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How to Make Everything Ourselves: Open Modular Hardware
- beardicus 8y agoI really love the aesthetic of all the demo pieces for OpenStructures (mentioned in the article). Unfortunately it seems it didn't really catch on, and is not an active project. Also, I've found that many standard metric parts that could fit in the system are hard to get or expensive here in the US, alas.
- TOGoS 8y agoIn the US it probably makes more sense to go with an inch-based standard, since it's easier to find materials in those sizes. I've been making up my own 'standard' for rack-mount electronics with an eye towards making it work nicely with as many other defacto standards as possible (19" racks, standard lumber sizes, pegboard, unistrut, erector sets): http://www.nuke24.net/docs/2018/TOGRack.html http://www.nuke24.net/docs/2018/TOGRack.html
- Qwertie 8y agoYou can just buy the closest match and cut off a bit of the end. In the end it's much better for everyone to standardize on the superior units
- TOGoS 8y agoIndeed. Which is why I standardized on inches, which match the hardware at Home Depot and whose rulers make it easy to divide by powers of 2. :P
- Animats 8y agoThis is the curse of Home Depot, which doesn't stock much, if any, metric. I was recently in a Home Depot where an Asian woman was trying to get some fasteners to repair some piece of metric restaurant equipment, and wasn't aware how backwards the US is on metric standardization. The US needs to go hard metric. That means metric fasteners and components. The rest of the world does not have inch tools. This hurts exports. The 95% of the population that can't use any tool beyond a screwdriver can still talk of inches and miles, but physical stuff needs to go metric. Autos, aircraft, and DoD switched decades ago. It's mainly building components that are still inch.
- Animats 8y agoNobody actually builds stuff that way, except for prototypes. But people do build things from T-slotted aluminum extrusions.[1] Their heating appliance designs are not too good. The one that heats a water vessel has liquids above a non-sealed box with electrical wiring. The toaster uses parts from another toaster, plus CNC milled plates and 3D printed parts. More expensive than a standard toaster, and looks iffy on electrical safety. [1] https://www.walmart.com/ip/80-20-1010-72-T-Slotted-Extrusion-10S-72-Lx1-In-H/41021210 https://www.walmart.com/ip/80-20-1010-72-T-Slotted-Extrusion...
- LeifCarrotson 8y agoWalmart? Would not have guessed they sold 80/20. Here's a more typical site that thousands of engineers will use today to purchase extrusion for all kinds of industrial projects: https://www.mcmaster.com/#structural-framing/=1dhfwat https://www.mcmaster.com/#structural-framing/=1dhfwat Or, if you're a makerspace in the market for larger quantities and want to standardize, find a local vendor of extrusion (80/20, Misumi, Futura, MB Kit, etc) that will have the oddball fittings you may need on hand locally. It's true that 80/20 will not sell you their dies, but they are happy to give away free CAD libraries of all their parts. There are subtle differences between different manufacturers, but everyone makes parts that are compatible with it and you probably shouldn't depend on the tiny features that won't match. It looks like OpenGrid saw a proliferation of too many 'standards' that were not open-source, and thought "We'll make a new standard that will be better than the others because it's open", and ended up adding a worse (less strong, less adjustable) standard product with limited adoption. On the electrical boxes, they seem to be proud of their homemade enclosures. What they probably don't realize is that you can buy an IP67, hinged, IEC-rated enclosure with continuously welded seams from Saginaw or Hoffman with built-in grounding lugs, backplane, and latches for $80.
- sigstoat 8y ago> Walmart? Would not have guessed they sold 80/20. they don't, their website is a marketplace just like amazon's, these days.
- hugs 8y agoOh heh, my project (Bitbeam) is listed there. I use it as the foundational building block for the robots I make at my company.
- TOGoS 8y agoI googled for 'bitbeam' and found a blog but no description of what it is.
- hugs 8y agoTry clicking the "About" link on the blog? https://bitbeam.org/about/ https://bitbeam.org/about/ Basically, Bitbeam is 3D printable, CNC millable, or lasercutable parts for making things like small robots. The geometry of the parts are compatible with Lego Technic beams.
- jacquesm 8y agoSome of the links to other sites on that page no longer work. Nice project! I particularly like your factory, that looks like a fun setup that you have.
- hugs 8y agoThanks. Yeah, I'm years overdue in updating the Bitbeam site. But I do use Bitbeam all the time in my work.
- TOGoS 8y agoWould have. This is what it looks like in Firefox: https://imgur.com/a/yA5dhm2 https://imgur.com/a/yA5dhm2
- iafisher 8y agoOne thing that Lego does very well despite (or perhaps because of) being a closed system is ensuring the consistent quality of all its bricks. In the years I played with Legos as a child I never encountered two bricks that didn't fit together perfectly. I wonder if an open standard would be able to achieve the same consistency.
- Already__Taken 8y agoLike you said, the standard is dead easy it's paying for the QA
- anitil 8y agoI can't find it now, but I remember reading about the QA process that they use. If I remember correctly, each mold is uniquely identified, so if you do find a bad part, the mold is taken out of circulation.
- TomMarius 8y agoHow long ago was that? Lego from the 80's sometimes got stuck together. I even remember two (2-brick) sets of bricks that stayed together to this day.
- kraftman 8y agoYou could tell the sticky pieces by the teethmarks from pulling them apart :D
- adrianratnapala 8y agoBy that standard, nearly all of my pieces must have been sticky. (And yes, I did grow up in the '80s).
- sien 8y agoHave you tried these: https://shop.lego.com/en-AU/Brick-Separator-630 They work very, very well. The other thing about Lego is that it's a bit trickier to clone than you'd think. Most of the other 'compatible with other major systems' brands don't come apart as well as Lego does. It seems part of the trick of Lego is to make things that are appropriately easy to take apart, as well as put together.
- agumonkey 8y agoI think about this all the time, i'm not sure how far it could go but it'd nice to witness
- delbel 8y agoThis stuff is cool, but it is also ridiculous over designed and over thought out. Anybody with a welder, angle grinder, plasma cutter, can do all of these things in seconds, from scrap on the side of the road. I guess what this is proposing is having a bunch of pre-fabricated metaL with holes cut. So, 95% of your holes won't be used -- which is a massive overhead for nothing. I can drive in any neighborhood on a Saturday, find a broken threadmil, and cut it up with my plasma cutter to whatever size I need and weld it. If I make a mistake, I can grind the weld off and re-do it. Also I would never trust that bed frame that looks like a deathwish.
- Koshkin 8y agoI think one of the points is to be able to build things without the need of expensive/extensive tooling.
- snarfy 8y agoThere is a middle ground. I make quite a bit of stuff out of square and angled aluminum stock using only a few basic tools - drill, file, hack saw, propane torch, and aluminum brazing rods. I would use open modular hardware if it were available everywhere like plain metal stock is, but it's not so I've learned to improvise.
- jacquesm 8y agoI see your point, there are a lot of tools required for that approach though and those tools are expensive and will see - at best - part time use making each of those welds and cuts a relatively expensive affair. If you're doing production work then sure, you will need that kind of optimization to stay in business. But if instead you are looking to produce one-offs with relatively low skill and a limited amount of money to spend on tooling then I totally see the point in making things from re-usable and easy to size components. And then there is the garbage disposal element: almost none of this is waste, even at the end of life of the original object. The same goes for Lego, all it is is parts, and parts have a life of their own (in the decades!) that is totally different from the life of the objects made from them (minutes to several years). So the over-design and the over-thinking go towards doing that work once so that the users of the system won't need a tools budget in the 10's of thousands of dollars (welder, plasmacutter, grinder, machine shop to go with it) and still build functional equipment that is not readily available. As for how sturdy the bed frame looks: that's mostly a function of the design of the frame, not of the parts that went into it (Ikea sells kids bedframes that look quite close to what is shown in the article), you could do a much better job if you wanted to with the same parts. I also note a lot of 'cheating' where the system doesn't work anymore (for instance: the stays to stabilize the bed and the legs under the sled).
- ape4 8y agoCould be a nice approach on Mars
- Koshkin 8y agoI am sure they have thought about it already.
- cellularmitosis 8y agoSee also Marcin Jakubowsky's work in this vein. https://www.opensourceecology.org/ https://www.opensourceecology.org/
- tomjakubowski 8y agoI am compelled to say it is spelled Jakubowski.
- dredmorbius 8y agoRelation?
- tomjakubowski 8y agoNot that I know of, it's a relatively common Polish surname.
- dwaltrip 8y agoThe short video on the front page is really interesting: https://www.ted.com/talks/marcin_jakubowski?language=en https://www.ted.com/talks/marcin_jakubowski?language=en
- Animats 8y agoOh, those guys are still at it? They have a good idea with the engine-driven hydraulic power pack. Except that you can buy those cheaply enough that making them isn't worth the trouble.[1][2] All they're really making is the frame; the engine, pump, hoses, radiator, and controls are all purchased. (Those guys seem to have a thing about not painting metal, so that it Looks Hand Made. Bare steel rusts. Rapidly. Paint is cheap.) [1] https://www.ebay.com/itm/STANLEY-GT13-HYDRAULIC-POWER-PACK-STANLEY-/202307601466 https://www.ebay.com/itm/STANLEY-GT13-HYDRAULIC-POWER-PACK-S... [2] https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Mini-order-Hydraulic-Power-Pack-retail_60610830056.html https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Mini-order-Hydraulic-...
- HeyLaughingBoy 8y ago
- Qwertie 8y agoI'm liking the idea but I just can't see how we can get anywhere close to the current size and aesthetics of the current stuff we have. Being modular and standard leaves you much less ability to optimistic to the most compact and cheap design. Desktops have this kind of modular design and they are huge and mostly full of empty space. I think it would be very hard to design a laptop using standard modules without everyone just building the exact same laptop.
- jecxjo 8y agoThe issue with Desktops is that motherboard layouts suck. 2' x 2' square with video cards nearly a foot long. Not much room to kill area unless you want fill the random gaps around your video card. The real place to make things more custom is when you can do small and stick the computer in places it would not normally go. Raspberry pi or a micro atx in the glove box of your car kind of thing.
- 2dollars27cents 8y agoThis reminds me of the MIT course "How to make (Almost) Anything" http://fab.cba.mit.edu/classes/4.140/ http://fab.cba.mit.edu/classes/4.140/ ... as well as the follow on course "How to make something that makes (almost) anything". http://fab.cba.mit.edu/classes/865.15/index.html http://fab.cba.mit.edu/classes/865.15/index.html
- Hasz 8y agoI get it, but the execution is going in the wrong direction. I want good documentation for everything in current consumer products. Good documentation makes things modular, not pre-drilling a bunch of holes in steel beam. If every printer came with a good BOM and links to datasheets, it would be much easier to reuse those parts, both for consumers and other manufacturers. Such standardization makes it easier to design and cheaper to manufacture, all without artificially setting a standard. I hope with new "right to repair" legislation, we will start to see a bit more light shed by OEMs as to what parts their products use and datasheets for them.
- codazoda 8y agoI like the idea of GridBeam for furniture. Break a chair leg, just throw a new one on. Build a crib, convert it to a toddler beb then to twin. Later reformat it into the first chair for the child's new apartment.
- hugs 8y agoI used Gridbeam to make the fume hood for my 3D printers: https://twitter.com/hugs/status/824090649540562946 https://twitter.com/hugs/status/824090649540562946
- vortico 8y agoModularity in every industry is 3-10 times more expensive than monolithic commercial products, and this is no exception. I can buy a metal bed frame for $40 at Walmart, or buy ~10 $40 pieces to make my own. It's the price you pay for having flexible parts. The synthesizer world knows this well, where a $3000 modular synthesizer is required to build a patch for a $300 portable synthesizer, although you gain flexibility with the modular version.
- kennywinker 8y agoPretty sure that’s an economies of scale issue. If the demand for modular was as large as the demand for complete synths, they’d be dirt cheap - but they are essential different products. Though we’ll see how that plays out if behringer ever makes good on their threat to get into modular...
- vortico 8y agoI think it has more to do with baseline product overhead. The cost of bringing a single electronic product to market is $50-100/unit + variable amount based on the scale. The solution to make the product cheaper is to offer monolithic functionality in a single unit, with the same baseline overhead. The same is true for assembled "monolithic" bed frames vs. modular aluminum beams, just with different numbers.
- RossBencina 8y ago> The cost of bringing a single electronic product to market is $50-100/unit. The solution to make the product cheaper is to offer monolithic functionality in a single unit Another solution is to reduce the baseline overhead.
- vortico 8y agoCan't. People require a particular amount of support, your marketing costs scale with product sold, and international shipping costs can't get any cheaper. The baseline is not much less for Behringer as it is any reputable modular manufacturer. What they do instead is reduce the parts, manufacturing, and R&D/unit cost, but they're still restricted from going below $50-100/unit even if they could magically clone modules.