MakePhilly February Meeting February 17, 2008

Find out about Fab@home
Evan Malone will present on a cutting edge branch of Rapid Prototyping he is involved with developing that holds the promise of allowing us all to fabricate anything we design right in our very own homes.

For the past twenty years, Rapid Prototyping has advanced as a technology that allows for transforming any 3D design in software, for example a CAD model of a mechanical part, into an identical physical model of it in the real world.

Now in 2008, at the Cornell Computational Synthesis Laboratory where he is pursuing his PhD, Evan is blazing the path to develop the next generation of Rapid Prototyping machines - highly compact ones called "fabbers". These small machines can fabricate almost any kind of object – not merely passive mechanical parts, but complete and fully functional electronic devices, ready to use right out of the machine!

To accelerate the transfer of this technology from the research world into the personal realm, he launched the Fab@Home project which he will speak about in his presentation as well. The Fab@Home project includes a user-editable "wiki" website which provides open-source, free software, parts lists, designs, and assembly & operational instructions for making a simple desktop fabber which anyone with basic hobbyist tools and skills can build for themselves. (More info: http://www.fabathome.org/wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page)

Evan Malone is a Doctoral Candidate in Mechanical Engineering in the Computational Synthesis Laboratory at Cornell University. He earned a BA degree in physics from the U. Penn and a Masters of Engineering degree from Cornell in mechanical engineering and systems engineering for work on Cornell's World Champion RoboCup autonomous robotic soccer project. His doctoral research involves developing systems, materials, and methods for all-additive fabrication (a.k.a. Solid Freeform Fabrication (SFF) or Rapid Prototyping (RP)) of complete electromechanical devices. Evan and colleagues Dan Periard and Professor Hod Lipson collaborated on the creation the Fab@Home Project.

Meeting Specs
Date: Sunday, February 17th
Time: 3PM Sharp
Location: University of the Arts, 333 S. Broad Street, Anderson Hall, 4th Floor [MAP]
Cost: $5 donation suggested

Open Make
A staple of all our meetings is Open Make -- Bring projects you're working on or recently completed to share with the group. Immediately following the guest speaker presentation, the mic is yours.

Maker Challenge
The Maker Challenge for this meeting is entitled "Arcade Anarchy!"... we're going to be building classic games.... download the details here: http://www.makephilly.com/content/Home/pdf/MAKER%20CHALLENGE%2013.pdf(89 KB)

Official Website: http://ww.makephilly.com