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83-Year-Old Inventor Wins $40,000 3D Printing Competition
harrymcc writes "The Desktop Factory Competition was a contest to create an open-source design for a low-cost machine capable of turning cheap plastic pellets into the filament used by 3D printers, with a prize of $40,000. The winner is being announced today — and he was born during the Hoover administration. I interviewed 83-year-old retiree Hugh Lyman — a proud member of the maker movement — for a story over at TIME.com. From the article: 'Lyman describes himself as an “undergraduate engineer” — he studied engineering from 1948-1953 at the University of Utah, but didn’t earn a degree. Though he holds eight patents, he says he’s “not educated enough to be able to do calculations of torque and so forth.” So implementing his contest entry “was trial and error. I tinkered with it and used common sense.”'"
I'm glad some people still attempt projects like these without engineering degrees.
Often better than calculations. It works, because of the assumptions often needed to do calculations are wrong. I've seen a guy spend an inordinate amount of time doing calculations and what not, and then have things still not work. go back make more calculations and wash rinse repeat. He didn't understand the problem.
Meanwhile an old timer looked and figured out the issue and had it fixed in about ten minutes.
Granted, this is just a single example, and not every case is like this.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
You don't want bridges, buildings, or airplanes designed by trial an error. The errors cost too much.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
I understand his invention.
What I don't understand is how plastic filament is so expensive. Surely this stuff is already produced on an enormous scale with machines that have a tiny amortized cost.
Anyone got any ideas?
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Unfortunately, "Common Sense" is in short supply. It's actually the rarest element of all, and very likely, this gentleman succeeds where others fail because he applies common sense.
There are a lot of very smart, clever people out there, but not that many smart, clever people with common sense. Trust me on this.
If telephones are outlawed, then only outlaws will have telephones.
Accumulating the knowledge so you didn't need trial and error probably took a fair bit of trial and error to start out with though. :)
Can anyone tell me how well ABS recycles? I'm thinking about something like this extruder, but instead of using bulk pellets, dicing up old projects and tossing them in the hopper. Recycle the plastic to make new stuff.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
One of the thing that makes a good 3D printer filament is a perfectly round one with a constant diameter. I'm guessing it was two requirements of the contest but the author was too lazy to put a link on the "Desktop Factory Competition" text.
Yes I can search "Desktop Factory Competition", but so will 500 other people. I'm not being lazy, I'm saying one person should have worked 5 seconds more to write the post instead of making 500 people waste 2 seconds. It's basic mathematics.
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Hopefully.
Log in or piss off.
Well, the irony is that evolutionary algorithms are sometimes incredibly useful optimization techniques, and amount to the same approach:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_algorithm
Sometimes the cost of not using trial and error is bigger than the cost of not using it. When your solution space is huge and discrete, sometimes it's the only way to go.
Just because you don't graduate as an engineer doesn't mean you dont graduate. The failed engineers at PSU frequently become the best business majors.
It depends on who you let in. When I attend Virginia Tech in the 80s they'd let just about anyone into the engineering program, but very few actually graduated with engineering degrees. Today a far higher percentage who enter graduate, but the admissions standards (for engineering, at least) are quite a bit higher.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Business comes after they flunk out of Comp Sci. CS was where they went after they flunked out of Engineering.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
The university I went to has a "dropout" rate of close to 98%. Not (only) because they weed out like crazy, but because of its reputation, a lot of people get hired with quite a salary long before they have a chance to reach the end of their master's. So it's less a dropout, it's rather that people who are good and don't want to spend endless hours doing theoretic stuff have a pretty good chance to land a job even without.
Especially in engineering fields you'll often see a lot of people hopping off before getting a degree. And to be blunt, I'd also rather hire someone with something to show me like a patent or at least some kind of product they built in their spare time than someone with a fancy sheet of paper for their office wall. And that's simply easier to achieve in a field like engineering than in those where you pretty much CANNOT do anything sensible in your field without first of all having a degree to show. I mean, who'd let a medical student perform some surgery?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
I am interested in buying a 3D printer. Does anyone have experience / recommendations? The cheapest I have seen is $500 at http://store.solidoodle.com/ but I'm curious if it is worth spending more for a 'higher quality' printer.
Some people die at 25 and aren't buried until 75. -Benjamin Franklin
There are very old plans out there on how to turn drill press into a very cheesy injection molding machine.
You fabricate a barrel and screw and work the screw advance with the drill press handle.
Not exactly $250 but in that ballpark.
He might have resubmitted the same basic design. Of course I didn't RTFA.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Cathedrals were mostly built by try and error. Most of them wouldn't get past modern day building codes either because of their static. Some still puzzle the collective architecture society because they can't figure out just WHY those things didn't come crumbling down ages ago.
Try and error is where true innovation is. There are simply some things you cannot calculate because they are, well, new. Nobody has done it before and there are no numbers to rely on. The example of that Saturn V rocket was already presented, where they had to come up with completely new technology that simply didn't exist before they invented it.
But yes, the cost of try and error is usually magnitudes higher than when you can simply calculate and predict the results. But sometimes you just cannot.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The diameter of the filament must be 1.75mm, ± 0.05mm
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The local teaching hospital, of course.
If forget the exact date. IIRC sometime in July. Never have a medical procedure during the month that the new residents start. Huge jump in screw-ups that month.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Could you please point to some detailled article about this combustion plate story ?
(I stopped searching when I realized google drives me to your old posts such this one from 2009)
Sorry for the off topic
The woman below replied, "You're in a hot air balloon hovering approximately 30 feet above the ground. You're between 40 and 41 degrees north latitude and between 59 and 60 degrees west longitude."
"You must be an engineer," said the balloonist. "I am," replied the woman, "How did you know?"
"Well," answered the balloonist, "everything you told me is, technically correct, but I've no idea what to make of your information, and the fact is I'm still lost. Frankly, you've not been much help at all. If anything, you've delayed my trip."
The woman below responded, "You must be in Management." "I am," replied the balloonist, "but how did you know?"
"Well," said the woman, "you don't know where you are or where you're going. You have risen to where you are due to a large quantity of hot air. You made a promise which you've no idea how to keep, and you expect people beneath you to solve your problems. The fact is you are in exactly the same position you were in before we met, but now, somehow, it's my fault."
'The tyrant will always find pretext for his tyranny.' - Aesop's Fables
Business comes after they flunk out of Comp Sci. CS was where they went after they flunked out of Engineering.
Not at PSU. Computer Science at PSU was (is?) a controlled major with a minimum GPA. If you were failing in engineering, you weren't going to make the cut in Comp Sci either.
EE didn't have a GPA minimum IIRC, if you made it past EE350 with a passing grade, you were going to be fine. (That class was the class you saved your late drop credits for)
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Accumulating the knowledge so you didn't need trial and error probably took a fair bit of trial and error to start out with though. :)
That's why as an engineer you should consider performing a Failure Modes Effects and Criticality analysis (FMECA). Quite often you can predict the error, and account for it. Sometimes you account for the error by adding in additional maintenance/inspections, other times you have spares, sometimes you perform preventative maintenance, and sometimes you put a net underneath the bridge.
Let's assume your bridge is being constructed from stone (longevity or maintenance reasons), you know that it will eventually erode, crack, and wear out, but you build into your design features which are intended to help delay the failure, or allow for a graceful failure. So instead of designing your bridge to be covered with paint because that would block some of the environment, you forgo the protective paint and leave it exposed to the elements because now you can send a crew to inspect the bridge every 5 years for cracks/erosion/damage which might have been obscured by the paint. While the paint might have extended the life of the bridge by 10 years in ideal situations, being able to inspect the bridge might allow you to discover the crack which would cause a catastrophic failure at life-5 years.
Sometimes you have to accept error as part of the design because correcting that error might compromise other aspects of the design.
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Great to hear at that age, he still inventing stuff...
Perhaps you had to take easy CS track courses for a semester or two before your GPA was good enough to formally be in CS.
I knew a few failed EEs that went on to 3.5+GPAs in CS. They couldn't handle engineering math.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
Many LDS people start at U of U (or another local college/university), then take off 2 years to serve a mission, then return to finish school - this is a very common practice.
"If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear." - Every fascist, ever
spent 5 years at The University of Utah studying engineering? Sorry, but you learn that in your freshman year. Great story, but that part is laughable. As a Mechanical Engineering graduate '93 from WSU I know what the hell I'm talking about, just like a person above me claiming the guy is lying.
Yet it happens all the time. You can start with the pyramids; the bent pyramid is an example where they changed the design halfway through. How about some Italian domes? Look at the gothic support structures because of what they learned. You can look at the Tacoma Narrows Bridge. World Trace Center towers. The Wright Brothers certainly used trial and error.
You avoid errors by following procedure that was put in place to avoid mistakes (trials) of the past.
It's fine to design that way as long as you then rigorously validate the design before building.
Exactly, it is called engineering.
I love Jesus, except for his foreign policy.
Perhaps you had to take easy CS track courses for a semester or two before your GPA was good enough to formally be in CS.
I knew a few failed EEs that went on to 3.5+GPAs in CS. They couldn't handle engineering math.
I don't know what courses were required for your CS department but ours were very heavy in math. Our CS courses were computational mathematics with a side of programming. Mr Maxwell probably tripped them up as long as they could handle linear algebra they could probably get by.
Knowledge = Power
P= W/t
t=Money
Money = Work/Knowledge so the less you know the more you make
He decided he didn't want to take that route, and tinkered instead.
Although I do not recommend that, as just a little knowledge of Mathematics can save you a great deal of time and effort in engineering activities of all types, including software. I can see why he never finished college.
So, although I am similar in that I personally refuse to get any degree because:
1) You are you are forced to have a bank involved if you want to be educated.
2) You are put into a institution, like other crazy people and forced to think exactly the same way, and if you do not you are considered a failure.
3) You are not required to produce a solution to any problem in your community or society to earn this degree, only provide a solution for corporation and human resource departments to screen others who are not in on the Ponzi scheme of banking. (See #1, rinse and repeat.)
With that being said though, I do attend UW-Madison every once in awhile just to make sure I am not totally cynical, just mostly cynical. :-)
But I already have my "degree" in my opinion as I have my own professional practice, I feed myself with the solutions I come up with that people pay me to solve their computing problems and all the time I am competing with B.S., M.S., and PhD's for the same customers. (Mostly winning.)
With the exception I have a nice tidy net worth and no debts far below and above most of these people.
The few jobs I have applied for in my career, most people ask me how is it possible you accomplished all of these things?
(Most seem downright annoyed too...)
To which I reply, "I am not very smart really. Just everyone else is extremely stupid that go to Universities." ;-)
-Hack
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
They could get away with business calculus and obviously didn't get to diff-eq. They took a bunch of sideshow math classes but were weak on fundamentals. To their credit, more then a few recognized the weakness of the required curriculum and took real calculus. Some even took diff-eq.
Linear algebra without diff-eq first is a joke of a course. Like statistics without calculus first. The best they could do was memorize and regurgitate.
The math they took was tough stuff like set theory. I took one of their 'harder' math classes and aced it with very little effort. It was recommended to me as a GPA pad by my adviser, same as econ (a class that flunked out fully 20% of business majors).
Control theory would have made them go cross-eyed. A senior year elective for them was assembler language, we (EEs) got that first semester, freshman year (assuming you weren't taking remedial classes, like intro to programming and pre-calculus.)
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
I have designs for safety related equipment used by the industry for almost 20 years before I got around to completing a degree.
One of my favorite tests was to use a 220Kg hammer (on a pendulum)to smash the competitions stuff against an anvil. Then I made sure my stuff took at least twice as much swing to break, while have fewer, less expensive parts. Fail fast and often, then figure it out.
And those items are still used today.
Because I listened. Both to engineering instructors (with over 250 hour to graduate, I had a broad education) and to old BDIFFF (Been Doin' It For F*****g Forever) people. Hi, Jake!
I learned how to do for a dollar what any damn fool could do for two.
Hey, Mom! Is it beer, yet?
How is that supposed to work? "Excuse me, sir, can I live in your basement?"
::You look up and see an 83 year old man covered in acne puss, screaming like a little girl and running from something that could only be...Pizza the Hutt::
The real path to male liberation
They were not required to take diff-eq or real calculus, we were required to take those plus linear algebra, matrix theory, and an Advances Statistics Class. Looking at the currently required curriculum diff-eq, linear algebra, and the Advance Stats Class are all electives now. Our CS curriculum had the same base classes as the EE students, this was because the CS department moved from Arts and Science to Engineering and was grouped with the EE and Comp E. I'm shocked that those classes are not required any more but I work with EEs and Electro-Magnetics all day so my view might be skewed.
Knowledge = Power
P= W/t
t=Money
Money = Work/Knowledge so the less you know the more you make
I think you are correct, perhaps his school was different, but I remember many of the CS students at PSU would be dual-majoring in Math.
However, PSU had the Comp Sci, Comp Eng, and Elec Eng degrees very tightly coupled with Math. My study group involved students from all three disciplines (though I didn't know any people taking math as their primary degree). But we all took the same basic courses, especially when it came to Math. And for Electrical Engineering/Computer Engineering I think the only difference between my degree and an EE degree was EE351 vs EE350. Everything else was CSE/EE courses. (Granted I tended towards the EE side of CompEng since I was more interested in sensors and robotics. But I ended up taking the senior capstone courses for both Comp Sci and Comp Eng just to prove to myself that I could. (All I needed my final semester was Senior Design Project so I filled the remaining time with the Comp Sci capstone, CSE477 (VLSI design), CSE472(embedded systems), and an emmersive environments course. Yeah I could have just taken the one course but I'm an engineer, that stuff is fun to me!)
Looking at the current courses for a senior at PSU, I'm seeing a lot of this: CMPSC 451 (MATH 451),CMPSC 455 (MATH 455), CMPSC 467 (MATH 467). So as you can see, the comp sci courses at PSU are so heavily math focused that they actually can count for math credit.
The point is as a Computer Engineering student at PSU, there is no way in hell that I would consider Computer Science as an alternative if I had trouble with engineering math, because if anything, computer science at PSU was even more math focused than engineering!
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Perhaps our largest recyclable plastic resource is the North Pacific Gyre, or as it is rapidly becoming better known, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, an enormous 'plastic soup' mass of marine litter trapped in the swirling vortex of currents of the Pacific Ocean. Recent studies estimate an average of 46,000 pieces of plastic litter every single square kilometre of the world’s oceans. The number of plastic pieces in the Pacific Ocean has tripled in the last ten years to what the UN estimates at one hundred million tons worldwide, with current trajectories predicting this figure to double in the next ten years. A ‘fishing for litter’ campaign involved fisherman from Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands and the UK who returned all litter caught in their net to the shore, landing some five hundred tonnes from sixty boats in 2004. By diversifying modern fishermen’s skills to restore our ocean environment, it is hoped that schemes like this will help regenerate Britain’s once strong fishing community. Makerbot support the 3D4D Challenge, a competition that awarded Washington Open Object Fabricators (WOOF) a prize of $100,000 to develop a recycling process that will enable waste plastic to be used as filament for 3D printing machines. The project is focussing on recycling high-density polyethylene, the plastic used in milk cartons, but the requests for finished products have been slightly different to what might have been expected. You could be forgiven for thinking that many Africans would want more mass-produced items such as buckets and plastic bowls. However the project coordinators doubt that a 3D-printed bucket—even one made from milk bottles—will ever be cheaper than one made in a factory. The surprising alternative to buckets is actually boats. Most small vessels in West Africa are made from hardwood trees, such as teak, that are becoming increasingly scarce. Making them from waste plastic instead is an environmental win/win: rare species are conserved and less rubbish thrown away. The team estimated that if they had printed a boat from commercial plastic filament it would have cost them $800. Instead, 250 clean, empty milk bottles set them back just $3.20.