After reviewing the projects here and those proposed by NextFab members it sounds like we will be doing some form of the Chess boards, the snowflakes, some robotics, and a bunch of laser-engraving. But what if you don’t like those? Come by anyway and you can rally troops for helping you on your own project(s).
NextFab Studio will have these staff members on hand throughout the event:
Chrinstine : Textile and Industrial Design ( fabric knowledge, product design,cad, sewing )
Ian : Electronics (pcb design/fabrication, coding, wiring, soldering, etc.)
Seth : Mechanical Engineer (handtools, cad, product design)
Brandon : Multi-Media Designer ( 3d printing, graphic design, product design, cinematography, cad)
This Hack-tacular event will be at NextFabStudio and will get us free access for the night to some of their most awesome tools, such as: CNC plasma, CNC embroidery, e-textiles, electronics, 3D printers, shop bots… Check out all their equipment.
There will be food too.
So Awesome.
Now we need to brainstorm project ideas, let’s start things off in this email thread. Please reply-all so the proper NextFab people (cc’ed above) can tell us if this is possible and, if so, the logistics for how to make it happen.
I’m proposing the first project (we can have many of them!!)…
A double-set of Hive76 chess pieces and boards. This will make use of their lasercutters, embroidery equipment, and possibly the electronics and 3D printers too. I really want a double-set (4 different colors) so we can play Bughouse Chess (You will love this game)
If we get really creative maybe some magnetics and electronics could be enabled as well.
Adjusting the available .blend file and related stuff took a couple of hours, adjusting the rendering took a couple hours, and the final rendering took over an hour (2.4GHz Intel Core 2 Duo, not the fastest kid on the block anymore).
There were so many wonderful things it was hard for me to pick a favorite. That is, until I hit the Ultimaker Booth. Ultimaker is another open source 3D printer offshoot of the RepRap Project. Erik de Brijn, Martijn Elserman, and the rest of their team have been hard at work perfecting v1 of the Ultimaker (and now Ultimaker+). The quality of this machine continues to amaze me (I’ve seen a previous beta version in person at Botacon). New this year, when mixed up with the newest firmware Marlin (which was recently ported to 3D FDM printers and is based on GRBL, the same firmware codebase picked to run Lasersaur), the Ultimaker is able to get insanely high resolution prints. You can get the Marlin firmware for RAMPS and RepRap from HERE on Github.
Erik gave me one of the high res Yoda prints (Thanks Erik!) which I put under the microscope last week. You can see with the scale bar… we have 162 pixels = 1 mm. The average layer height in that pic is around 12 pixels, or 0.074 mm (That is 74 microns). And that orangey low res looking thing on the left? That’s not a print… that’s my finger. Click the image to see in higher detail!
In collaboration with NextFabStudio, we are offering a state-of-the-art and upgraded RepRap printer kit and accompanying 3-day Build Workshop from August 26th-28th. The class cost is $998 ($1,200 for non-members) and includes EVERYTHING you need to get up and running, and more importantly, a fully calibrated and fine-tuned robot.
Check out the time-lapse video below from our first class in Baltimore where we got 10 printers up and running in 3 days.
We’ll help you and a friend or two to build your very own open-source RepRap 3D printer, which has more than 4x(!!) the build volume of it’s closest competitor, the MakerBot Thing-o-Matic. Note that you will save $202 off the class if you’re a member of Hive76 or NextFab Studio. Total class cost for members is only $998. This is a crazy cheap deal! You can’t even buy a MakerBot for that price, let alone learn how to assemble it and fine tune it correctly in just a weekend.
There’s lots of additional bells and whistles on this bot that you won’t find anywhere else: custom machined aluminum motor couplers, linear bearings, the latest RAMPS electronics, and much more!
Hive’s Board had a meeting, check out the Notes Here.
We reviewed officer reports, financial outlook, strategic planning, events coordination, and planning the first Hive76 annual report. Lots more planned for the coming year!
Patents, an oldie but a goodie
We had some questions about provisional and full patent applications. Here’s some notes we got from a while back talking to a patent attorney.
In general, US Patents cost ~$10-25,000.
In the US, the right to hold a patent is based on a “first to invent” policy. Example: Bob invents something. At a later time, Jim invents something identical and files for a patent. Bob later files for a patent. Jim’s patent will be rejected and Bob will get the patent because he invented it first (assuming he has proof). Proof of invention is typically a notebook or extremely detailed record of the invention. It does not necessarily need to be “the idea sent to yourself by certified mail.” Sending the idea to yourself by certified mail is not necessary for certifying invention date, but can sometimes be useful to prove that you have “prior art” to invalidate someone else’s patent.
The reason to do a simultaneous international filing is that the US is the only country that is first-to-invent. All other countries are first-to-file. Meaning that if you file in US only, and someone in another country sees your patent (the submissions become public in 6 months, well before the patents are granted or the provisional 1-year deadline gets close), then you can actually lose rights to the patent in other countries and their patent will supersede yours in those countries. You really want to do the filing here.
Normal trade-secret laws can be used to protect your idea without having to do anything else as long as you don’t disclose the idea to someone not under NDA. This means that writing a detailed account of your invention and keeping it locked up is enough to protect yourself. Get a good notebook, keep very detailed notes, date and sign every page, and keep the notebook somewhere safe. If someone breaks in and steals your idea, this situation falls under normal trade-secret laws, and you are protected. The only way to protect an idea after non-NDA disclosure is to submit a patent application within one year.
In the US, there is a 1 yr “on-sale or bar date” limit. An individual has exactly 1 year from the date of public disclosure of his invention to file a patent. This is a very strict limit. If a patent application has not been filed by this date, the individual is barred forever from filing a patent for this invention. This limit has been put in place to encourage people to disclose their inventions and put them to use asap.
The best/most secure option is to get a patent application on file asap. It can cost anywhere from $5-10,000 to get the process started. You can generally file a provisional patent application which is initially cheaper than filing for a full patent outright. This can help to give you more time (one year to get a utility file submitted), and allows you to use the “patent pending” moniker on your marketing materials. The provisional patent is typically a detailed explanation of the idea, as well as a cover letter. As long as the invention is disclosed, the person that files the patent application is fully protected. Also, it is best to have an attorney assist with the provisional application because if an attorney does not assist, the individual may mistakenly not disclose the idea properly or fully and therefore may not be protected. Filing a provisional application and then eventually a patent will cost more than filing outright for the patent, but it can help to defer costs by up to one year.
For help filing a patent or a provisional application, patent agents are needed. Not all patent agents are attorneys, and indeed, some very good patent agents can often be cheaper than attorneys who also file patents (and who may not be very good). There are many patent agents in Philadelphia, and you can find one by looking on the PTO website.
Elsewhere in the world, the right to a patent is usually based on a “first to file” policy. However, because of treaties with the US, if you file a patent in the US, you have a 1 year grace period before you have to file any international patents. If you file international patents, you get a priority date identical to the date for the US patent. Example: Bob has an idea, and publicly discloses it to an audience in the US. Jim is from a treaty nation, sees Bob’s idea, and rushes back to his country of origin to file a patent. As long as Bob files a patent within one year of disclosure in the US, and also files an international patent in the same country as Jim within one year, Bob will be covered in that country and Jim’s patent application will be rejected.
To ease the difficulty with filing international patents, you can file a single Patent Cooperation Treaty (PCT) application to start the patent process simultaneously in many different countries.The PCT application is not a full patent application, but eases the burden on the individual filing the patent, and can defer (for several years) the significant costs associated with filing patents in other countries. Each patent must be translated into the native language of each country to which it is submitted, and this can obviously take large amounts of time and money.
The monopoly for a granted US patent is enforceable for 20 years (from the date of public disclosure of the invention).
Independent creation is a defense for copyrighted material, not for patents. Example: Copyright: Bob writes a book; Jim writes the *exact* same book without knowledge of Bob’s book. Both Bob and Jim are allowed to sell their books.
Patent: Bob has an invention and submits a patent application. Jim invents the identical invention without knowledge of Bob’s invention. Bob can sue Jim for damages because Bob has proof that he was “first to invent.”
Summary:
1) Keep a notebook. Write down your invention with as much detail as possible, sign and date each page, and describe the invention as well as you can.
2) Decide if you have the resources to submit a patent application, or at least for getting a provisional patent application.
3) Be mindful and keep aware: don’t miss that 1 year deadline! This rule is non-negotiable with the US patent office.
PLA bushing sliding on precision ground 8 mm rods is actually quite smooth movement. I don’t think it can go as fast as the original Sells Mendel (which was ball bearings sliding over the rods), but it’s only half the printed parts and the z-axis is much smoother motion too. I will try oiling or greasing the bushings to try to get smoother and faster motion without losing steps. So definitely some tradeoffs but overall a super awesome bot. The Prusa is also fully parametric and entirely made from OpenSCAD. All sources are available on github FTW.
As this is the first bot I built that I actually own, I named this awesometown after my HS science teacher, Mr. Sloate, who really got me into Biology and now, robotics for Biology.
There’s some outstanding new open-source add-ons for Blender, one of our favorite open-source 3D rendering/simulation/animation programs.
The first, LuxRender is a physically based Light Modeler. It’s currently limited to CPU-rendering only, but it creates enormously realistic lighting scenarios based on physical equations that describe the behavior of light. An amazing new feature here is that it stores the contribution of each light to each pixel during rendering, so you can modify the rendered image photorealistically and non-destructively without having to re-render the entire scene again.
The second, SmallLuxGPU is even more experimental but it is able to harness the full power of your GPU for unparalleled rendering speed of highly photorealistic visual scenes. Even better, with SLG you can interact with your scene in realtime to get just the view you want.
And here’s some examples of renders we’ve done in the past few days. Keep in mind, these are entirely synthetic images. Jump over to flickr to see at higher resolution.
“We’d like to create a magazine for the scientist in all of us.
It will have simple How-To’s, like extracting the DNA of a strawberry using kitchen materials. But on the next page could have a paper on the validity of using Bacillus Subtillus as a model organism. We’d feature extraordinary citizen scientists who are doing extraordinary things in abnormal labs (aka garages, closets, etc). We’d also give legal and safety tips to inform and protect citizen scientists from some of the dangers they could run into.”
