Intro
Hello World, and welcome to That Maker Show with me, chalkers, your host to all things new in the maker movement.
This week we’re talking about a gigantic 3D printer, coffee cups powered by Microsoft, an open source hardware laptop and an awesome kickstarter project.
3D Print a House
Over on The Guardian, Oliver Wainright talks of an ambitious project under taken by Dus Architects. They aim to 3D print a full size canal house.
The dutch architecture firm were already familiar with smaller 3d printers and sought out Ultimaker, a dutch 3d printer company, to help realise their dream of making a cheap, zero waste, recyclable canal house. With Ultimaker they made the KamerMaker or the Room Builder.They set the printer outside their office and has become quite the spectacle for passers by.
Windows on Devices
This week saw the Build conference from Microsoft. And they’ve got plans on bringing Windows to devices.
With devices like Intel’s Arduino compatible Galileo on the market and the increasing size of the maker movement, Microsoft have taken note. They’ve launched, all be it a soft launch, WindowsOnDevices.com where they suggest creating smart coffee mugs, talking bears and robots.
While the details are scarce at the moment, they’re planning to release an SDK soon. Whilst Microsoft aren’t known historically for their openness or friendliness to hackers, it seems that the tide is changing and may invite new people with different backgrounds and skillsets into the maker movement.
Novena Open Laptop
The Novena Open Laptop crowdfunding project has been launched by bunnie. This is probably one of the most important developments in the Open Source Hardware movement to date.
We see small electronics open sourced all the time, but a Laptop! That’s insanely awesome. Bunnie’s motto is if you can’t hack it you don’t own it.
It has the kitchen sink when it comes to ports and slots. It has two ethernet jacks, SD, micro-SD, micro-USB, regular USBs, serial, a high speed expansion port for an FPGA and much more.
There’s a bare board, desktop, laptop and heirloom versions and are available to backers on the Crowd Supply website.
Kickstarter of the Week
This week’s awesome kickstarter project is from the folks over at Polymakr.
They’ve come out with 3 new filament types. The first is an improved PLA called PolyMax. It’s impact strength is 20% greater than ABS and over 8 times greater than regular PLA.
The next is a flexible print material called PolyFlex. They claim that their flexible filament, unlike others currently out there is compatible with most (if not all) FDM/FFF printers.
Finally they’ve got PolyWood, a wood-like material that contains no wood at all. Other wood-mimic materials out there do have wood particles in the filament which can result in messier prints. The folks at Polymakr use a foam to pull this off, and to their knowledge they are the first to bring a printable foam filament to the market.
These types of innovations get me really excited for the types of things we can start making in our own homes. It’s exciting times!
Outro
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Notable mentions
Hit me up @chalkers on twitter if you have any stories you’d like me to cover. If they don’t make it into the show I’ll include them as notable mentions in the show notes.
Hosted and Written by: Andrew Chalkley (@chalkers)
Produced by: Michael Poley (@michaelpoley)