The Filabot brings a miniature recycling plant to your desktop, grinding down everyday plastic waste and transforming it into ready-to-use material for your 3d printing. Water pipes, drink bottles, plastic wrappers and Lego bricks can be fed into the machine which grinds, melts and extrudes the plastic into a filament of either 3mm or 1.75mm diameters. It can also melt down unused 3D prints, allowing for increased experimentation..
Filabot brings affordability and sustainability to 3D-printing. The debut model is still under development and no official price has been announced. The company will launch a range of machines, at different levels of completion. Users can adapt and develop their own kit – from the Filabot Core (which comes without a grinder), to the open-source Filabot Wee, which users can build from downloadable plans.
The home-manufacturing revolution is well under way. And, thanks to an invention by American college student Tyler McNaney, it’s affordable.
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 Consider the First Source!

When we align our objectives with the Divine will, when we strive for the attainment of a worthy goal, when we begin our work with a well defined plan, and when we have ability to work together with others effectively, we have already achieved the trajectory for success. For we know that “all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.”

Learn how to enjoy boundless opportunity and unlimited progress!

Need a new knocker for the front door? Select a design and push the print button. How about that fork that got damaged in the garbage disposal? Scan one of the remaining ones and print a replacement. Printing 3d objects at home is now possible although the choices of material are somewhat limited.
Soon, very soon, new picture frames, eating utensils, a replacement piano leg for the one the dog chewed up, that weird looking fastener that was missing from the new bookshelf kit, bookends, crown molding, coat hangers, phone chargers, earrings, Toynbee convectors, and flux capacitors will be had by giving a voice command to a StarTrek like replicator.
A new era of Consumer Sovereignty will come to light as additive layer manufacturing technology allows us to bypass those inconvenient economies of scale. Instead of having to purchase a pound of drywall screws, we can just buy one.
Big companies have already bought in to the technology. They envision a future where Home Depot and Kinkos-style shops fill local needs while online markets focus on larger projects and more intense customization. Amazon is planning to install commercial printers in all of its U.S. factories and Staples is rolling out 3D equipment in its European stores.
Thanks, in part, to a variety of open source projects, the Home Depot and Staples models aren’t likely to be as popular as home printing in the long run. Why? Because the mother-may-I product chain is just too bloated and unpleasant. Even today, an item priced at less than four dollars doesn’t justify supermarket shelf space. A service bureau experience marked by overpricing, long lines, outmoded software, outdated hardware, poorly trained staff, and sluggish execution times is seen by most as something to be avoided.
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Forget your smartphone, shelve the tablet, and clear your desktop for something useful. Those great looking sunglasses may be your key to Cognitive Demand. It’s not enough for Google, Microsoft, and others to be in your face. They want to be on your face!
Microsoft plans to deliver “augmented reality” – where data and illustrations overlay the actual world around you. Google Glass presently features a tiny screen you see by looking up and to the left. Is this just an ear dongle for the eye, or is it something more? The apps makers will provide the answers.
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Coffman High School teacher, Jim Roscoe, with the help of students, built a 3D printer last spring and is now turning out plastic items that can be used in a number of scenarios. The machine melts plastic from a spool to make 3D items.
“All the information for this is open source,” Roscoe said. “The parts for the machine were made on a machine just like this. Now we can make another one.” The electronics and machines for the printer had to be purchased, but Roscoe said about $600 went into the machine that usually sells starting at $1,500.
The printer took about a month to put together plus some time to calibrate. The machine has been used to make parts for the Dublin FIRST Tech Challenge robotics team that Roscoe coaches. It also has other applications around the school. “We’re going to partner with the school store to make things,” Roscoe said, showing off small Coffman Rocks plastic figurines. “I have a product design class that will work on that.”
“We’re thinking up many uses.” Roscoe said, “We print something every day. This will have applications in math, science and physics. There are shapes you can make with it that you really can’t make in another way. You can make very complicated shapes.”
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Make the stove and the insulating bricks.

Arduino project for catching my cats on the kitchen counter, while they’re up there doing food intelligence work 🙂

Arduino nano in iPod Touch box. Switch arms toy gun, Knob controls trigger distance. Opto-isolators fire toy gun.

Maxbotic ultrasonic rangefinder senses distance and determines if sonar field has been interrupted ( by cat). The gun just makes a silly little ‘p-tang’ sound and flashes a red LED in it’s barrel. The cats seem to completely ignore this 🙂

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The Open Source Robotics Foundation, Inc. is an independent non-profit organization founded by members of the global robotics community. The mission of the OSR Foundation is to support the development, distribution, and adoption of open source software for use in robotics research, education, and product development.
One major project is ROS (Robot Operating System) which provides libraries and tools to help software developers create robot applications. It provides hardware abstraction, device drivers, libraries, visualizers, message-passing, package management, and more. ROS is licensed under an open source, BSD license.
This video shows a robotic arm driven by the ROS software and operating as a picker/placer.

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A Michigan man moves massive blocks in his backyard using simple contraptions.
Visit W. T. Wallington’s website at: http://www.theforgottentechnology.com/

Flying robot quadrotors perform the James Bond Theme by playing various instruments including the keyboard, drums and maracas, a cymbal, and the debut of an adapted guitar built from a couch frame. The quadrotors play this “couch guitar” by flying over guitar strings stretched across a couch frame; plucking the strings with a stiff wire attached to the base of the quadrotor. A special microphone attached to the frame records the notes made by the “couch guitar”.
These flying quadrotors are completely autonomous, meaning humans are not controlling them; rather they are controlled by a computer programed with instructions to play the instruments.
Penn’s School of Engineering and Applied Science is home to some of the most innovative robotics research on the planet, much of it coming out of the General Robotics, Automation, Sensing and Perception (GRASP) Lab.
This video premiered at the TED2012 Conference in Long Beach, California on February 29, 2012. Deputy Dean for Education and GRASP lab member Vijay Kumar presented some of this groundbreaking work at the TED2012 conference, an international gathering of people and ideas from technology, entertainment, and design.
The engineers from Penn, Daniel Mellinger and Alex Kushleyev, have formed a company called KMel Robotics that will design and market these quadrotors.
More information: http://www.upenn.edu/spotlights/penn-quadrotors-ted
Video Produced and Directed by Kurtis Sensenig
Quadrotors and Instruments by Daniel Mellinger, Alex Kushleyev and Vijay Kumar

There is a short-sighted methodology for calculating the Internal Rate of Return (IRR) on an investment. It causes some investors to focus on smaller and smaller wins. If something doesn’t pay off for years, the IRR is so unattractive that the addled investor will focus capital on shorter and shorter term wins.
The other myopic view is called RONA. It is the rate of return on net assets. It sometimes causes companies to reduce the denominator through a reduction of assets. The “thinking” is: The fewer the assets, the higher the RONA.
Profitability is often measured by these ratios. The financial services industry has sought to simplify its practices through describing profitability by a ratio so that it can be compared across different industries. It effectively ‘neutralizes’ the measures so that they may be applied across sectors to every firm.

“You Americans measure profitability by a ratio. There’s a problem with that. No banks accept deposits denominated in ratios. The way we measure profitability is in ‘tons of money’. You use the return on assets ratio if cash is scarce. But if there is actually a lot of cash, then that is causing you to economize on something that is abundant.” — Morris Chang (Chairman and Founder of TSM)

The calculation of the IRR and RONA, based on a narrow view of costs and benefits, discounts long-term implications that include:

• The cost of the knowledge that is being lost, possibly forever.
• The cost of being unable to innovate in future, because critical knowledge has been lost.
• The consequent cost of  business being captured by emerging competitors that can make a better product at lower cost.
• The missed opportunity of profits that could be made from innovations based on knowledge that was given away.

Aevia — Consider the Source