Category: Hardware

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Sepp Hasslberger: 3D Printer Builds Houses from Mud

Design, Economics/True Cost, Hardware, Innovation, Manufacturing, Materials
Sepp Hasslberger
Sepp Hasslberger

Constructing houses out of mud with a 3D printer … this looks like a great advance for getting building costs down to what can be afforded locally just about anywhere!

The world’s largest Delta 3D printer creates nearly zero-cost homes out of mud

The future of affordable (and sustainable) housing may lie with 3D printing. The World’s Advanced Saving Project (WASP) has unveiled the world’s largest delta-style 3D printer, which can build full-size buildings out of mud and clay for nearly zero cost. The massive BigDelta printer stands 12 meters tall (40 feet), and it's nearly completed its first house at a cost of just 48 euros so far.  Read more, watch video, see compelling photographs.

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Sepp Hasslberger: Open Modular Hardware

Hardware
Sepp Hasslberger
Sepp Hasslberger

How to localise manufacturing – go modular and build for re-use…

How to Make Everything Ourselves: Open Modular Hardware

Reverting to traditional handicrafts is one way to sabotage the throwaway society. In this article, we discuss another possibility: the design of modular consumer products, whose parts and components could be re-used for the design of other products. Initiatives like OpenStructures, Grid Beam, and Contraptor combine the modularity of systems like LEGO, Meccano and Erector with the collaborative power of digital success stories like Wikipedia, Linux or WordPress.

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Sepp Hasslberger: MacroFab – The Open Source Hardware Factory

Hardware
Sepp Hasslberger
Sepp Hasslberger

This factory is collecting together and testing all the technologies needed for future widespread local manufacturing of … everything.

Making Hardware Is a Total Pain. But Not in This Factory

EXTRACT

What Church really wanted was for manufacturing to work more like cloud computing, where you can simply request the resources you need through the web. He wanted to be able to upload his designs to a manufacturer, get a quote automatically, and, when the time comes, order a batch of prototypes with a push of a button, instead of having to spend hours and hours going over spreadsheets with sales reps. That didn’t exist, so, along with electrical engineer Parker Dillmann, he started a factory called MacroFab that lets hardware designers do just that.

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Worth a Look: Open Source Ecology

Access, Architecture, Crowd-Sourcing, Design, Economics/True Cost, Hardware, Innovation, Knowledge, Manufacturing, Resilience, Science
Click for Wiki
Click for Wiki

Open Source Ecology is accelerating the growth of the next economy – the Open Source Economy – an economy that optimizes both production and distribution – while promoting environmental regeneration and social justice. We are building the Global Village Construction Set. This is a high-performance, modular, do-it-yourself, low-cost platform – that allows for the easy fabrication of the 50 different industrial machines that it takes – to build a small, sustainable civilization with modern comforts.

Continue reading “Worth a Look: Open Source Ecology”

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Jean Lievens: Makerspace the Next Open Source Frontier

Hardware
Jean Lievens
Jean Lievens

The makerspace is the next open source frontier

EXTRACT

In this brave new world of heterogeneous projects that combine hardware, software, printed, cloud, and other pieces, we are going to see an cacophony of different tools for building these different parts of an idea and project. We have GitHub for collaborating around code, Thingiverse for 3D models, Trello for project management and coordination, Moqups and Balsamiq for user interface design, specific toolkits for building drivers and integrating with sensors, and more.