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Nadia Peek will present,
so it's very difficult
making machines that make
rapid prototyping of digital
fabrication and instrumentation
missions.
So.
Welcome was warm applause.
All right.
Good morning, thanks for coming
to my talk this early
because it's this early, I figured I
would start with a
kind of small story about,
say you wanted to make a machine,
say you wanted to make any kind of
machine.
What? What is the machine do that
you want to make? Does it cut things?
Does it mill things as extrude things?
Is a 3D printer? Is it a laser cutter?
Does it just dispense candy?
And depending on what you want your
machine to do?
How fast is it go?
Like how? What is the motion that you're
going to have? What is the inertia of
your machine?
Is it going to be very slow?
Is it going to be really, really strong?
Is it going to be very precise?
Do you need it to move super fast?
And those are all things that you might
want to take into consideration when
you're designing a machine that you might
want to make.
The next thing you might think about is
if this is a machine that fabricates
or measure things, it's probably going to
have to move around.
So how do you move things around
with the drive train?
So here are just some illustrations I
made of drive trains that you're probably
already familiar with, like a lead screw
with a lead screw not or a rack and
pinion or a timing belt.
And each of these things have drawbacks
and advantages in machine design, like
a timing belt can move very quickly,
but there will be a lot of backlash in
your system.
Lead Screw can put in a lot of force,
but it might not be as fast.
Rack and pinion very cheap to prototype
anyone with a laser cutter could make
one.
And so once you have your drive train,
how are you going to hold your drive
training in place?
How are you going to make the frame for
your machine? A very popular way to make
3D printers nowadays is to laser
cut plywood and use a Tesla
slot construction to hold everything
together. You could use an aluminum
extrusion, and how you make
the frame of your machine is going to
have a lot of impact on
the rigidity of the machine and therefore
the inertia that your machine is going to
have. If it's very heavy, it's going to
be more difficult to move around.
If it's if it's very
kind of loosely connected, it's going to
be full of vibrations and there and the
resulting precision of your machine is
going to be very low, even if you have
even if you have micro stepping in your
stepper motors.
It doesn't really matter if you have a
big floppy machine.
So what are you going to do about that?
And then the
way that you have to restrict the motion
of your machine, so say you have a lead
screw that's moving things back and
forth. You have to make sure that it
stays in one axis, right?
So you use something
like a guide shaft or maybe use a flexor
and you restrict the motion in one degree
of freedom or two degrees of freedom
or three degrees of freedom, however many
degrees of freedom you want.
And to think about those degrees of
freedom, you can think about different
kinematic systems.
So each bot delta
by its polar coordinates, those are all
examples of
of parallel kinematic systems, right?
So if you move X, it's going to affect
how you move Y and those things are
dependent on each other. Whereas with
serial kinematics, if I move X,
then it doesn't really matter.
The Y position is independent of X,
so different kinematic systems result in
different control systems.
And how are you going to talk to all of
those control systems?
Did any of you guys go to Travis
Goodspeed talk yesterday about satellite
control?
Some of you. Yeah.
So he used a he is a
stepper motor driver board that was
designed for a different machine to
control his satellite
right now.
And then he wrote a pie game interface
to like, look at different look at
different satellite pointing, which is
pretty cool. So how are you going to how
are you going to control yours?
Are you going to repurpose a system like
that, or are you going to design
something from scratch?
So this is my very brief overview on
if you wanted to make a machine, that's
kind of a different steps in aspects that
you would want to think about.
So now I will go back to talking about
now that we have an overview of what
machine building entails in this talk.
So a long time ago, we had
the industrial revolution, and that gave
us
a lot of things that were available
in the color black and
using using
kind of mass production techniques, we
were able to build things that we were
otherwise that were
otherwise prohibitively expensive
to build. So building a single prototype
for a car?
Yeah, that's it's not something that you
can really afford to do if you're only
going to build one of them. But if you
take advantage of an economy of scale,
then and you build lots of the
same car, you can start selling them for
not that much money. If you think about
it like a car being 20000
$20000, maybe if you buy a new car, I
have no idea I never bought a car.
But like all
of the systems that go into that are
are actually quite complex and expensive,
and if you were going to prototype them
one by one, that would be prohibitive.
So I guess economy of scale is useful in.
That regard, but the way that a lot
of those things were driven forward was
in conjunction with
kind of the militarization of
the mid 20th century
and and so a lot of the techniques
that we that we developed for
manufacturing and building things
are really kind of closely tied to
militarization.
And so.
It's hard to extricate that kind
of manufacturing and design process from
from jet engines, missiles
and things like that.
So making tools to make tools
obviously dates back to the beginning of
the first war because
you make a tool to make something else
which might need to be made with
something else, right?
And the first time we
hooked up a one a tool to
a computer and with we, I mean,
mankind was
a long time ago. So this is a this is
the first CMC milling
machine, which was at
a moment in the 1950s
totally stole an idea from an independent
inventor. But whatever.
And yeah,
that really enabled going from the
precision that you would otherwise
manually require
with more traditional
tools to be able to start using
numeric readout to control things.
And and so then
making things in
an economy of scale isn't necessarily
as important anymore, because the only
way that you change how what the object
is that you're making is by changing the
code, which is relatively trivial in
comparison to having to change what
a craftsman is able to produce.
But that doesn't necessarily mean that
that's the way that we're building
things. These people are actually not
actually building things. I think they're
sorting mushrooms. This is a photo of
Andreas Gursky.
But I
I just kind of use it as a as a visual
reference point for maybe something that
we'd be interested in.
Departing from
mass production kind of often results
in a lot of artifacts and objects that
produce desires and people that they
think they want or need things.
And is it really the case that
you need to buy
what it is that is already available?
Maybe things that you need are slightly
different from things that are available
in the market.
And so obviously, you
guys like building things because
otherwise you wouldn't be at a big
hackers conference.
And so there are a lot of spaces like
this now available not just to do
code production, but to do
physical prototyping with
digital fabrication equipment.
So this is a fab lab in Iceland.
I don't know if any of you guys know
Samari, but I think memory
is from this lab and
and so you have all of this
equipment now that previously
was a that was previously kind of
affordable or unattainable.
You have 3-D printers,
small format milling machines that you
can use to do printed circuit board
production. You have, you know, vinyl
cutters. There's plenty of vinyl cutters
in the hall.
Laser cutters, large format milling
machines. So anything that you kind of
think about wanting to make right now
is a.
Yeah, it's kind of at your fingertips.
And so I'm a I'm a grad student
at MIT and for the past,
well, let's not talk about how long I've
been a grad student for the past
couple of years.
I've been teaching.
I've been teaching a class called How
to Make Almost Anything and how to make
almost anything just uses digital
fabrication tools for
students to make whatever they want.
So I don't know if you guys are familiar
with my advisor, Neil Gershenfeld, but
you wrote this book about digital
fabrication and building things.
And it turns out that a result of
making things with digital
fabrication means
that you maybe you want to make more
tools for digital fabrication.
So how to make something that makes
almost anything instead of how to make
almost anything?
So this is a friend of mine, Jonathan,
who back in 2009
made this plywood milling machine on a
larger milling machine for circuit board
production.
And I think it's about
$400 in parts and replaces
a $4000 machine
that we were using to make circuit
boards.
And this is a lawnmower also
from MIT.
And together with Max Lebowski, he built
this MTM multifaith,
which was a multipurpose machine tool.
And I don't know if you guys are familiar
with the Ultimaker a 3D printer, but
the kinematics for that printer
is inspired by
the design of this machine.
And so it's becoming easier and easier to
build these kinds of like
custom tools that you might want to use
yourself.
The Fab at home project
Adrian Bowyer and Wrap, making
it a lot easier to have 3D printers or
liquid handlers.
This was a
plastic snap together version of
Milling Machine that Jonathan developed
that you can make in
a fab lab, or a space that has a large
format milling machine
so that you can have your own circuit
board production.
And these are the the
plans for this machine.
And so the cut files, the firmware
and everything is available online
and so other people started making them.
This is David.
He made one for Budapest.
This is right.
And Tintin, they made two from Russia
and then kind of iterations of this
machine. So
this is when these are kind of two larger
format ones that we built in
Moscow, more iterations
of more milling machines in Moscow.
But there's something
kind of strange about rebuilding a
machine that has been designed for
industrial practice, right?
I don't know what your
living situation really is like, but I
have a very small apartment.
And so maybe the form of these kind of
desktop things is not quite correct.
Like having a desktop computer
versus having a portable milling machine
is a somewhat
yeah, it's kind of a
thought process that maybe that maybe we
should reconsider.
Is it important for everything to be
on your desktop like that?
So maybe a maybe.
So this was.
So I'm going to show you in a second
video of an experiment that Alan
and I did for what if the form
of digital fabrication machines
was different if they were a multipurpose
and smaller?
This has got him.
Did you?
She was plucked.
So.
Maybe from the so from the video
you remember from the beginning of this
talk where we learned about the different
parts of machine design and components,
that this is a
parallel kinematics machine.
So it has a timing belt that moves the
stage around with two motors in a kind of
an abort configuration.
There is a lead screw motor that controls
the C axis and then
there's a kinematic mount on that for the
head. So it's actually a multi-purpose
machine.
In the video, we use it as a 3D
printer, but most of
the time I actually use it to make
circuit boards because I find I need
circuit boards way more often than I need
3D printed parts.
And so it's kind of an
exploration of what if digital
fabrication were something that you can
take everywhere, use any time and
doesn't need this like huge planning
thing to happen beforehand where you
design a bunch, go to a maker space and
and use equipment there.
But for some reason, you know, we're not
we're not really quite there yet.
This is a this is.
This is in 2010
or so this is milling circuit
boards on my desk, where
I'm using a G Code interpreter, running
off an Arduino and processing sketch
on an OPEC to control the milling
of the circuit board. And for some
reason, you know, it's not the way
I constantly make boards.
Now it's still it's still
it's still not.
It's not really an enjoyable, easy
process yet. So maybe something else
isn't quite right about how we
use digital fabrication right now.
How many of you have ever used Master Cam
or HSM works or any
kind of tool passing software?
OK.
So it's really terrible.
They're probably the reason that you
never wanted to use it is because it is
awful. Also, you have to run it in
windows. And after
you calculate all of your total past,
what comes out is G
Code. So her
how many of you still
write in FORTRAN?
No one.
One person.
OK, how many of you still write and see
lots of people write OK, so decode
code is like 30 years older than
C. It's really retarded.
It's a it's a there's like
a hundred codes.
They do random things.
Each machine has to interpret g
code in a machine specific way
to be able to figure out where it's
going. So you would say I'm going
to jog G0 and then
you fill out coordinates and then it has
to move to those coordinates and you have
to write in your separate motor drivers
how that's going to happen.
It's really quite silly.
And the way that
you generally interface with these
machines is you have super advanced
file transport like a USB stick
here in my pocket.
And then you have and mills that you want
to put in your machine. That actually
makes sense because if you wanted to
machine something, you would
need at most.
But then this is the interface.
This is not this is not, you know, 20
years ago. This is a machine.
It's a very expensive, fancy milling
machine that I use these
days.
It's actually not a picture of machine
that I use, but it's the same machine.
It's a horrible,
horrible interface.
And then after you
write your tool path so you use
this annoying software
to generate a tool pass, which
you know if you spend enough time with
it. Sure, you can get proficient at it.
You can get proficient at tool passing,
3D prints or whatever.
But then what
happens is you load it into this machine
and then you just spend time watching the
machine and the machine gets to have
fun.
And so it's just kind of,
you sit there, you use a computer for a
long time and then you watch a machine.
It's something something seems like not
very. It's the way that you use
the tools just doesn't seem very
natural.
And sure, you know, tools are getting
more accessible and more
affordable, which makes them more
accessible.
So this is the M2M.
Snap grew into a company which is
now out of San Francisco and also
form one 3D printer and
slate based 3D printer,
which is relatively inexpensive,
both from people from
my previous lab.
But, you know, do we really
want to perpetuate this notion of how
we use digital fabrication equipment?
You know, and also, what about less
ordinary machines that aren't necessarily
going to make it into
the general market any time soon?
So these are four machines
that I use in my
lab on a regular basis.
On the top left is a CT
scanner, so an X-ray machine, a kilowatt
laser cutter, which you can use,
which you can use to cut metal
or for access wire idiom, which
controversially or at least I think so
has a GPS embedded into it.
Because if I move it anywhere within the
shop, then the Department
of Homeland Security wants to know
because they think that maybe I sold it
to someone who's going to make aluminum
tubes for uranium enrichment,
but that's a different story.
And and a
five axis milling machine
that you can use to cut
that's quite rigid that you can use to
cut metals like titanium.
And so what these
four machines have in common besides
besides being over 300,
well over $200000 each
is is that they
all run on Windows seven.
It's horrible.
So the way that you want to interface
it, if I wanted to do anything like with
with the CT scanner, if I wanted to move,
if I wanted to move the stage around
in a way that wasn't, that wasn't
the way that the manufacturer intended
it. If I wanted to look at, say, a gig, a
pan of a x ray instead of
instead of a rotational x ray, you know
you can't do it. There's no way that you
can script to it.
It's a it's
it's like an opaque box that you have no
control over because there's no way that
you can communicate with him.
And so what about even more
playful system? So this is the picture
I took about a month ago at MIT,
where a student was using seven axis
robot arm with a hot wire or
with her with kind of a hot end to
cut Styrofoam and to make the tool pass.
He had written this complicated rhino
script thing that took a surface and
then turned it into a tool path,
circumventing the tool passing software
that you otherwise would have to buy.
And then on the left
here you can see someone holding a
surge protector, right?
So the reason that he's holding the surge
protector is the way that he's
controlling the heat of the thing
that is cutting the Styrofoam is like
turning a surge protector off and on with
his thumb.
Because even though it would be trivial
to write that as a software widget to be
able to control the heat for the software
end, the easiest thing for them to do to
be able to insert themselves into the
system is to put a hard wire in
and turn it off and on manually.
No such seems completely
absurd to me.
So we want to have.
So instead of making more of the same
machines, what about
kind of different machines that you might
want to be making in the
hall?
That way, I think there there's a ceiling
kind of like this of tubes right
in the in the in the kind of main hall
area. And so this is a ceiling that
one of my friends made James, where
he had to install this entire ceiling in
less than a week.
And so you have to hang all of these
tubes at a precise distance
from the ceiling.
And so how are you going to how are
you going to make sure that they're all
the correct length while he made this
little machine that cuts?
That cuts strings
to the precise length that he needs.
And then they're labeled so that when he
shows up, the only thing he has to do is
take a numbered string and
hang it on the ceiling in the correct
place, and you don't have to do
any measurement on site or in place.
And so for him, it was easier to build
this kind of hacked machine
than it would be for him to
then it would be for him to to cut each
string manually.
And similarly, a line
built this 24 bit friendship loop,
which is a funny project by itself where
you can design friendship bracelets
on a on a web interface, and
then it is automatically
controlled with these coils, which
of the threads that you lift and lower
at any given point.
And so to be able to make this, he needed
a bunch of coils of a specific
resistance.
And so the easiest way for him to do that
to get those coils was to make another
machine that would win these coils.
And so, you know, if if
it becomes easier to start prototyping
machines to help make
more machines, then
maybe we would be able to have a much
bigger explosion of, you know,
automated control.
Here's a turntable that
another machines that make project
collaborative work done where,
OK, this is like not a very nice
design, right? This is just gestural.
I need a thing that does a thing.
I need a turntable.
And the only reason he wanted this
turntable was so that the
3D display that he was working on
could be photographed very stably
in this time lapse.
So it's yeah, he makes 3D
displays are pretty cool.
So how can we make all of these kind
of processes easier if you wanted
to automate anything?
Like do you really want to go through
the stress of engineering a different
system and repurposing it to
what it is that you want to be making?
So this is kind of how I
break down our machine
control systems.
You have at the top of this pyramid
a tool head and the tool head is
controlled by some mechanical system,
which is controlled by some motors, maybe
some sensors that position the motors
and they have a control system.
So some kind of hardware,
some kind of hardware layer that actually
sends pulses to the motors.
And those things are in turn controlled
by applications and interfaces, which
could be software.
They could be some other kind of
interface.
And so if this is how we break down all
of those different systems, a lot of
those things are
relatively straightforward.
But the control system, like writing
applications and software, is relatively
easy in comparison to prototyping a
control system.
And so if making the control system is
kind of the bottleneck or at least what I
saw was the bottlenecks and what
can we do to address making that kind
of prototyping easier?
So this is an article that
my advisor Neil wrote back in 2004,
together with Danny Cohen, Danny Cohen,
the guy that said variable length
namespace addressing, then we wouldn't
have this whole IPv4 IPv6 problem
anyway.
The The
Internet of Things, the notion that
everything is going to be networked in
the future, assuming that we have enough
space for it, and that you should be able
to communicate with each node
individually.
And so something that I thought was an
interesting thing to play with.
So this is a a router
that I hacked a long time ago.
It has a useful linksys routers
that had a serial port that you could
communicate with so that you could add a
little bridge so that
Mega 168
implements a serial,
a slip protocol so that you can have
lymph nodes hanging off this router
that are addressable
from the internet.
So there's this notion of like networked
lymph nodes or machine components
kind of informed the way
that I was going to think about making
machines and also
sometimes at work, I have to work on
things that are
that make money for our research group.
So this was a a big control system
for curing carbon fiber airplane wings,
and each node has
temperature sensing and heating in
it. And so that was another kind
of machine network
that I built to
be able to communicate over this whole
hardware layer where instead of having
IPv6 addresses because it turns out,
no one supports that.
It has a it has that kind
of address is identity
is is
where it is in the network.
And so I decided that this was going to
be the way that I should also talk to
the machines. So this is
kind of the the first control system
I built for it, a bus network.
So each motor
on this network has an identity
x, y z
and and and you can address them
individually by calling functions on them
so you don't have a G Code
interpreter with that recompile of
whatever it is that you wanted to do and
change that into motor
commands you you can write
a you can write as
your own script that calls function
specifically on each motor on the
network instead of having to go
through this state space.
And so it's
grown since then.
And so the library is now called PI
gushed out. And the way that you
can, the way that you can interface with
it is you just you write a virtual
machine had an argument with my friend
Marco about this yesterday, where he said
the only reason that you call it a
virtual machine is because you
think that software is all virtual
and that real stuff is real.
So maybe it should just be called a
machine. Not a virtual machine.
Anyway, that was confusing digression.
Sorry, the but the
way that you you would initialize it is
for each other.
For each node you say, OK, I'm going to
initialize an x A6 node.
My x axis is a lead screw
has this pitch.
It has this way of communicating with it.
It has parallel kinematics with this
other node. So when you call functions on
it, you have to call functions on both at
the same time.
And and that's all.
It's all you have to write.
You don't have to write a whole G Code
interpretation layer. So if Travis
had used this, he wouldn't
have to have, like complicated.
We measured how his timing
belt gearing ratios interface with each.
There and then write software that took
that into account.
It would have just done that for him
and built into the
library is a way that you
can add other kind of more legacy
notes. So say you couldn't control.
So you've got something out of the trash
and you couldn't necessarily control it
with your.
You couldn't necessarily control it with
the piker style.
No library.
You can still import other
virtual nodes into the network.
So this terrible photo,
I'm sorry about it, but this is
a gel printer that
I made with a line
for Jennifer Lewis, professor at Harvard,
who does functional ink printing.
And so it's kind of a it's a pressure box
in the pressure box can like
shoot out amounts of Goop and
you can send it serial commands to
tell it how much group to shoot out at
any given point.
And so that box, with its legacy
RSU 32 interface, just became another
node on the network that we're able to
integrate into the rest of the control
system. So you don't have to write
something on top of another controller
that then allows everything to interface
with each other.
So we made another liquid handling
device. It turns out that biologists
spend a huge amount of money on machines
that are not technically
very complicated, like moving a little
bit of liquid from one well, well, plate
into another. Well, plate you can.
You can sell biologist's machines for
hundreds of thousands of dollars.
I don't really understand the economics
of that, but this was a collaboration
with Scott and myself
from Caltech and will from my lab, where
in two days,
two days, three days we
built a microliter
pipetting machine using the same control
system and interface.
And so not to
just show you machine examples,
you now no longer are
necessarily confined to the interfaces
that the manufacturers
give you. So this is a this is a web
based interface which combines both a
tutorial for how to mill a PCB with
a small format milling machine and
the control system for it so that there's
like a server running that talks to both
your machine and your input,
generates towpath files and sends them
to your machine online.
And so this is a this is a one
of the one of the hardware layer nodes
that.
That controls each one of these axes,
so it's a it's
at mega 328 P based, which
means that you can also program it
through the Arduino interface should you
feel so inclined.
And it has a stepper motor, has a stepper
motor controller on board so you can use
that to control different stepper motors
conveniently has a NEMA 17
hold pattern. So if you wanted to attach
it to any new MY17 stepper motor,
that would be relatively straightforward.
And so the way that you
can do the control system layer
for any of these machines is you just
add more nodes to
a network and then you talk
to it over a computer.
So instead of having a
monolithic control system,
you have a virtual machine network.
So control systems.
I guess not super exciting to everyone.
So can we make
the rest over?
Can we make the rest of the machines
more modular as well?
Can can the rest of the
can the mechanical part and
maybe the software part also be more
modular? So if we think back to
the brief introduction to machine design
from earlier,
like what is it that you might want to be
able to do? You might want to move only
in one axis, maybe in two axis,
you want two degrees of freedom or a
three.
And so we decided to build these.
We decided to build these kind of one
one degree of freedom
stages where you
just move one thing back and forth
and you can communicate with that over
now where you might want to add a head to
that. So maybe you just want something
that displays a message back and forth,
or maybe you want
two degrees of freedom, so you move
to things back and forth and
you could add a head to this.
Or maybe you want a
maybe you want to move in this direction.
So like, say, with this machine,
you could put a pen on that
platform that moves up and down, slide
it up against the wall and then draw
on the wall.
Or if you need three axes.
It turns out that most of the time people
want to do things in the space
as well. So if you wanted three axes or
you could start thinking about the ways
that you could change chain these kinds
of machines together. So this is a four
axis for axis control.
So you're moving something like this
and like this. So maybe you you can
move things in this direction.
So the wire EDM,
they showed you a while back that has
four axis machine control so that you can
cut metal
and like a square on one side and a
circle in another.
And so this was a mockup that we did
for a hot wirecutter
of four axis hot wire cutters.
So if we wanted to make air foils
for UAV or things like that,
we could.
We couldn't make it with a machine like
that. So we started prototyping this
kind of modular machine network.
So this is the first version that we
made in Moscow
in October, and then this is another
another version. So these are all made
with HDP.
So I'm I guess I kind
of glossed over it. But the MTM snap
is made with HDP that is snap
fit together, which makes it easier to
prototype mechanical systems
because you don't necessarily need as
many fasteners.
And you can build error correction into
the way the plastic snap
together. And so these were
these were built kind of with the same
premise that you're using plastics,
but turns out HDP is pretty heavy.
If you want to have the amount of
stiffness that you might require for this
kind of machine, so then the
the latest the latest
version that we made of it is
made out of bent sheet metal.
So this is anodized
aluminum with
so you can see serial
serial kinematics, system lead screw
based guide shafts,
bent aluminum bent
aluminum frame
so that you can rapidly prototype
whatever kind of machine you want.
So here is a
last month we
built the hotwired cutter
that we thought about before.
Here's a video of that
that and machines and the sample that
mapping machines ensure that my
actions and the sample that
mathematicians enjoy, that my
emotions and unsayable got mathematicians
and that
my intentions on the table got
mathematicians, machines and so that my
ass.
So that took us
twenty two hours to build from.
No, like we had sheet metal stock
and motors.
And I had to solder the whole control
system and I actually did go to sleep,
so it wasn't like I stayed up for twenty
two hours.
And so it kind of brings us to
this possibility of if you want to
rapidly prototype rapid prototyping
machines, these are all kind of
modules and parts that
I've been working on to try to make that
easier.
So obviously, it wouldn't mean anything
to you unless you could use any of it to
MTM machines that make that
CBA center for bits, atoms that give you
all of the firmware, all of the files,
all of the control system
for designs and layouts are all available
there. If you felt like making any of
them. And so yeah, that
that's all I wanted to show you.
I wanted to thank Fabian
for inviting me here and
the kids computer club.
And that's all.
Thank you very much.
We have 10 minutes for question and
answer if any
questions, please go to the
microphone and then we can start.
No questions.
It's because it's very early, I
understand
it was a very good presentation, so there
are no open questions.
OK, good.
Oh, that's one micro
three.
Hi. I notice you use a lot of.
Numeric control machines to actually make
the machines if you make.
Have you ever actually made anything out
of.
Raw materials without any
gourmet control machines,
they can't all something.
Oh yeah, absolutely.
So the.
So sorry.
And what's the time difference
between if you ever done
something with both?
Well, well, it's a machine
like, you know, machine will and with
handles.
Right, right? Well, so I
I guess it kind of depends where in
the prototyping process
we are. So the the
pop fab, the suitcase fabrication
machine, the first the first
prototype that we made for that we
actually cut out a foam core.
So we just cut it by hand to just kind of
figure out what the what the system was
going to look like and how it might fit
in a suitcase and how it might fold.
And so that was entirely done by
hand. But then once
once you, you know,
once you want to start building the rest
of it, it
it kind of gets prohibitive to
try to achieve that level of precision
with hand tools.
It's definitely possible.
But my
my skill set is much
more attuned to writing code
that than is executed on a machine
than necessarily making sure that I'm
getting a piece of metal within one
thousandth of an inch,
which is kind of required if you want to
be able to move those systems
precisely in that way.
So I would say that it's definitely
everything that you can do with
numerically controlled machine tools you
can do by hand.
There's nothing.
There's nothing that stopping you from
doing it, just it just might take a lot
longer.
And so since they have all these toys, I
might as well use them to flesh.
Thanks.
There's no question
yeah, we we saw very nice
movements of transit systems,
but do you have any rotation
systems? I know it's trivial, but
rotation based systems?
Yeah, I've built rotation based
systems before.
It works fine with the library.
You just you just import a different
kinematic model for it.
And so like, there are certain things
that are much better are much better
to do rotational. So at some point we
had this, we had this idea that we could
cut records.
And so we wanted to do a rotational
system with like an amplifier with a
needle to scratch.
And then we were like, What are we doing
this stupid stuff?
But yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, any any kinematic model that you
want, you should be able to use
like the fact that things are control
constrained into a linear systems,
just kind of an arbitrary artifact of how
we design things. And if you want to
design things differently, then
by all means definitely do that.
OK, thank you.
I call one.
So in the.
And if it is, it seemed like the
the passing was all pretty pre-scripted.
Is there any and that's what you
mentioned also to automate the passing
and maybe, yeah, in generic
way building something.
So so for, for example, the
hot Wirecutter, the way that we were
doing that was
James would design something in Rhino
and then I would just export things from.
So he would he would kind of design
different shapes in rhino using
grasshopper and change kind of the
dimensions of different parts.
And I would import that directly into
the control system.
So.
So it's not like you have any like
real time control, although
in that case, because you're designing
something that then is being executed by
the machine. But if you wanted it to be
like a pentagram or some kind of
amplification, you could just use that
as an input to the machine.
There's nothing, there's nothing that's
stopping you from doing that.
The the latency that the network has
is is really.
Negligible comparison to how much
time it would take you two to do any kind
of real time control for it, so.
Yeah.
I'm sorry.
I think
that wasn't quite my question.
Oh, sorry. If you do more complicated
shapes.
Oh yeah, absolutely.
So for modified generating
a machine to a path?
I mean, if you plug in a machine which
looks different than the last machine?
Yeah, absolutely.
So one thing
that I didn't show that we've been
working on is a kind of a generic
machine to control
interface. It's called Code Copy.
You can download it from code convict
creator, imitate you and then as a
as input files to kind of keep everything
super generic.
It takes pages, so
a peg is a bitmap.
But if you have an extremely high
resolution tag, you can kind of
take the vector path from there
from the edges and use that as
the way that you can script your tool
path. So it generates a generic
kind of path description, which
then you can feed into the move commands
of your machine.
And if you wanted to do three access
things, you can
do it with great skill pages
where the grayscale corresponds to the
height layer.
And so we have
it has it you can
control. So the the
gastelu controlled MTM
snack machine you can control from code
copy, but it can also control a lot
of kind of legacy machines like an
epilog laser cutter has
the tool path.
It has the file format for that built in.
So if you wanted to make an arbitrary
shape with a black and white peg and
then send it to an epilog laser cutter,
you could, which is actually a really
annoying thing to add.
Because did you know that the engineers
for epilog add 10000 spaces
at the end of their line at the end of
their files to do file handling well?
Yeah.
Thank you, Michael.
Three
questions regarding the machines
building machines.
How does the accuracy keep up?
I mean, you showed a big machine building
a small machine.
Right, right. OK, so that actually
is not
really. So it's something that
that seems logical that if you would make
a big machine that has a certain kind of
inaccuracy, then then if you made a
machine with it, it would become more and
more inaccurate.
But actually, that's that's not
actually the case because depending on
how you design the machine, the
way that the machine fits together
doesn't have to include the inaccuracies
from the previous machine.
So if you look at the the snap blot
connection of the MTM Snap, it's like a
it's like a buckle system, the same as
you would have like on a on a backpack
or if you had like a strap that clicked
close. And so you have different
opposing forces that elastic average
to make it more precise.
So the more of those you kind of build
into the system, you can make something
arbitrarily precise depending
on how you engineer the system.
So even if you had if you if you had
something else as a
if you imagine like a child that's
building something out of Legos like
Legos have micron precision, right?
A child does not have micron precision.
So the fact that you can place the brick
on top of another brick means that you
can engineer precision into the system
without necessarily having to have
precision in the thing that built it.
Second, last question from two.
Hello.
I've got a question regarding
the compatibility of
Pakistan with current
workflow models of 3D
printing, for example.
Yeah.
So if we use Slicer to generate
our G Code nowadays,
how does it, how compatible
is it? I mean,
G Code is just a bunch of coordinates,
right? So you can just write an
interpreter that will take your code and
write and then stream it as more
functions. So I would assume I've
not written it, but I think it would be
like five lines of code.
So using the transition from a
decode based workflow to Pakistan,
it should be a trivial,
effortless yet trivial.
OK. Thanks.
Last question from three.
Yes. So I checked out the website of
Pakistan, and it says that it will be
published open source.
And yeah, it's 2013,
but. Hmm.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's that's that's a little bit
of a problem, but it's on GitHub.
If you go to the MTM website instead of
the Pakistan website, there should be a
link to the GitHub.
All right. Thank you.
Sorry about that.
I'll fix. Thank you very much.
APPLAUSE.