Making Machines that Make talk by Nadya Peek

Must-watch video if you are interested into DIY, desktop manufacturing machines, hacking, making and generally awesome stuff!

Nadya Peek speaks about the process and basics of making machines that make, technology, digital fabrication economics, MIT modern high-end CNC machines and their limitations, how g-code is very stupid  and how biologists buy expensive machines that are easy and cheap to DIY ...
She also talks and shows many interesting machines that you can make yourself like liquid transfer and auto pipetting machines...



From video description:

Making a new control system for a machine is often a slow and tedious task. Maybe you already have a 3 axis stage, and you already know how to move it around. But what if you want to add a camera and use it for position feedback? You'd have to redesign the whole hardware layer.

I'll talk about some ways I've built modularity into control systems for machines so that you can quickly iterate on different kinds of machine systems without getting stuck in hardware land forever. This includes connecting synchronized nodes across a network and importing legacy nodes for things like, say, an old pressure box you found in the trash and has rs232 in.

Down with gcode! Long live machine control.

You can see her PopFab factory in a briefcase here:

http://diy3dprinting.blogspot.com/2012/07/popfab-factory-in-briefcase.html

Here is the post about MTM Multifab and Fab-in-a-Box:

http://diy3dprinting.blogspot.com/2014/01/mtm-multifab-multitool-desktop.html

Nadya Peeks home page:

http://infosyncratic.nl/

I found one of her presentations which loosely follows the theme of the talk in PDF format:

http://cba.mit.edu/events/13.03.scifab/Peek.pdf

She also spoke about some high end CNC machines being monitored by gyroscope, sensors and GPS so they can not be moved without authorization to prevent them begin exported to blacklisted countries. Here you can see the perfect example of that crazy security policy: http://boingboing.net/2014/01/06/high-end-cnc-machines-cant-b.html


The talk was part of 30th Chaos Communication Congress (30c3) by the Chaos Computer Club (CCC) at Congress Centrum Hamburg (CCH)