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Making Living Sharing – Trailer #1

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It’s finally online, the very first trailer for my upcoming research documentary. The movie will be about my adventures in global collaboration and local fabrication. How can we help people create their own products? How can we make a living from sharing?

It will feature shots from FabLabs and projects around the world, animations about design by sharing and interviews with various makers and generally awesome people.

Making Sharing Living will premiere in August 2013 at FAB9 in Yokohama, Japan

Layer Chair iteration by Nick Graham

Layer stool by Nick Graham

This Layer Stool was created by Nick Graham at FabLab Wellington, New Zealand. Nick loaded his custom profile curves into my parametric design system to make a stool iteration of the Layer Chair series. Nick is a generally awesome guy doing a master in Open Design at Massey University. More info about the stool and Nicks research here. Great experience to be surprised by someone finding new possibilites with an open design.

Nick also invited me to participate in his Exquiste Corpse design experiment, where three participants had to design a part of a chair without knowing what the other two had designed. Nick designed the four legs, and Continue Reading →

Lasering Pixelglasses at FabCafe

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I couldn’t allow myself to visit FabCafe to only talk and not make anything. So I returned and had one of the best espressos of Tokyo while I worked out a parametric Pixelglasses definition in Grasshopper.

You define the outline of your glasses with a vector line that you load into grasshopper. The size of the pixels depends on your material thickness. You can set the length and width of the glasses as well as the opacity of the hollow pixels. They work by the same principle as the shutter shades made famous by Kanye West.

The download link features some of the designs I made in collaboration with friends and visitors of FabCafe as well as the parametric system. The Grasshopper definition is slightly buggy and still work in progress. Contact me if you get stuck.

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Casting the rubber component of a prosthetic foot sketch

The finished prosthetic foot sketch, the principle looks promising

We used a two component rubber resin of polyurethane type for this prototype. The wedge shaped rubber will provide exponential resistance as the prosthetic foot bends forward. The rubber also packs around the metal hinge pin to reduce shear stress. Continue Reading →

CNC milling the parts for a prosthetic foot sketch

The finished two sided milling job

To get some feedback on the potential of the rubber wedge foot, we CNC milled a sketch at HONFablab Indonesia. We used massive wood of the Keruing type and a flip part setup to create the parts. Continue Reading →

Wedge based prosthetic foot sketch

Wedgefootsketch01

This is an illustration of the a design principle for the 50dollar prosthetic leg program. The basic principle is to use a a rubber wedge that will create exponential resistance as the foot fends. The amount of resistance can be varied by casting different stiffness of rubber or by creating open “pockets” within the cast rubber. The design is largely based upon design input from Haakon Karlsen at MIT FabLab Lyngen. Continue Reading →

Winning the FAB8 flight competition

fab8flying

Knut Klo, Haakon Karlsen Jr. and I won the FAB8 design competition in Wellington, New Zealand. Our hexacopter easily managed to stay the required 30 seconds in the air. The amazing guys at Phothigher saved the day by lending us one of their micro controllers when we couldn’t get the Ardupilot to work in time. Also a big thanks to all the people from the FabLab community who helped me troubleshoot the RF communications. More pictures in the post. Continue Reading →

Greetings to FAB8 from MIT FabLab Lyngen

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This is a 5min video message from Haakon Karlsen Jr. to the FabLab community, since he could not make it to FAB8 this year. We have included some shots of how we used the plastic bender to make our hexacopter arms and the ShopBot to cnc mill the propellers. Continue Reading →

First takeoff with the hexacopter

 

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We had a very very successful first test flight with our hexacopter. Extremely cool feeling to CNC mill your own propellers and then see them take off into the sky. Press the “Download this design button” to get our drawings for laser cutting and cnc milling. We would love all kinds of help on developing the flight electronics with the FabLab PCB milling process. A more detailed tutorial on building your own is coming soon.

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