Pop Tech Interview
Kristen Taylor interviewed Bre Pettis about Jansen Walkers, MakerBots and Modular Electronics. Check it out!
PopTech: Bre, we hear you like bots. What is the general definition of a bot? Is there a general definition? How do you define the MakerBot, and where does the Jansen Walker fit in the bot universe?
Bre Pettis: A robot is a machine that has a purpose and does something. I am particularly fond of two kinds of robots, robots that help us be more creative and robots that are absurd.
A MakerBot is a machine that you can use to make anything. This is pretty cool for designers, architects, and people that want to live in the future.
A Jansen Walker is a wonderful way of locomotion. These were originally designed by Theo Jansen and then folks have been doing spinoff projects for a while now. The jansen walker on Thingiverse is an example of one of these spinoffs combining lasercut parts with an arduino to make a walking machine.
I’m mesmerized by robots and I don’t care how severe your ADHD is, when a machine is doing something like make something or walk around, it has your full attention! If you’ve ever seen a cat in front of an aquarium, that’s the same kind of attention that people have for robots.
PT: Theo Jansen talks about the “12 Holy Numbers” of joins in his work and the Jansen Walker replicates those – does every mechanism have a “holy number” of joins?
BP: It’s easy to get superstitious around machines. For example, with the MakerBots, we play Daft Punk music a lot and if for some reason, the Daft Punk music stops, that’s when the machine will decide that it needs maintenance. We’ve been talking about installing sound systems that play daft punk all the time automatically so that the machines will never need maintenance…you know, for safety.
PT: What’s the difference between buying a kit and downloading the plans to make a bot? Are they equally fun?
BP: There are a few people who have made bots from scratch, but none of them have completed the project. It takes a long time to source all the parts yourself and it’s pretty close to the same price to just order them all together from us.
It’s really fun to put together and now that we have assembled boards, it’s a bolt together process. We like putting them together with friends because there are a bunch of tasks you can do in parallel and that makes for a great collaborative project.
PT: Tell us about releasing code and open sourcing in the hacker community–is it expected? How does Maker Bot release code?
BP: We made MakerBots to be hacked out of the box and we’re committed to being as open as possible. We want people to be able to look at the code and plans and electronics layouts and modify them. When you get a MakerBot, it’s yours! In fact, we’ve made the electronics super future compatible by adding a lot of functionality that we don’t use yet so that people can build on what comes in the kit and add lots of add-ons and customizations! We’ve got links to all the plans and code and electronics layouts on our wiki at wiki.makerbot.com so anyone can get them.
It’s not expected for people to be open source yet but as more and more people find value in creating collaborative friendships with customers, we’ll see a lot more of it. Hackers have a culture of sharing in place and I think we’ll see this culture hit the mainstream in the next 4 years.
PT: In the creature in the PopTech video, Jansen uses lemonade bottles with wind and the Jansen Walker uses an Arduino. Could you explain what an Arduino is and what other sorts of brains bots have?
BP: A jansen walker walks by storing the power of the wind. An Arduino-controlled jansen walker walks with the power of batteries and can change directions and its Arduino brain is a microcontroller which is a tiny computer, all on one chip.
We are in a wonderful time right now where electronics are modular and projects can be created by combining modules into new configurations to make wonderful things happen. About 1/3 of our sales at MakerBot are to people who are buying our stuff to use for other projects. We like the modular nature of electronics these days, the possibilities are limited only by your imagination!
Thanks, Bre! Leave questions for Bre in the comments below.
Shopping list | MakerBlock
December 21st, 2009 at 1:00 am #
[...] Daft Punk [...]