[p2p-research] How low-cost, open-source tools are energizing DIY.

[Michel Bauwens]

Bryan Bishop <kanzure at gmail.com> May 21 11:52AM -0500 ^


Make-offs: DIY indie innovations: How low-cost, open-source tools are
energizing DIY.
http://radar.oreilly.com/2010/05/make-offs-diy-indie-innovation.html

"""
by Dale Dougherty | @dalepd | comments: 1

DIY, or Do-It-Yourself, is not something that everyone thinks they can
do but more people are doing it than you might think.

The DIY movement in science and technology is demonstrating that it
can do inexpensively what large companies and even Big Science have
spent millions doing. I call them "make-offs," low-budget knock-offs
of scientific and industrial technology built with off-the-shelf
components. It is a version of what China has been doing to America,
benefiting from the R&D that goes into refining the specifications,
developing prototypes and building a finished product. Only now, with
new digital fabrication techniques and open source hardware and
software, individuals and small companies are in a position to compete
globally with a distinctly DIY approach to innovation. It's a new
independent source of creative work, similar to what indie films are
to Hollywood films developed in-house. It's open, collaborative and
done on the cheap. And almost anyone can play, as you can see this
weekend at the 5th Annual Maker Faire Bay Area.

In Mountain View, Calif. last September, Greg Klein, who was about to
go off to college, designed and built a high-altitude space balloon
with two other students. Like a lot of Silicon Valley startups, the
idea was first sketched out on a napkin. Named Apteryx, the balloon
was launched with a 4-lb. payload consisting of sensors, an
open-source microcontroller called Arduino and consumer-grade cameras.
After about five hours, the balloon had reach 90,000 feet, which is
considered near-space. The team used an amateur radio to send
telemetry data and later tried using a prepaid cellphone as a tracking
device. They were successful in locating the payload when it returned
to earth. The bill for the project's materials was about $800, a bit
high for college students but a lot less than you might expect for
something so amazing.

Here's a picture taken from Apteryx of the Monterey Bay, which shows
the curvature of the earth.

monterey-bay-from-space

The team's website, hibal.org, shares the results of their mission.
The students are not that unusual, although it's not what every
student is doing at winter or summer break. Yet, they are showing us
what it is possible to do.

This spring, the Spacebridge project, organized at a San Francisco
hackerspace called Noisebridge, succeeded in their third attempt to
launch a high-altitude balloon. Even before them, NYC Resistor, a
hackerspace in Brooklyn, launched a high-altitude balloon as well.
(Hackerspaces, which are sprouting up around the country and around
the world, are shared workspaces where hackers and makers come
together to share tools, knowledge and community.) NASA is beginning
to look to DIY communities to participate in the development of
"SmallSats," which use available components like smart phones and
legos, making it possible to build satellites for close to $1,000.

The NYC Resistor hackerspace gave birth to Makerbot Industries, a
company that produces a 3D printer kit called MakerBot that sells for
under $1,000. Featured on the cover of Make Magazine (Volume #21), Bre
Pettis and his team used open-source software, the Arduino
microcontroller and digital fabrication techniques to create a
low-cost competitor to high-end 3D printers that sell at $20,000 and
above. Makerbot won't necessarily displace its more established
competitors; it's not as fast nor the same quality. However, Makerbot
will expand the market for 3D printers, making them affordable to
small businesses and home hobbyists. As a consequence, Makerbot will
help accelerate the growth of a 3D printer community that is open to
anyone. The Thingiverse website, also developed by Bre Pettis, is a
shared collection of designs that can be used to create objects on any
3D printer. With more people playing with 3D printers, new expertise
and new ideas will develop.

Two University of Michigan postdoc students, one with a background in
electrical engineering and the other in neurophysiology, formed a
company called Backyard Brains to develop the SpikerBox, a kit that
"provides a great way to learn about how the brain works by letting
you hear and even see the electrical impulses of neurons!" They call
it DIY Neuroscience. At a demo of the Spikerbox, Timothy Marzullo, one
of the two co-founders, detached a discoid cockroach's leg and placed
two electrodes on it. The electrodes picked up the flow of electrical
impulses and sent the signal through a speaker, which made a
scratching, popcorn sound. He showed me the neural “spikes,” or action
potentials, as waves on an iPhone running an oscilloscope app.
Marzullo told me that the demonstration I saw was something that he
had not seen until he was allowed to use a $20,000 machine in the lab
in his first year of graduate school in neurophysiology. The Spikerbox
kit, which is open-source and uses four chips from the 70’s, sells for
just under $100 from their website backyardbrains.com, making it
affordable for high school labs and amateur scientists. What happens
when you can do real science instead of just reading about it in
school?

Tito Jankowski is one of the organizers of the DIY Bio community and
he's trying to make the field of biotechnology accessible to amateurs
as well. He thinks anyone should be able to look at their DNA. You can
start by swabbing saliva from inside your mouth and then look at it in
a small, home-based lab. His small San Francisco-based company, Pearl
Biotech, is starting to develop some of the equipment you'd need. The
Pearl Gel Box, a gel electrophoresis system, is based on an
open-source hardware design, like many of these projects, which means
that the specifications are open and shared publicly. Anyone could use
these specifications to build their own version of this equipment and
customize it for a specific application. Or you can buy the Pearl Gel
box in versions from $189 to $500, depending on how much assembly
you're willing to do yourself. Commercial versions cost more than
$1,000 but most importantly, their producers don't expect anyone but
scientists or technicians to be using them.

Who would have thought that there were people like Eri Gentry anxious
to join the DIY Bio community? Admittedly, she has no formal training
as a scientist, having studied economics at college. When a friend of
hers died of cancer, she became determined to participate in cancer
research. She discovered how much she enjoyed doing the work so she
built a low-cost biotech lab in her garage. Knowing that there's only
so much that she could do herself, she organized meetups and connected
with others who were doing similar work around the world. A person she
met online came from Ecuador to stay and work several weeks in her
lab. She seeks to create a biotech hackerspace in the Bay Area called
BioCurious where "professional scientists and the merely curious" can
collaborate. Who would have thought it was even possible to do biotech
in a garage, let alone that others were interested in doing the same
thing?

Andrew Archer, who grew up in Duluth, Minn., was unhappy and
unchallenged in high school, but his mother noticed how he would bring
things home from yard sales and go into the garage and take them
apart. She encouraged him to participate in robotics programs outside
of school and he found something he loved -- building robots that
could do complex tasks. His experience solving challenges for robotics
competitions led him to start a robotics company when he was 17.
Today, Andrew is 22 and Robotics-Redefined is building customized
robots using off-the-shelf components to transport inventory on
factory floors. Last year, he moved to Detroit because he had begun
selling his robots to the auto companies. In Detroit, he found hackers
who were interested in helping him build robots. He began training
hackers himself to do what he needed. At a demonstration, I saw his
autonomous orange robot move around a test track and approach a heavy
item, pick it up and relocate it. Archer told me his robot was a more
sophisticated version of a Lego Mindstorms robot.

One of the upgrades is a vision system using a webcam to detect if
people are in the path of the robot. If the robot is bumped or pushed
off its path, it can reorient itself and get back on track. It could
also communicate with other robots doing the same work. All the while
the robot was busy, it played a chiptune from one of Andrew's favorite
Nintendo-64 games. This industrial robot was a serious piece of work,
built for a harsh environment, but its goofy 8-bit music showed that a
really geeky kid was its maker.

As Andrew and other young makers become more familiar with the
equipment used in industry and science, they will see new
opportunities to build "knock-offs" using cheaper, reusable components
that are open and adaptable to customization. We shouldn't consider
them "knock-offs" as we talk about what's produced in China. As
"make-offs," they stand-out as examples of creative DIY innovation and
collaboration. Make-offs are open platforms for doing new things,
enabling more people to participate and develop the expertise to solve
new and more challenging problems together.

Maker Faire Bay Area opens Saturday and runs through Sunday (May
22-23) at the San Mateo Expo Center. Meet makers young and old, talk
with the hackers from Noisebridge and NYC Resistor and see
demonstrations from the balloonists at Hibal.org, Bre Pettis at
Makerbot Industries, Tito Jankowski of Pearl Biotech and Eri Gentry of
Biocurious.org. You'll find more than a thousand makers who possess
the wherewithal for doing amazing things. While it's fun being a part
of Maker Faire, you'll find yourself inspired by the creativity,
intelligence and conviction of your fellow makers.
"""

- Bryan
http://heybryan.org/
1 512 203 0507

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