![]() We’ve paid into the community by submitting our designs, and we get payment back in the form of excellent feedback and free access to other peoples work. Not only does it provide top-notch designs for all manner of objects, it can bring thousands of expert minds to bear on a problem, Pearce said. Thingiverse is a child of the free and open-source software movement, or FOSS. “We made a simple change, and now I have a lab jack that’s superior to our original design.” “Immediately someone I’d never met said, ‘This isn’t going to work quite right, you need to do this,’” Pearce said. Then they posted the OpenSCAD code they used to make the lab jack on Thingiverse, a web repository of designs where members of the “maker community” can submit their designs for all kinds of objects and receive feedback. Using a RepRap, inexpensive plastic filament and a few nuts and bolts, Pearce and his students made one for under a buck. Pearce received a quote for a thousand-dollar version, which inspired him to design his own. Lab jacks raise and lower optical equipment and aren’t radically different from the jacks that raise and lower your car, except that they are more precise. The Arduino controls the process, telling the printer to make anything from toy trains to a lab jack. This allows users to make devices to their own specifications, so they don’t have to make due with what’s available off the shelf. Michigan Technological UniversityģD printers make stuff by laying down sub-millimeter-thick layers of plastic one after another in a specific pattern. The machine is made up of parts from any hardware store, open-source electronics and parts that it can make for itself-all the red, white and blue components. Joshua Pearce with a Mendel RepRap 3D printer. ![]() Once you have one RepRap, you can make an entire flock. This microwave-sized contraption starts at about $500 and can actually make parts for itself. But it really shines when it operates 3D printers like the open-source RepRap. The Arduino-which retails for about $35 at RadioShack- can run any number of scientific instruments, among them a Geiger counter, an oscilloscope and a DNA sequencer. “It makes it so simple to automate processes.” “The beauty of this tool is that it’s very easy to learn,” said Pearce, an associate professor at Michigan Technological University. The open-source Arduino microcontroller is key. With these tools, researchers from all over the world are driving down the cost of doing science by making their own lab equipment. 13 issue of Science: software, 3D printers and microcontrollers. Three converging forces, all open source, are behind this sea change, he explains in an article in the Sept. It’s spawning a revolution, says Joshua Pearce. September 14, 2012-The DIY movement has vaulted from the home to the research lab, and it’s driven by the same motives: saving tons of money and getting precisely what you want.
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