Become a Member of the MakerLab!

Starting with the Spring 2014 semester, University of Illinois Students, Staff, and Faculty are invited to become official members of the Illinois MakerLab. For a low price ($20 for a semester for students & $30 a semester for staff/faculty), you can become a member of our lab and enjoy several great benefits, including: --A 15% Discount on all material costs for 3D printing in our lab --Use of a special, members-only 3D printer --Invitation to special, members-only events --One free object scan (a $5 value) --An Official Membership Card

(Memberships are a way to offer discounted services to individuals looking to make things. We are unable to offer memberships to campus units or to individuals using campus accounts/funds to pay for prints. All prints by members are for personal use only, to be paid by personal credit cards only)

Drop by the lab to sign up. Have questions? Email us at uimakerlabATillinoisDOTedu.

MakerLab hosts Countryside Students

Last week, Ms. Zielnicki's 8th grade class from Countryside School in Champaign visited the MakerLab. This visit was organized in partnership with the Illinois Geometry lab. The students had a workshop using OpenScad at IGL, before visiting the lab. During their time in the lab, the students learned how to operate our MakerBot Replicators, printed conic sections and engaged in 3D scanning using our Sense scanner. The students were "blown away" by the experience.  This type of outreach activity is an important part of our mission and we enjoyed hosting these students. If your class would like to visit our lab and learn about the emerging maker movement, just ask your teacher to contact us at uimakerlab AT illinois DOT edu.

Making Things Students Begin Ideation

The second week of Making Things began with a warm welcome from Professor Deana McDonagh from our School of Art + Design. She spoke to the class about authentic human behavior and finding opportunity through observation. She noted that innovative potential exists in home-made solutions and that disruptive technology is the key to life-changing events. Each team received a copy of Jane Fulton Suri's book, Thoughtless Acts?: Observations on Intuitive Design as a source of inspiration. Ms. Suri is a top executive at the world-renown design firm, Ideo.

The last half of the class was devoted to brainstorming and product ideation. Students identified opportunities for prospective things to make. During this process, the seven groups examined things currently available on Thingiverse, Ponoko, Shapeways, and Kickstarter as a means of inspiration. Each team was tasked with deriving nine different opportunities for potential things to make. We closed our class by sharing our ideas with each other and obtaining feedback from our colleagues. We will continue this ideation process next week, as we seek to narrow our ideas down from nine to three.

Drafted by the Shakin Bacon team (Benjamin Moy, Colin Korst & Rebecca Gluadell)

Help us win - Vote for our Video!

The College of Business has submitted a video of the MakerLab for a competition hosted by Educause. This video competition focuses on six emerging educational technologies: the flipped classroom, learning analytics, 3D printing, games & gamification, the quantified self, and virtual assistants. These six themes were identified in the 2013 NMC Horizon Report, which featured our new lab on its cover! There are 21 video submissions by a variety of institutions, including the University of Michigan, Ohio State, and Penn State. Of these 21 submissions, six focus on 3D printing.

Help us share our approach to learning by making with the world, by voting for us. Our video (submission #17) was developed by Ana Said in the College of Business'eLearning Center. Voting ends on Tuesday, February 4. So, please vote today on the Educause website

You can view the video here, but you must vote at the link above. http://youtu.be/JV-owT85K68

Making Things Class Begins!

Our new Making Things class has begun! This innovative new course teams up 21 undergraduate students across business, engineering, and art & design. Each of these 7 teams will be conceptualizing, designing, prototyping, manufacturing, and marketing a new product. This is the first course of its type in an American business school. Class sessions are held in the Illinois MakerLab each Wednesday night and are hands-on in nature; during each session, students practice our MakerLab principles of Learn, Make, and Share. Our first class kicked off with a video conference with Zach Kaplan, CEO of Inventables and Erwin Cruz, Head of Innovation and IP at Grainger offering insights and advice to our students. Both Zach and Erwin are members of the MakerLab Advisory Board and are deeply involved in the emerging Maker Movement. Following this conference call, students formed their teams and then designed and printed custom nameplates using Tinkercad 3D modeling software and MakerBot Replicator 3D printers. During the course of the semester, student teams will take turns updating course happenings on our website. So, please stay tuned to see what amazing things our students will be making!

You can also join us in the journey, by following the class hashtag #makingthings, and perhaps even sharing some relevant resources for our class by using the same hashtag.

The 3D Printer That Can Build a House

The University of Southern California is testing a giant 3D printer that could be used to build a whole house in under 24 hours.

Professor Behrokh Khoshnevis has designed the giant robot that replaces construction workers with a nozzle on a gantry, this squirts out concrete and can quickly build a home according to a computer pattern. It is “basically scaling up 3D printing to the scale of building,” says Khoshnevis. The technology, known as Contour Crafting, could revolutionise the construction industry.

The affordable home?

Contour Crafting could slash the cost of home-owning, making it possible for millions of displaced people to get on the property ladder. It could even be used in disaster relief areas to build emergency and replacement housing.  For example, after an event such as Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines, which has displaced almost 600,000 people, Contour Crafting could be used to build replacement homes quickly.

As Khoshnevis points out, if you look around you pretty much everything is made automatically these days –

your shoes, your clothes, home appliances, your car. The only thing that is still built by hand are these buildings.

How does Contour Crafting work?

The Contour Crafting system is a robot that by automates age-old tools normally used by hand. These are wielded by a robotic gantry that builds a three-dimensional object.

Ultimately it would work like this,” says Brad Lemley from Discover Magazine. “On a cleared and leveled site, workers would lay down two rails a few feet further apart than the eventual building’s width and a computer-controlled contour crafter would take over from there. A gantry-type crane with a hanging nozzle and a components-placing arm would travel along the rails. The nozzle would spit out concrete in layers to create hollow walls, and then fill in the walls with additional concrete… humans would hang doors and insert windows.

This technology is like a rock that we have rolled to the top of a cliff, just one little push and the idea will roll along on its own.

- Khoshnevis told Discover Magazine

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