David Cranor

David Cranor is Associate Chair of O’Reilly Solid. When he isn’t curating conferences, he can be found working as a design/technology consultant on a wide variety of projects ranging from bionic limbs to experiential theater installations. Previously, he co-founded desktop 3D printing company Formlabs. He holds an S.M. degree from the Media Lab at MIT.

Seeed Studio electronics factory walkthrough

An update from the Pop-up Factory project.

As part of the preparations leading up to the Pop-up Factory installation next week at O’Reilly’s Solid Conference, Marcelo Coelho and I went to China to work with sponsor Seeed Studio’s Shenzhen facility in order to produce parts for more than a thousand Alike wristbands.

Working with Seeed project manager Vivian Zhong, we set up in a conference room for the week to organize logistics for getting neoprene straps and assembled printed circuit boards (PCBA) produced and shipped. We also worked with her to source the components that will be used for the manufacturing demonstration in the Pop-up Factory itself at Solid.

In this video, Zhong shows us what’s going on in the factory, all the way from reels of components through various assembly and testing stations. Although the factory is working on many other projects in addition to Alike, we were fortunate enough to catch up to the Alike PCBA as they were in the testing phase. Read more…

Pop-up factory

An experiment at Solid tests a manufacturing style pioneered by pirates.

A few years ago, I was lucky enough to take a tour of the South China manufacturing ecosystem with Andrew “bunnie” Huang. One of the most fascinating things that I saw there were the markets full of funny little mobile phones: Read more…

Talking shop with Other Machine Company

The O'Reilly Solid Podcast: Danielle Applestone on running a machine tool startup and empowerment through desktop manufacturing.

Register for Solid 2015, where you can see Danielle Applestone’s session — How to make an Othermill: From milk jugs to your door — and much more.

Othermill

An Othermill. Photo: Other Machine Co.

For this week’s episode of the Solid Podcast, Jon Bruner and I sat down with Danielle Applestone, CEO of the Other Machine Company — purveyors of one of my favorite personal digital fabrication tools: a desktop CNC router called the Othermill (see a demo video).

Grown out of the Machines that Make project at MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms and incubated at Saul Griffith’s Otherlab in San Francisco, Other Machine Company launched a successful Kickstarter to finance completion of the Othermill back in May of 2013.

For readers not familiar with this particular type of kit, I’ll go into a bit more detail: a CNC (Computer Numerical Control) mill is a machine tool that can be controlled by a computer to move some kind of rotary cutter (such as an endmill or drill bit) to remove material from a workpiece. This is a type of “subtractive manufacturing” process.

With all of the fuss around 3D printing (known in the industry as “additive manufacturing”) these days, I personally don’t think that CNC machining gets enough attention. Although 3D printing is certainly an exciting technology in its own right, it cannot currently compete with CNC machining in terms of cost, supported material types, and range of applications. Read more…