Thing Tracker

The Thing Tracker Network got me thinking about exactly what would need to be shared. This immediately brought to mind the classic science fiction work "The Big Front Yard" by Clifford Simak, describing how interstellar trade must be in ideas and information and not material objects. The protagonist trades the "idea of paint" for the "idea of anti-gravity saddles".

What ideas do we have to trade?

I fall back to my design roots, and this forces me to ask what are the use-cases we wish to address? Let me start out with a few off the top of my head.

• Replacement Part

  Aside from trivial handles and feet, printing replacement parts will probably need the participation of manufacturers. Some, like Nokia, have started this process already. But if you've ever been associated with product lifecycle management, you'll know there is a lot more to it than a one-time publication. Specifically, different product models, sizes, component part differences, configurations, geographies (line voltages, certification, and so on), versions over time, etc. make the correct part difficult to determine even for the manufacturers building it. All of this information would need to be included with the tracked object.

• Custom Object

  Although there are ways to tailor objects after construction, there will be a use-case for things that are specifically built to fit people, pets, rooms, vehicles, etc. The big problem here is measuring and applying the measurements correctly to the objects. For this purpose, the instructions and parameters would need to be included with the tracked object so it's useful to the receiver.

• Toys, Jewelry, Art

  By and large, this is the current set of objects, that requires only geometry, material, and some images and assembly instructions.

The current state of affairs is pretty crude. The existing sites like Thingiverse, Physible Exchange, The Pirate Bay, Archive of Our Own, etc. share only .stl files, or whatever else the author chooses to share. These are doomed eventually, because they

1. don't have full parametric model files
2. have insufficient metadata
3. aren't indexed, other than by full text search or user specified ad-hoc tags
4. aren't versioned
5. are centralized to one site

The Thing Tracker may answer some of these. For example, it may be decentralized ... as long as the implementation uses something like torrent magnet files. I think the content and use-cases need to be determined and then the implementation will derive naturally from those. Are there any use-cases I omitted?

Carbon Offsetting

I don't trust CO₂ carbon offset schemes. Just like every other charity, there is an efficiency rating for the process, and in my opinion the amount of good being done is minimal, if not negative.

Rather than try to ameliorate the situation with a band-aid solution, just use less fossil fuels in the first place. If you can't avoid flying, take it easy on the environment by bringing less with you.

For those who have to sit on their suitcases to close them, there is no salvation. But for normal people consider that it takes 2.5 liters of jet fuel to ship an extra kilogram across the Atlantic. A CO2 conversion chart says 2.52kg of CO₂ is produced for every liter of jet fuel. This means you can do 6.3kg of CO₂ offsetting by just not carrying an extra kilo.

To get that fuel consumption number took a little digging, and I present it here so others can ratify it if they want.

From Figure 4.8 Fuel Efficiency, the industry achieved 1630 Revenue Ton-Miles / 1000 liters in 2006. Revenue Ton-Miles is a measure of cargo amount. It is calculated by multiplying the weight in tons of the shipment being transported by the number of miles that it is transported. This metric includes only paid tonnage. In other words, only materials being transported for and being paid for by customers. Using 1.60934 kilometers/mile and 907.185 kg/ton, this works out to 4.2e-4 liters / kilogram-kilometer. For 6000 km trans Atlantic flight, you get about 2.5 liters / kilogram.

To put this in perspective, one penny is 2.35g, which needs 0.006 liters to cross the Atlantic. Using the current IATA Jet Fuel price of $3.08/(US)gallon (€0.61/liter), it costs nearly half a cent (0.48¢) to ship a penny. The airlines would be more environmentally friendly by converting your pocket change into paper bills just before you step on the aircraft. They could do this at a very customer advantageous exchange rate and still make money.

The airlines are on the right track in reducing luggage allowance and charging €75 for the extra 23kg piece of luggage ($100/50lbs). The next step is to charge per kilo of person. Fortunately for me, they don't do that yet.

The plane manufacturers can obviously do a lot more too, since 50-80% of the takeoff weight of an aircraft is just the plane.

Friction Welding

Following on post and a YouTube video by Fran, I tried my hand at friction welding. It works, but you need to practice.

Chuck up a straightened piece of ABS filament about five centimeter long in a Dremel tool such that about three or four centimeters are visible. Turn on the dremel tool at medium speed and drag the spinning plastic backwards along the joint to be welded making little circular motions.

The plastic will liquefy, there's a bit of a burnt plastic smell and then the parts are joined. The laminations of the printed part may come apart if you're too rough with it, so practice on some scraps first.

Follow welding best practices where possible, i.e. it's best in a corner between two pieces to be joined, and avoid butt welding like that shown below.

Backlash

Yesterday I discovered a significant amount of backlash in my Ultimaker's axes. This is how I fixed it.

First I isolated where the backlash was coming from. I used a bit of blue tape and stuck it to shafts and belts in the mechanical linkage while driving the axis back and forth with the smallest step in PrintRun. The reason for the blue tape is to amplify the small angular or linear motions enough to see them.

Starting at the motor shaft, observe the motion of the blue tape while clicking the small step left and right (X) or up and down (Y) in PrintRun. If you observe motion in both directions move to the next part in the linkage (pulley, belt, shaft). At some point in the process, the blue tape doesn't move unless you click the step button several times. The joint between the current part and the previous part is the problem.

For me, this was right at the beginning, either where the pulleys are set-screwed onto the motor shafts or the small pulley tension is set by the four motor mounting screws. So I took off the motor, removed and reattached the pulley on the motor shaft (to let the set screw get a new grip on the shaft), and reassembled it with a lot more tension in the small belts. I was able to remove most of the backlash just from that.

This also explains the flat spots I was getting when using G2 and G3 arc codes.

Microscopic

My eyes aren't so good anymore, so I have a head mounted magnifier that I got from Lee Valley some years ago. But for the current work I'm doing, I needed to get even more magnification. It turned out to be surprisingly easy.

I remember reading that by reversing the lens in a webcam, you can make a USB microscope. I had an old Logitech webcam lying around since my new laptop has an integrated one, and there's instructions on Instructables.

It took about 10 minutes before I was seeing stuff in the Quick View panel with the lens bodged on backwards with blue tape.

The trouble is, the position of the camera and specimen need to be micro-adjusted and then held in one position for long periods of time... hey wait a minute I have a X,Y,Z stage with just those properties.

So clamping the "microscope" onto the print head and running PrintRun to position it turns out to be a very good control system to look at your samples (if you turn the printhead fan off). It also shows some other interesting info.

For example, I now realize how much backlash I've got in my axes, because the image from the microscope is exquisitely sensitive to even the smallest motion. So how many times do you need to touch the 0.1mm step button in one direction to see motion after taking a 1mm step in the other direction. This I'll need to experiment with, so more on that later.

But I did find out what I wanted to find out - the two traces I was laying down were not touching. I'm guessing at the numbers here, but I think the magnification is about 300 times in the picture below, and the PLA trace running diagonally up from left to right (it looks like icing that's been scraped with a spatula) is about 0.35mm wide and is separated from the next trace in the lower right hand corner by 0.13mm.

Nanotechnology

I finally got the invitation to Google Communities and joined the first 3D Printing group I saw. It turns out it's pretty much like following the people in my 3D Printing circle of the same name, except the scope is a bit wider. There are some posts I either missed or wasn't seeing, and some I can do without. There are more people of course, some with good information or opinions and others that are on the periphery or complete novices. It's a bit of a wash that way; there is more data, but less information density.

I'm not convinced yet on whether communities will take off. I can't see how to filter out everything that hasn't been +1'd yet (there's an opportunity for a coined verb if I ever saw one - the act of clicking +1 on Google Plus: how about plussed or plownd or plumped), but that's a natural extension that would be easy to do. You can model it after the system on /.

So anyway, the reason I'm writing this is one comment from a guy, who was already in my circles, on a post by a novice who asked "How big is the gap between a 3D printing machine and a personal fabricator?" Here's the money quote:

Basically, no, you're never going to be able to say "tea, earl grey, hot" and have a machine fabricate whatever you want out of atomic structures.

To which I heartily disagree and call bullshit.

Now granted, it may not be realized in my lifetime, but the fact that plants and people have already created it, is an existence proof that it's possible to construct it - even more so when it's done purposefully either by an organism or a machine. But, it won't be done by the bulk processes we have now.

The dialog around the post did include the words nanotechnology, but not in the way I've always thought of it. To me nanotechnology has always meant the ideas championed by K.Eric Drexler, especially in the mind blowing tome:

K.Eric Drexler, Nanosystems: Molecular Machinery, Manufacturing, and Computation (New York: John Wiley &Sons, Inc, 1992).

This book, based on his PhD dissertation, and his other more accessible previous work Engines of Creation were based on the There's plenty of room at the bottom lecture by my personal hero Richard Feynman. If you haven't read any of the above, I would recommend doing so at the next opportunity.

So, yes, it will be possible to construct any physically possible arrangement of atoms. The original question about what's the gap between the current technology and the possibilities as envisioned is simple to answer: it's a very large one. But even now, the differences are more subtle and nuanced than they were, just as the question of machine intelligence can now be answered affirmatively albeit with many caveats and conditions.

GnuPG

If you want to use encryption on emails you send, you have to:

1. have a program to encrypt and decrypt text like GnuPG
2. have somebody's public key

Here's mine:

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