[MUSIC] >> Chris, thanks for joining us today. >> Yeah, absolutely. Thanks for having me. >> Thanks for your help in helping
me launch my 3D printing adventure. I couldn't have done it without you. >> Yeah, thank you. [SOUND] So the idea of the hackerspace is
that you bring people together who have interests and maybe dissimilar backgrounds
or similar backgrounds or similar experiences or very different experiences,
and you bring them under one space. It's just like a gym club for
people that like to build stuff. And so you can come in,
you can use the tools, you can use the equipment, you can get
training, you can get instructions. Meet up with like minded people and
work on projects together. Now the thing a lot of people neglect
is that it's not all about the tools, it's all about the people. So the people that you can bring together
are the most important asset, and the tools are a secondary asset. Sector 67 got started about five
years ago, which makes us one of the earlier hackerspaces in the US,
and one of the first in Wisconsin. But when I graduated with a master's
degree in mechanical engineering, I rented a building,
the building that we're in now. And I hoped that it would work out. I signed a personal guarantee
on a one-year lease, and I hope people would show up and use it. [SOUND] When I was a kid, I used to go
run over to my neighbor's house, and my neighbor had a welder. He had a car lift. He had an acetylene torch. He had all the necessary tools to
be able to work on a car and so that was my sort of
primordial hackerspace, further then that is really
thinking in terms of a farm. So farmers are the earliest
hackerspace operators. Those are the folks who ran
to their neighbors and said, hey you've got the tool that I need or can you come down help me with fixing my
tractor, get my equipment working again. This has been around forever, this idea
of sharing tools and ideas and resources. It just hasn't been done in inner
city areas or downtown areas, and I think that's really the biggest
difference with the hackerspace and what's been done in the past. [SOUND] In the past five years we've
had a little over 500 members. And having folks come and
go is a healthy thing, so at any one time we've got about
100 members who are active. Our membership's all month to month, so
people can join for a month, they join for a year, or do whatever they like to do in
terms of what timing works out for them. But we've had just as many people who have
no formal training in anything as there are people who've got a PhD in physics and
maybe a Master's in engineering. And I'd say that's the underlying
theme with the people that are here is that everybody likes to build things. I think what it really comes down to,
though, is having somebody around
you to egg you on. I think that's what
a hackerspace really exists for, is to draw together people who go
I've never done this before and somebody else looks at them and goes,
yeah, I had to do that last week, here's what I did and here's what
worked out well and here's what didn't. And I think that's the differing
element between reading online and being on a forum. And being in an environment with
a bunch of people who are working on things together. Is that you get the true, you bump elbows with somebody who's doing
something totally different than you. One of the members is really
into taking USGS survey data and then compiling it into something that's
either 3D printable or routable. This company's called My Square Foot,
but he makes these brilliant maps and routes them into a piece of wood. This one's been milled out of
a piece of pine on the CNC router. But you can just as easily
print one of these off. We've got another member who
worked here who's actually making frying pans in the shape of the state. She's got all the US states
all made out of cast iron and they're usable frying pans so you can
use them as a wall decoration as well. One of the members built a penny
farthing which is an old-time bike with a giant front wheel. This is a laser-cut wooden hat and one of our members has a patent on
this tab and slot construction system. There's no glue and no screws
holding this together on the top and it's essential just held
together under it's own tension. This is bending plywood and
then it's been laser cut and laser engraved so
that's how it's been cut out of the wood. >> Very cool.
[NOISE] >> I think 3D printing about five years ago really picked up. There was a patent that expired and
allowed a lot of innovation in the area. We started off with RepRaps,
which were 3D-printable 3D printers and those are still around. Those spawned MakerBot
out of NYC Resistor, a hackerspace in New York just like
this one where MakerBot got its start. And then we've seen from then many many
many different companies entering this arena and starting to construct and
manufacture their own machines, and there's a number of those
machines in this room. And yeah,
I think it's a really commonplace tool. It's a very accessible,
very easy to understand how to use. And the best part about it is there's not
a lot of prior knowledge that you need. Because it's additively
building the parts. The 3D printer you're just hitting print. The platform's starting off
empty as a blank slate and then building up your part
layer by layer by layer. Behind us on the back wall there, there is a whole bunch of 3D printers
that are used to print off these stamps. So these are a company
called Snowshoe Stamp, these are emulating the points of
contact of your fingers on the screen. And so
when you push this up against your screen, your phone can register where
these contact points were, and it's an authentic means of validating
that you've been to a location. If you wanted to go to a coffee shop and
say, yep, I've been to the counter, I bought a coffee, you can stamp your
phone on this and it'll authenticate that you were at that particular location
interfacing with this particular stamp. The challenge is though is that
every stamp needs to be unique. 3D printing right now is really one of
the only viable processes to make these. They're able to make hundreds and
hundreds and hundreds of these stamps on 3D printers. And they're not able to make many
thousands in short order but there still able to make every
single one of these be unique. For this company 3D printing was
crucial to them getting started. And they actually got
started here at Sector 67. I think you see a lot of entrepreneurs and a lot of start ups using 3D printers
as a manufacturing approach. And I think that's going to continue
to happen more and more often. As the printers keep coming down in price,
it becomes more feasible to have a dozen of them or two dozen of
them on a wall or on a shelf and be able to work those machines nearly
around the clock making your parts. So I think with 3D printing you're
going to see many different technologies come into play in the future. So right now FDM technology, where you're laying down material like
a hot glue gun does is really commonplace but SLA and SLS are two different other
manufacturing approaches that yield a lot higher detail and a lot better
approach to manufacturing parts. And those printers are going to
become more and more popular. But I think second to that, you've still got traditional
subtractive manufacturing technologies. There's actually a maker of CNC milling
machines just north of us in Waunakee called Tormach. And Tormach makes CNC mill and those mills
are doing subtractive manufacturing. And so when you do subtractive
manufacturing you're putting in a block of metal or a block of steel or
whatever you want to make it out of and you're removing material. These guys are building
desktop personal CNC machines. They're nearly the size of a 3D printer. But they're able to make
metal parts directly. And they're making the software and technologies much,
much easier to approach. And I think that's going to be
another place things are going to go as people are going to start to realize
that through software solutions, and just educational solutions, you can teach
people how to use a lot of these machines that were difficult previously, and
are becoming easier, and easier to use. I think the future is still going to
be a big blend of these things. Really, 3D printing has enabled anybody
to start manufacturing their own products on their desk. The catch is it's limited to what
they can consume as an end consumer. But the idea of a 3D printer though is
that every end consumer could own one of these machines. So now it falls into
the hands of designers. To be able to design parts that are
manufacturable on a printer to be used at home, and, I think, as the technologies
continue to improve, and, as we'll see, over the next five years, these
technologies are going to become more, and more advanced, and more, and more easy to use, which has really
been the key innovation to date. And we're seeing a lot of
start ups embrace that and build their products within the confines
of what the printer can make. And I think that will continue to permeate
larger manufacturers and larger companies. But the reality will become you can
make more and more customized things. I would say 3D printing has definitely
been a revolution over the past five years and
going to be going forward from there. We're going to see more and
more technologies evolve and more and more openness around these things. And I think that's really the revolution,
is this idea of being open to making things yourself, and
the idea of designing things yourself and figuring out how to go about doing
that is really the next step. [SOUND] I guess my advice for 3D printing
would be number one, don't just go out and buy a machine for yourself. First, look in to the community and
find out if someone also already has one, that you could go meet with them or
talk with them or interact with them and find out what their experience has been, because the whole point of a hackerspace
is bringing people together. The opportunity for the two of you to
learn together is a lot more valuable than individuals working in their
homes on their own projects. On hackerspaces.org they list all
these spaces all around the world. So you can go on there and check it out
and see what's out there and there might be one right around the corner from you,
you just haven't heard about it yet. There's a website called Hackaday. Hackaday shares different projects. It's essentially a project blog. So anyone can contribute
a project to that. It'll get featured on the main page and
people then talk about it in this huge community around that website
of just people making projects. If you're interested in looking
more into what we're up to, you can go to sector67.org. And, we've got a lot of information on
products that are up there, the tools and equipment that are here. And, if you're ever in Madison we
do tours every Friday from 1:00 to 7:00 on the hour. [MUSIC] [SOUND]