Bre Pettis Blog

Toorcamp Adventure: Mad Max Road Trip to a Hacker Con in an Abandoned Missile Silo

brepettis@gmail.com (Things!) — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 19:04:11 +0000

Like a cross between a road trip movie and Mad Max, my friends Zach Smith, Adam Mayer and I are on a journey to Toorcamp with MakerBot in tow. Toorcamp is a hacker conference and campout at an abandoned missile silo.

I'll be updating my flickr page obsessively over the next few days and adding photos to the set above as I get internet/mobile access so you can just check them out here and enjoy the slideshow!

DIY Fanatics in Financial Times

brepettis@gmail.com (Things!) — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 22:42:47 +0000

Financial Times, I think you and your pink pulped paper are great. David Gelles wrote up a great piece about the DIY scene. Besides MakerBot, it mentions Instructables, Techshop, and Etsy.

Here's a few choice paragraphs from the article:

The new DIY tech culture is made up of a loose-knit group of computer geeks, arts-and-crafts fans and whimsical sculptors and is enjoying a mainstream renaissance, thanks in part to television programmes, magazines and festivals that celebrate the quirky culture of making.

The decentralised nature of the DIY tech culture makes it hard to value it, and there are no estimates of how much it is worth. Yet with hundreds of thousands of enthusiasts around the globe, it is a potentially lucrative market for those who can tap it.

Indeed, scattered among the creative spirits are would-be entrepreneurs who are trying to open up the manufacturing process to encourage innovation and lower the costs of the research and development.

Bre Pettis is the founder of MakerBot Industries, which sells affordable 3D printers. While most 3D printers cost anywhere between $25,000 and $250,000, (€18,000-€180,000, £15,000-£150,000), Mr Pettis sells his, which can create nearly any three-dimensional form of 4sq in or smaller, for a mere $750. Users of MakerBots simply create or download a 3D computer file using one of several programs, then set the machine to work. The MakerBot takes spools of spaghetti-like plastic, heats it to 2000C and squirts it out in the desired shape. Already the MakerBot has been used to make missing parts for electronics and the casing for new flashlights.

“It changes the way you live,” says Mr Pettis, “from being a mindless consumer to being a creative participant in the marketplace.”

After just two months Mr Pettis (pictured) has sold 60 printers, half of them to clients outside the US. “We originally had the idea that we were going to revolutionise American manufacturing, but it’s global,” he says.

The DIY community even has its own method of commerce. While most of the wares produced by makers never see the inside of retail stores – small volumes make wide distribution impractical – there are ways to consume a bit of the culture.

But isn’t there something incongruous in a profit-seeking marketplace for specialised goods that are supposed to be the antidote to big box shopping? Herein lies the paradox of the DIY tech ethos: much as it would like to escape the confines of the throwaway economy, it cannot exist too far outside consumer culture.

Mr Wilhelm of Instructables does not see a conflict. The DIY movement, he says, “is not anti-capitalist...It’s a backlash against mass market. It’s not like everyone who does DIY is a communist.”

This is a really cool article. David totally gets the DIY movement and summarizes it's frontier really well! Thanks!

(Sidenote: There are three founders of MakerBot, Zach Smith, Adam Mayer, and me.)

Have you always wanted Disney's head on a platter?

brepettis@gmail.com (Things!) — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 19:07:30 +0000

Well now you can have it! Zach printed out Disney's head. Here's what he had to say about it.

This may be one of my favorite prints to date. It certainly is impressive, and has a very nice heft to it. Not only that, but I printed this using a fan which really improved print quality. For example, the chin had very little sagging.

Besides being an awesome Creative Commons licensed model, it looks fantastic! This basically means that when we have the scanner technology ready, you'll be able to make copyies of your head and give them away!

If you've got a MakerBot, go download the 3D files on Thingiverse and go print one of these babies out!

Siamese Twins and Sharing 3D Medical Files

brepettis@gmail.com (Things!) — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 16:38:55 +0000

It's coming. Soon you'll be able to scan parts of your body at home and print them out. Earlier today I wrote about 3D medical scans and the 3D printing happening in the UK on the MakerBot blog, but I can't get my mind off of it. It is very cool that you can get your fetus scanned, even if you don't have siamese twins! Once it's scanned you can get it 3D printed. Super bonus points to the first person to put a scanned medical image on Thingiverse. This is just the beginning of the scanning and 3D printing revolution in the medical sector.

Imagine this: Every month, I get a body scan that documents many layers of my biology from bones to nervous system. Then, one day, I break my finger and print out a replacement on my MakerBot made out of PLA, which is a bio-compatible plastic we're in the process of manufacturing. I bring it to the surgeon who has his office, not in a huge medical complex, but in his office around the corner. He replaces the bone as if it's a spare tire and I'm good to go.

This isn't science fiction. This is five minutes into the future.

The Song of the Laser

brepettis@gmail.com (Things!) — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 15:50:51 +0000

I'm at NYCResistor right now sitting on the couch next to the lasercutter. It's a magical device and using it, just doesn't get old. It's humming along and cutting out the lasercut parts for MakerBots. The laser is a seriously wonderful and enabling device. Being able to design things and lasercut them is the reason we were able to go through MakerBot prototypes so fast and get the MakerBot designed in the blink of an eye.

Ours is an Epilog 35W Mini and everyone here at NYCResistor, my Brooklyn hacker collective loves it because it means that if you need something physical, you can slap it together really fast. I believe that everyone should have the tools of manufacturing at their fingertips and in fact that's just what our plan is with MakerBots.

Lasers are a different thing than 3D printers. I'm sure there will be lasercutter kits in the near future, but for now, I'm really happy to let the professionals at Universal Laser and Epilog and GCC do the work with big lasers. They are getting cheaper and more accessible every year.

As part of the process of getting MakerBot started we've been interfacing with lots of different manufacturing companies and institutions and I have to say it feels really good to be manufacturing a manufacturing tool in the USA. Everyone we've dealt with in the manufacturing world has been friendly, considerate, and helpful. Everyone we've found in the manufacturing sector has been awesome.

I used to teach art in public schools, but for me teaching art was actually more like a class about making things. With home ec and shop class replaced with mindless testing in our school system, my class was the one spot where students got to touch things and make things and express themselves physically. We used to have a population trained on how to use a lathe, drill press, bandsaw and mill and I'm sure there are lots of fingers lost because of it, but our obsession with safety and the trend of education for sake of test achievement has moved the collective learning process away from the physical. The dominant culture of the USA has shifted away from manufacturing and I think it's about time that it came back. If you've got free time, ideas and a passion for something, there is no better time to get into manufacturing it and selling it. Collaborate with friends in your spare time and make it happen. I predict that a wonderful future awaits for those who set out on a manufacturing adventure in their life with friends.

I hope with MakerBot to bring manufacturing out of the factories and into the homes, apartments, and corner stores of the world so that it will be ordinary to download and manufacture the things you need in everyday life.

As my lasercutter hums and cuts out MakerBot parts, it's singing a machine song of wonderul manufacturing future!

Annihilation of Time and Space and The Epoch of Sharing.

brepettis@gmail.com (Things!) — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 06:44:56 +0000

The Epoch of Sharing is here. This new era is a great time of opportunity for passionate obsessives to collaborate and make wonderful things happen.

But before we get to the current state of affairs, let's look back to a time when the locomotive heralded a new age of industry and the annihilation of time and space.

In the early 1800's very few people travelled farther than a days walk from where they were born. The fastest way to get somewhere was by horse and the fastest means of communication was a carrier pigeon.

By the middle of the 1800's a canal system was in place in England at least and you could transport goods which meant that your town didn't have to be self sufficient. You could have a town that was good at making shoes and other towns could be good at producing jam and so on.

By the end of the 1800's the train had arrived into the world and people who road it felt distances disappear. Before the train, crossing the USA had been a dangerous, life threatening 7 week journey. On a train, it could be done in under a week. With the arrival of fast long distance travel, the industrial revolution began.

At the time people talked about the annihilation of time and space. Because you could get places in less tme, the world shrank and distance wasn't the barrier it had been. People felt the change coming and it was coming on a train. Empires were built on the trains and the industrial revolution arrived. For some, it was a magical time to build wealth, but for most, it was a time full of change that appeared bleak and shifting and it was full of a lot people with hammers hammering railroads and lots of people with saws cutting down trees to be fed into the steam engines.

Just like with the dawn of the industrial revolution, we're arriving at another shifting time in the world. Organizations don't need to giant multi-national corporations to succeed. They need to be flexible, connected, collaborative, and clever to succceed. A culture of sharing is emerging as the most intersting thing going these days. The free culture movement is gaining steam and winning is all about sharing and winning together. By sharing we connect to each other and amazing possibilities are around every corner. Right now, today, we are in a time where we have amazing tools to connect to each other and share and more are on the way. The most interesting thing going on right now is SHARING.

I read the news today and it was dull. I sat out on the stoop with Kio and we read it cover to cover. The whole NYTimes was readable in about half an hour. Sitting on the stoop reading the paper should have been an iconic Brookyn experience, but it left us feeling like we were riding horses in the age of locomotives. There was little or no mention of the Iraq pull out or the North Korea Nuclear Threat which I heard about later in the day from friends. The ability to get information is no longer owned by news institutions. In fact, even though there is a lot of gossip and misinformation out there on the peer to peer news level, I trust my friends as news sources way more than I trust the formerly mainstream media. Again, it's about sharing. The newspapers and tv stations used to have a monopoly on the sharing of information, but that age has gone the way of the carrier pigeon.

Beyond the annihilation of time and space, today's connectivity has gone the next step and made it possible for people to share anything to anywhere. The more passionate you are about something, the smaller the world becomes.

Even though the core MakerBot team is in Brooklyn, we've shipped MakerBots to every continent except Antarctica now and the community is connected with a google group, flickr pool, forum and wiki for developing and sharing information, helping each other out, and pushing development forward. You used to have to use the postal system to get things, but now if you want something and you have a MakerBot, you can design it and start printing it out moments later. If you want to share a design with a friend on the other side of the world, you can just upload it to Thingiverse and in a few moments, your friend with a MakerBot in Berlin can start 3D printing the object. The age of the post office and needing trucks, trains and planes to shift objects is coming to an end. You can share objects digitally over the internet instantly and everywhere there's an internet connection.

I use this as an example because MakerBot is close to my heart and it's my passion to support others in creative endeavors, but it's not just happening with MakerBot Industries. It's happening with every individual and company and community that's connecting and sharing. The bottom line is that if you are supporting people sharing their passions, then you are winning right now. Twitter and facebook and the pirate bay are the some obvious folks facilitating sharing at the core of what they do, but you don't have to have a sharing company to win, you can do a lot of things and support people sharing their obsessive nature and it will work. I know in NYC there is a growing community of startups that are scrappy and full of energy and are happy to share their experiences.

In Germany, the average person is in 3 clubs. In the USA there are very few people who are in any sort of club. Even though I wish more people in the USA connected by meeting physically together in groups, clubs don't really matter that much as a metric because with the internet, if you have a passion, you have a community online that you connect with. It could be a passion for model trains or a obsession with a conspiracy theory, but no matter what the passion is, there is a community to connect with and the farther out it is, the better. With a long tail passion, the community is smaller and you can connect to everyone in the group and make new friendships, connections, and with those connections you can work with them to collaborate and make wonderful things happen that you couldn't do by just yourself.

For me, NYCResistor is my club. Our goal is to learn, share, and make things and as a community, we have so many skills to share that it's off the charts. Besides the members who have keys to the hackerspace, we have a greater community in our Microcontroller Study Group which has around 1000 members who all share information and collaborate on electronics projects and more. Meeting together in the space is a powerful way to build trust, but our sharing over the internet, let's us get to know each other better and support each other in different ways.

The open source and free culture movements are going strong and it's exciting. The tools of collaboration and connection are in everyone's hands. It's a great time to be part of something special that you care about and be working on it collectively with others and sharing the results and wisdom of your experience.

With a culture of sharing, we get things done faster and better. We all work on a piece and get everything in return.

With the rise of the locomotive and the car and airplane, time and space have been annihilated for over a hundred years. Right now we are seeing creativity and passion grow in a time when large corporations are failing. The future will be built by all of us and the culture of sharing that results from our individual and collective efforts.

I'm not saying to quit your job and start an iPhone app company to connect people, although there are lots of people doing that successfully. I'm saying that if you aren't doing something obsessive that connects you to a community in addition to your normal daily grind, then you are giving pony rides while the trains rush past.

I declare that the Epoch of Sharing is here. There are so many ways to get involved and be a part of this exciting time. What are your obsessions? How are you connecting and collaborating with those that share your passions? I'd love to hear your reactions in the comments.

Image by National Library of NZ

Phone Evolution (Russian Doll Cellphones)

brepettis@gmail.com (Things!) — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 05:33:33 +0000

Wow, I love this set of Russian Doll Cellphones by director/animator Kyle Bean. Via Next Nature

Jimmy Fallon Ate a Cupcake Frosted by Goldie the MakerBot

brepettis@gmail.com (Things!) — Sun, 28 Jun 2009 04:17:13 +0000

Photo by Steve Garfield

Last night on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, the man himself ate a cupcake frosted by Goldie the MakerBot with a frostruding attachment. Earlier in the evening, Erykah Badu saw the machine and the cupcakes and plastic parts that it made including a model of the empire state building and said, "Your machine made that? Get The F*** Out!"

It was a great time, but the gremlins were on set. The air conditioning of the studio affected the hotglue holding the drive gear to the motor and it fell off mid frosting! It still frosted the cupcake in what appeared to be a Twisted Sister logo, saving the day!

We're going to attempt to set a better record and shorten the time and improve the frosting distribution soon! Make sure to check out URDB.org to make your own records!

Factory, Photos, Steppers!

brepettis@gmail.com (Things!) — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 18:38:02 +0000

Things are going good. MakerBot Industries is selling machines, a MakerBot will be on the Jimmy Fallon show tomorrow, and the stepper motors we've been waiting for arrived so we can ship out batch 3!

We also got a FACTORY! Yep, we're renting a factory. In the 1880's it was a brewery and now it's going to be MakerBot Industries Factory HQ! (M4V)

It's basically the perfect location and our landlords get us. They wrote into our lease that our robots have to follow Asimov's 3 rules of robotics.

Ronen took awesome pictures of us. (more to come)

I'm going to Toorcamp next week!

RAWK! And it's summer in NYC, finally!

NYCResistor, MakerBot and Me in Daily News

brepettis@gmail.com (Things!) — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 17:19:25 +0000

_
In high school, their club would be considered nerd central. But in New York City, the 25 members of NYC Resistor, Brooklyn's own DIY robot collective, are considered a rare and lucky few.

The exclusive club caters to local inventors adept at taking apart electronics and transforming them into completely different products.

"We're a hacker collective, which is just like an artist collective, but with people who break things down to understand them and then use the parts to build something new and creative," says NYC Resistor co-founder Bre Pettis, 36, who recently collaborated with other Resistor members to build an open-source 3-D printer. "Basically, it's a clubhouse for a group of geeks where we can work on our various projects and share them with each other."

Founded in August 2007, NYC Resistor (www.NYCResistor.com, 888-881-2802), currently has 25 members who pay $75 monthly dues for a shared space where they gather to work on their electronic projects, both individually and in groups. Progress updates are posted on the NYC Resistor Web site. Recent projects include Pettis' 3-D printer, named the Makerbot, iPods that have been turned into musical instruments, and a robot that makes drinks.

Due to the space limitations, membership in the collective is limited, but New Yorkers don't have to be a member to participate in NYC Resistor's weekly events. Every Thursday night between 6 and 9 p.m., NYC Resistor hosts a free open crafts night where anyone can come and present their most recent project. There are also regular classes on everything from how to use high-powered lasers to the basics of soldering.

"Hackers get a bad rap in the media because you only hear about the ones who cause trouble," says Pettis. "We are innovative, curious people who want to know how things work so we can rebuild them for our own purposes. NYC Resistor is a supportive atmosphere for people that want to do interesting things with technology."

For anyone who has ever thought of turning their pants into a keyboard or designing a robot that will make grilled cheeses, NYC Resistor provides a community of like-minded innovators and a workspace where nothing is impossible and no project too ridiculous.

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