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Maker Business – I Heart Robotics

Plastic

In the spirit of my “Maker Business” posts (like The Real Costs and Lessons Learned) I’d like to point you at this post from I Heart Robotics titled Business Plan: 3D manufacturing. If you haven’t read it, go read it. Then come back here. I’ll wait.

Are you back? Good! Let’s go…

This is my favorite post of the week… and it’s only Thursday! For anyone wanting to get into a maker-related business, it’s a must-read.

The funny thing is, I’d seen one of these TriK Tripod Adapters for the Kinect before, because Mike printed it at Milwaukee Makerspace one day. (You could say I have an interest in various camera related mounting technology.) Yeah, that’s right, they guys who were selling this item also gave away the design for free to anyone who wanted it. Insane you say? The world I want to live in, I say…

This is an area I see open source hardware similar to open source software. Once a problem is solved, why not share the solution with everyone else, for free? You’re welcome to sell the software (or hardware) all you like, and letting other use it for their own use is a great side effect that costs you nothing. (Some could argue it costs you in potential revenue, but I won’t argue that right now.) It’s also worth noting that I Heart Robotics licenses the item with an Attribution – Non-Commercial – Share Alike license. For those unfamiliar with Creative Commons, a simple explanation would be that as long as you don’t make money by selling it, you can go nuts and make (and give away) as many of them as your 3D Printer can make.

This breakdown of costs is also worth studying.

TriK Tripod Adapter Costs 

 $0.384     8 grams Raw ABS Plastic
 $0.0182    1/4-20 Nut
 $0.222     Qty 4 Plastic thread forming screws 
 $0.124     2 x 1 1⁄4 x 3" Kraft Reverse Tuck Carton
 $0.015     2 x 2" White Laser Label
 $0.044     3 x 5" 2 Mil White Block Reclosable Poly Bag
~$3.75      NRE - Non-Reoccuring Engineering Costs
~$0.50      Labor - Push button, remove part, repeat
~$8.34      Printer operating cost

Total Cost $13.40/part

What can we learn from these numbers? Plenty! Some of these items are things you don’t really think about, like labor or equipment operating costs. For instance, I use a drill press in my basement to manufacture things. I don’t really add in the cost to run it for a few minutes per unit, but maybe I should. I also run a fan in my spray booth, and that uses electricity. The numbers might be negligible, but they do exist. (Oh, we also learn that Uline is awesome.) Update! Uline sucks. They helped fund an insurrection. I stopped using them years ago. See Also: refuseuline.com

Since I’ve been dealing with numbers like these in the past few months I’ve become a little more aware of people who complain about such things. I can see someone who owns their own 3D Printer saying “They want $20 for that!? It’s like 5 cents worth of plastic!” and while it may be just 5 cents worth of plastic (or less) there’s a lot of other costs involved. If you have the power to make one on your own, go for it! Either design one and make it, or in this case, download it and print it. I’ve learned that even if you carefully outline exactly how to do something and publish it on the Internet, there are still people who will (gladly) just pay you to do it all for them and then ship it to them, and for that I am grateful.

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iPhone Tripod Mount

iPhone Tripod Mount

Since the camera on the iPhone 4S is so good, more than one person has thought about mounting the iPhone on a tripod.

In fact, some guys did a Kickstarter campaign and got over $137,417 for the idea! And a bunch of other people designed things you could make on your 3D Printer to do the job.

The Glif

The problem with the Glif and most of these other phone holders is that they are designed to work with an uncased iPhone, and I tend to leave mine in the case all the time. I use an OtterBox case (It’s this one.) It’s grippy and rubbery, and since I wanted a tripod mount that would work with the case, I made my own. (Here’s a post that mentions an early version.)

iPhone Tripod Mount

This mount would probably work with almost any phone that uses a rubbery case, since it uses the grip of the rubber to its advantage to stay in place. You just gently tighten the wing nuts to hold the phone in place. There are nuts under the top piece of wood to prevent you from over-tightening.

iPhone Tripod Mount

Yeah, it’s basically two pieces of wood, two bolts, a few washers, nuts, and wing nuts. I may consider printing some knobs like I did here to replace the wing nuts. (And yeah, you’ll notice it’s the same screw method I used for my DIY Mouthpiece Puller.)

iPhone Tripod Mount

The bottom piece of wood has two small pilot holes to accommodate the two buttons on the side of the iPhone, so the buttons do not get depressed when in the mount.

iPhone Tripod Mount

The other tricky thing is how I mount the tripod plate to the bottom. I ended up getting a nut coupler, and then drilling a hole into the bottom piece of wood, and pretty much hammering in the nut coupler. It was too long so I had to hack saw it off to be flush with the bottom. Not pretty, but it does work.

Now that I’ve got this done, I should probably go back and do those test shots comparing the iPhone 4S camera to other cameras. :)

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Hot Shoe Audio Mount

Since I’ve got the RepRap I can start on some projects I’ve been meaning to tackle, one of which is printing some camera accessories.

Hot Shoe Audio Mount

Thingiverse is full of weird combos of objects smashed together, such as the Lepus Colberus (The Colberabbit), but you can also combine individual objects in other ways.

I grabbed this 1/4-20 Thumb Screw and this Nikon DIY GPS Holder and combined them into a new thing.

Hot Shoe Audio Mount

The nice thing about the “Nikon DIY GPS Holder” I printed was that I can see it being a generic part I can modify in the future. I can easily import the STL file into Google Sketchup and built on top of it. (I did find this camera mount accessory, but the assembly was a little more complex than I wanted to deal with.) It did take a little bit of work with a file to get the part to fit the hot shoe on my Nikon, but that’s probably a good thing. I got it to fit just as snug as I wanted after minimal filing and sanding.

Hot Shoe Audio Mount

I’m still calling this one a prototype. I ended up drilling out the hole for the bolt, and I cut the head off the bolt to be able to make it all fit together. It works, but I can see some improvements for next time. (I’m also expecting better quality from the RepRap as I get better at calibrating and operating it.)

Hot Shoe Audio Mount

Here’s the mount on the hot shoe of my camera. I haven’t done a ton of video shooting with the Nikon D3200 yet, but I know that most DSLR microphones are not very good, and secondary audio is pretty standard, so by mounting the Zoom H2 on the camera I can get better audio, and I can also monitor the audio, which you can’t do with the Nikon D3200. (The Nikon D800 does allow you to monitor audio from the camera, but we still haven’t received ours.)

So besides two nuts and a bold, there’s probably 10 cents worth of plastic. I think this shows the power of 3D printing in making things you need. I wouldn’t have been able to make this out of wood or metal very easily, but a 3D printer and a hardware store made this a pretty trivial project.

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Minority Report

Wisconsin

Hi, I’m the minority.

I know that hearing a white male who identifies as a heterosexual saying he’s the minority may sound odd, but that’s how I feel.

There have been rare times in my life I’ve felt like I was in the majority, but overall, I think I’ve been in the lesser half. Most people in Wisconsin love football, and love beer, and use Windows, and voted for Walker, and do all sorts of stuff I don’t do. Life goes on, and that’s fine.

My problem is that I’ve got friends that are not males, and don’t identify as heterosexual, and I don’t think it’s right that they aren’t treated as I am, and are not given the sames rights as I am. I’ve got friends who are teachers, who have made sacrifices because they believe that educating our youth is important, maybe more important than another career that might pay more money.

I feel like those on the right are concerned that someone is getting something they don’t deserve, while my own point of view is that I’m concerned that someone else is being denied something most others get. That “something” being the things I get because I’m a white male heterosexual.

I’m not a greedy person. I don’t live in a fancy house (I don’t even own a house) and I drive a crappy old car that frequently breaks, and I still eat Mac & Cheese and peanut butter sandwiches all the time, and I fine with all that. I guess what I’m not fine with is telling women that they should make less money than I do for the same work, or telling LGBT folks that they can’t have the same rights I do, or telling teachers that they’re lazy and trying to steal my tax money.

Maybe I’m just an optimist, and like to try to see the good in people instead of assuming the worst and living in fear that someone will get more than they should, and by that happening I’ll somehow get less than I should.

So yeah, I’m in the minority again, and that’s fine, because I’m used to it, but I still wish there was a way for everyone be treated equally, and beyond all that, I’ve got one request for you: please don’t be an asshole.

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Ding! Session is Ready!

WordCamp Milwaukee

Even though I’ve been attending BarCamp like events since 2006, and hosted Web414 for many years, I still hit these periods where I think that I have no right being in front of a crowd talking about something. Don’t get me wrong, I love to talk, and I love sharing my knowledge, but I occasionally question my own credentials.

That brings us to WordCamp which happened this past weekend. I wasn’t very involved in the event (though I did help sponsor it) but during the planning I was asked to do a session, and I said “Sure! I can do a session on blogging with WordPress” which was the most generic thing I could think of at the time.

So about a week before the event, Dusty asked me for description of my session. I wrote a rambling paragraph and emailed it off, still not sure what the focus would be. I then got busy, as I often do, and didn’t prepare anything before the event. I got there Sunday about an hour before my session, and cobbled together 6 slides, of which I only showed about 4. None of that really matters though…

How did it go? It went well. It went fine. It went… good. Yeah, it went good.

I need to take my own advice. The thing I’ve told people time and time again at BarCamp events is “You are an expert at your own experience” and damn, that’s the truth. Seriously, that may be the smartest thing I’ve ever said. If someone is more of an expert at your experiences than you are, well, you may have a stalker, and hey, then you have experience being stalked!

Here’s the thing… I just rambled on about my experiences blogging, and showed some of the blogs I write for, and some of the tools I use. There were questions I couldn’t answer. That’s OK. I asked other people in the room. I’ll never assume I’m the smartest person in the room, even if it’s just me and the cats. All I can do is share my own experiences. I can tell you what I’ve done, or what I think, and occasionally I can tell you the right way to do it, but even then, it’s going to come from my point of view.

Also, it helps to yell and swear. I tend to do this when I talk to a large group. Someone from Chicago invited me to do a session at their WordCamp in the fall, and I had to confirm they actually saw my session. You know, the session where I told people interested in making money to get the hell out! I guess yelling and swearing works sometimes.

So the good news is, you may not have to prepare for your BarCampMilwaukee session this year. Just show up and talk about your own experiences. If it doesn’t work, feel free to yell (and swear) at me. You’re welcome!