it has more ambitious plans for the new site. Christine Datz-Romero, the nonprofit group’s executive director, said by e-mail that the drop-off site would also refurbish and test equipment and create a retail outlet where wireless cards, keyboards and other discarded parts in working condition can be resold at affordable prices.
NEW PRODUCT – Ada Lovelace, large, oval black and white – Sticker! Celebrate Lady Ada Lovelace, one of the world’s first computer programmers. Adafruit offers a fun and exciting stickers to celebrate achievement for electronics, science and engineering. We believe everyone should be able to be rewarded for learning a useful skill, a badge is just one of the many ways to show and share.
Here are some Ada-related facts, events and organizations.
Who was Ada? Ada Lovelace Augusta Ada King, Countess of Lovelace (10 December 1815 – 27 November 1852) was one of the world’s first computer programmers, and one of the first people to see computers as more than just a machine for doing sums. She wrote programs for Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine, a general-purpose computing machine, despite the fact that it was never built. She also wrote the very first description of a computer and of software.
The Ada Initiative is a non-profit organization that seeks to increase women’s participation in the free culture movement, open source technology and culture. Founded in 2011 by Linux kernel developer and open source advocate Valerie Aurora and open source developer and fellow advocate Mary Gardiner, the organization is named for Ada Lovelace, the “world’s first computer programmer.”
Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging (videologging, podcasting, comic drawing etc.!) to draw attention to the achievements of women in technology and science.
Art licensed as: This file is made available under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.
Perfect for laptops or the workbench.
These gorgeous stickers are glossy, vinyl and made to last a lifetime. Made with printing/vinyl machines that are solar powered and using the most green friendly supplies as possible.
MADE IN THE USA!
Adafruit’s stickers are manufactured in partnership with AMBRO Manufacturing located in NJ, USA. AMBRO is a family owned and operated business since 1990 that celebrates open-source with Adafruit Industries. You can meet their team here. AMBRO uses non-toxic soy based, water soluble and environmentally friendly printing supplies, threads and more when possible. AMBRO has over 250 solar panels that generate 50,000 Kilowatt hours per year. Their equipment runs solar powered, so the wonderful things AMBRO and Adafruit have worked together on are made with the sun! AMBRO Manufacturing was recognized by Impressions Magazine, a leading trade publication in the garment printing and embroidery business, who published an article highlighting AMBRO and their commitment to their environmentally focused manufacturing practices. Adafruit knows you have a lot of choices as to where you spend your money and time, we hope our open-source values, commitment to green technologies and partners helps make the decision easier and fun!
This is something I worked on over the summer last year and its finally out from under wraps. The idea is to create a version of the Mirror Box; effectively copying the real limb onto the Phantom Limb in order to relieve the pain that such people feel. This has been done once before with VR but now we have the kinect and cheaper VR goggles and XBee units from Adafruit, we can build a much cheaper rig and begin to investigate what works and what doesnt.
Just because the Peek service has been killed off doesn’t mean the devices themselves need to be crushed and swept off into a landfill somewhere. CEO Amol Sarva just dropped us a note to say that he’s got “a few thousand” Peeks still lying around the warehouse that are just waiting for a hacker’s touch: “maybe somebody can build something great,” he says. The notion of a pre-built and tested portrait QWERTY device with a jog dial, QVGA display, ARMv7 processor, and a GSM radio is, in many ways, a hacker’s dream — and Sarva says he can even throw in “some tools” to help them get started. The “operating system sucks but is workable,” he says. Sounds like a challenge to us. Interested folks should contact Amol himself via email — amol at peek.ly — and he says that one of the company’s developers will be in touch.
This is an online MSP430 firmware editor. This means that you edit C-code within your web browser without having to install an IDE such as IAR or CCS on your computer. The files are compiled on our server and you download them from there. Using this tool to develop MSP430 firmware from within your browser is very simple, but does not offer as many advanced features as an expensive IDE.
As the United States seeks to reinvigorate its job market and move past economic recession, MIT Newsexamines manufacturing’s role in America’s economic future through this series on work at the Institute around manufacturing.
Not long ago, MIT political scientist Suzanne Berger was visiting a factory in western Massachusetts, a place that produces the plastic jugs you find in grocery stores. As she saw on the factory floor, the company has developed an innovative automation system that has increased its business: Between 2004 and 2008, its revenues doubled, and its workforce did, too. Moreover, the firm has found a logical niche: Since plastic jugs are both bulky and inexpensive, it’s not economical to produce them overseas and ship them to the United States, simply to fill them with, say, milk or syrup.
“Is this just an odd little story?” Berger asks. “Actually, no.” While the decline of American manufacturing has been widely trumpeted — manufacturing jobs in the United States have dropped from 20 million in 1979 to about 12 million today — conglomerates such as Procter & Gamble and high-tech firms such as Dow Corning have kept significant amounts of manufacturing in the country. Moreover, 3,500 manufacturing companies across the United States — not just the jug-making firm in Massachusetts — doubled their revenues between 2004 and 2008. With that in mind, Berger asks, “How can we imagine enabling these firms to branch out into more innovative activities as well?”
Electroland seeks a hardware designer/hacker for a fast-track interactive installation project. Candidates should have significant experience with embedded tactile interaction design using Arduino or similar and familiarity with coding for physical computing. Basic fabrication skills (cut, finish, fasten) are a plus. Candidates should be able to work with us to develop functional pieces that are reliable in the scope of a two week installation. The work will be fun and very fast-paced. We want to make things that illuminate, squawk, wobble, etc.
There have been quite a few questions in the forums and on the comments about what libraries will be available, what codecs, what is open source etc. This short post will try and give people some idea of what will be available at or around launch time. It won’t be comprehensive – I am sure that for some it will generate more questions than answers, but I hope it will be of help.
Firstly, libraries. Any distribution will need to supply a set of closed source libraries that give access to the GPU acceleration features…
The Open/Closed source debate can become quite heated, as those perusing the comments and forums may have noticed. As stated above, the host side libraries for the graphics acceleration are closed source and are provided by the SoC supplier. The Foundation has no control over the closed nature of these libraries. Since the vast majority of people simply use libraries such as these, it was deeded a trade off worth making to get the high graphics performance. It’s worth noting there are no other SoC devices with a similar graphics performance that are open source. There is no GPL issue here, these are user side libraries not linked in any way to the kernel.
There are a few drivers for the SoC which are linked in to the kernel, these are GPLed and hence OSS. One of these drivers is the interface from the user space libraries to the GPU. The user side libraries use this ‘driver’ to communicate with the GPU and tell it what to do.
Here’s a handy diagram that may help visualise what’s what.
Printable catalog (PDF)
We’re hoping this is not true…
FEED
