Some slides from yesterday’s thesis presentation. More images after the jump.

Its the mid way point of my thesis project and yesterday was the chance for Digital Fabrication Thesis Studio to present our current explorations and design processes. The panel gave a varied set of comments, it was good to run through the project with non tech based tutors from the urban and theory fields. Some questions were cast on the viability on the use of digital tools implemented, which was expected when one presents anything relatively new in design technology . All in all the critique was quite a confidence booster.

As a personal quest to distill ones communication techniques, i culled a large amount of detail since i figured that majority of the panel (the larger the more true) lose interest in the numbers game early on, therefore providing self explanatory images (or models) became a more powerful way to communicate your ideas rather than information overloading your audience.

Relating new processes with traditional linear strategies in design became a strategy itself to bring forward alternative ideas

Using a projector to blow up close up perspectives also gives one an advantage compared to the usual printed media. (As you can tell, i’m all for using technology to help)

Another aspect to the design were physical models, which were effective in giving the panel a sense of scale and space but also suggestive ideas on fabrication. 30-40 percent of the presentation went into giving a run down on the fabrication process of the models (which one inherently spends alot of time on whatever the architectural issue is, so you might as well display your effort)

also for a self confessed tech nut, it became a conscious effort not to overwhelm your panel with too much tech terminology, although lightly sprinkling some wordy terms like “finite element method linear static stress analysis ” threads the line between impressive and confusing.

All in all , there was positive feedback on moving to the next stage. Its been a long tiring month, but it was worth it. I’m quite excited now and after a short break its time to follow through with one’s ideas.  Execution and finishing is often much harder than the initial idea but always much more fulfilling as an end result.

On to the next stage of thesis work!

Winning entry for DuPont + igloo’s Changing the Face – Casa Poporului. Idea sparked off with Raresh Dragoiu of drr_____ fame.

Jury was composed of:

prof. arh. Dorin Stefan (DSBA)

arh. Bruno Andresoiu (igloomedia)

Anne-Line Citrene (DuPont France)

Gabi Rottes (DuPont Germany)

Some pictures from the exhibition, which can be seen at the University Underground Passage until the 7th of December (09):

Qualified: Having complied with the specific requirements or precedent conditions

Certify: To attest as being true or as represented or as meeting a standard

Many companies are claiming “certified welding procedures meeting the requirements of AWS and ASME” in their literature and on their websites in hopes of expanding their place in the welding industry to include ASME repairs and new fabrication. Having “certified welding procedures and welders” is only one step in being a “qualified” ASME fabrication facility. In order for a facility to be a legitimate ASME shop they must hold a current certificate and stamp issued by the ASME (http://cstools.asme.org/holdersearch/ ). The ASME only issues a fabrication certificate and a stamp after they have taken the time to review the fabricators quality system that states in writing how the fabricator intends on meeting the applicable ASME code. The welding portion of the QC system is only a small part; the QC system must also include provisions for engineering, procurement, material control, non-conformances, non destructive testing, post weld heat treatment, calibration of test equipment, and data reports and record retention. These are only a few of the sections considered the minimum for a quality control system. In addition to the quality system the fabricator must have a current agreement with a third party inspection agency (such as One Beacon America Insurance) to review and ensure the QC system is being followed. The inspection agency along with a representative of ASME audits the fabricators QC system every three years prior to renewing the certificate. These requirements are in place to make sure that fabricators have controls in place to ensure the safety of the public. Although there may be many fabricators which utilize welding procedures that meet ASME specifications and certify their welders to those procedures customers should take care to ask any potential fabricators for a copy of the quality control manual before they execute a purchase order for welding on ASME certified, stamped product.

www.precision-pipe.com

Hi,

New job for Estimation Engineer – Jeddah, Saudi Arabia

A global leader in steel manufacturing industry specialized in design, fabrication and supply of structural steel, power transmission and telecommunication towers; storage tanks, pressure vessels and similar products for Oil and Gas and Petrochemical industries need competent personnel for the following positions for its operations headquarted in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.Common for all positions these skills (presentation skill, computer proficiency, sound product knowledge, excellent communication skill in English and interpersonal and human relation skill) are required.

Qualification:

Experience:

• 5 years experience in estimation within an EPC company.

Skills Required:

• Fully conversant with international codes and specifications for materials (such as API 650; API 2000; ASME; AISC; ASTM)
• Extensive exposure to engineering design, procurement and contracting in steel industry.
• Capable of analyzing project scope of work, client requirements, BOQ, project milestones and specifications from the supplied bid documents.
• capable of preparing detailed cost sheets (capable of integrating engineering, procurement, construction and delivery tasks into detailed costing).
• Excellent statistical and numerical skill; conversant with tendering process.

Please send us your latest updated  resume with current, expected salary details and  required time to join to  kbs@kbsconsultants.com

Further Information:

KBS Consultants
Flat H,Kulothungan Apts,
No, 5 Natesan Road
Ashoknagar,
Chennai 600 083.
India
Phone: +91-44 2489 5341 / 2371 9622

Visit Our Sites:

International jobs: http://www.jobsearchworld.com
SAP ERP Jobs : http://www.jobsvista.com
Core Engineering Jobs : http://www.gotachance.com
Technology Jobs : http://www.kbsconsultants.com
India Jobs : http://www.kbsconsultants.org.in

There is a growing interest in self-replicating machines. Beginning with the RepRap project, and now continuing into RepLab, the open source FabLab, there is a serious effort to build machines which can build themselves.

It is a laudable goal. A machine which can make itself can also make an unimaginable variety of other machines, each unique if desired, and promises an era of material abundance and freedom from scarcity. Pursuing that goal, however, has shown the goal itself to be somewhat unclear. This is an attempt to remedy this situation.

What is replication? The production of a replica, but what is a replica? The original meaning was that of a duplicate of a work of art, properly one produced by the original artist.

I propose we define replication precisely, as the transcription of a template into a physical form. This definition is perhaps more general than we are used to, but I believe it accurately captures the use of the word.

Let’s take the test case: an artist producing a replica of her own painting. The original painting may have taken many months, while the replica may take only a day or two at most. The artist is using tools, a brush and palette, and materials, canvas and paint, to make a copy of a template, the original work.

How about DNA self-replication? We have a toolchain of proteins, from DNA Transcriptase on, which transcribe a template, the DNA, into a copy of itself, using materials (ATP, other nucleic acids, caffeine if there’s some in the organism in question) both extrinsic to the cell and fabricated within it.

Note that in the first case the template resembles the result, while in second case, if we consider the result a new cell rather than new DNA, the result doesn’t resemble the template at all. This is immaterial to the act of replication; a high-resolution inkjet printer and a scanner could replicate the artist’s original work, faster and more accurately than she could, and in this case the template would be stored as bits within a computer.

The rest of this discussion will focus on replication in the context of human-tool interaction.

This means replication of an object, from a template, through the combined efforts of at least one human with at least one tool. We call this a ‘tool’ rather than a ‘machine’ for greater generality.

The earliest form of replication was a human using a tool to make a copy of an object. Our paradigm case for this is a scribe copying a scroll. A human can’t do this without the materials (paper, ink) and tools (quill, sharpener) required for the act. With those tools, a human can copy a scroll in a certain amount of time.

A few observations here: the tool enables, the human works. A faster tool, let us say a pen rather than a chisel on stone, allows for faster work, but more copies will always take more human time. We will call this Type 1 replication. It is characterized by modest gains in efficiency for mass production and poor scaling characteristics.

A second form of replication came about when humans began using tools to automate aspects of production. By investing time in setup, many copies can be replicated much faster. The work is still done by humans, with tools; but by doing the work intelligently, many copies can be made with comparatively low effort. We call this Type 2 replication.

The paradigm case for Type 2 is the printing press. By investing considerable effort in building a press, casting type, and laying out a document, one is rewarded by the ability to print as many copies as one wants, with speed and reliability which increase over time. Type 2 replication has good scaling characteristics and rewards mass production. It is characteristic of the Industrial Age.

Type 2 production next evolved in two directions the first of which we’ll call Type 2a: significant setup time followed by fully automated production. Newspaper presses work in this fashion, although the most recent ones are Type 3. Type 2a has significantly better scaling characteristics than Type 2, and mostly displaces it when developed.

Type 2b replication is where there is significant tool investment, but negligible setup time and non-automatic production. The matching paradigm for this is a Xerox machine, though like newspaper presses these have become increasingly Type 3 over time. An early Xerox would make a copy of anything that fit on the glass, or even a hundred copies, but a human had to stand around feeding it sheets and doing things like collation by hand. This has poor scaling qualities, being labor intensive, but it favors customization over mass production.

Type 3 replication has negligible setup times and fully automatic production. Our paradigm case here is a laser printer. Even a desktop laser printer can print replicas of stored data, each different, for many hours without needing attention. The factory scale printers can make entire books without human intervention. Type 3 replication is characteristic of the Information Age, or Industrial Revolution 2.0.

Type 3 has good scaling characteristics and rewards customization over mass production. One can make an arbitrarily large number of copies off any given template, but there’s little to no advantage over using many different templates.

These are the essential distinctions:

Many FabLab technologies, such as laser cutters, hobby-scale 3d printers, and CNC mills, are Type 2b. What’s interesting about 2b replication is that it’s often a small step away from being Type 3, needing only, for example, a small conveyor belt. I hope that by drawing attention to the radical difference in scaling quality between Type 2b replication and Type 3 replication, I can encourage open-source hardware developers to strive for Type 3 tools whenever possible.

A Type 2b tool is a creative enabler, while a Type 3 tool is both a creative enabler and an economically disruptive force, because it can compete effectively with 2a mass-production technologies. It also frees human labor for other pursuits, which is an important goal for many.

So this is replication; what of self-replication? This is the second concept I hope to make clear with this essay. Self-replication is not different from replication, except that, in the context of human-tool interaction, that which is being replicated is a part of the tool itself. I refer to this as recursion, because that’s what it is.

Note that there are several Type 1 replicators with a high degree of possible recursion. The lathe is a classic example: one can hand-turn many of the components for a lathe on itself, and even bootstrap a lathe by building the spindle and using it to make other components. A kiln is another example, since a kiln can be used to fire refractory bricks to make another kiln. In fact I might argue that a kiln exhibits the highest recursion of any Type 1 replicator, in that a kiln can be nothing but stacked bricks and a fire, and the bricks can all come from a kiln.

Note, however, that this still has poor scaling qualities, though it favors custom production. The Dave Gingery approach of contributing massive human inputs to a bootstrapped machine shop is noble, but it will never be an economic force. It is simply too easy to identify the main shapes needed, turn them over to Type 2 or 2a production, and swamp the market.

The RepRap project faces exactly this dilemma. RepRap knocked the bottom out of 3-d printing, but it did this mostly by making the MakerBot possible. The RepRap is a 2b replicator, which requires human tending during the entirety of the recursion process. This makes it easier and cheaper to simply make a chassis on a faster 2b tool, namely an Epilog laser cutter that NYC Resistor happens to already own, and sell that. If the RepRap were a Type 3, with an automatic conveyor, it might be a different story, since a RepRap could then print its chassis parts at a rate of a few complete sets a week with minimal human inputs. For that matter, a MakerBot with a conveyor belt would be a Type 3 replicator, albiet one exhibiting less recursion than a Darwin or a Mendel.

Let me conclude by suggesting that the RepLab project needs to place priority on Type 3 replication, not on a maximum level of recursion for the whole system. Recursion, I think I’ve shown, is no great trick if it takes a human hand-holding the machine through the whole process, since this is how machine tools have always been built, on other machine tools.

The power of Industrial Revolution 2.0 lies in developing machines which exhibit Type 3 replication. If the outputs of those machines are sufficiently general than the toolset as a suite can exhibit economically significant recursion. An example would be an open-source toolchain for automated printing and assembly of PCB boards. Such a suite would be able to print its own control hardware in addition to any other circuit that can be designed and mounted with a pick-and-place, which is most of them.

The RepLab project should focus on tools exhibiting Type 3 replication for a variety of economically significant goods. Recursion is an emergent result which can lend exponential momentum to the deployment of RepLab technology. By approaching the project goals in this order, we have a rational approach to an open source hardware platform for Industrial Revolution 2.0.

1. Le principal critère de qualité et d’efficacité d’une solution d’argent colloïdal est la taille de ses particules. Il y a une relation étroite entre la taille des particules et l’efficacité du produit.
2. Les particules colloïdales doivent être suffisamment fines pour ne pas s’agglutiner entre elles. En effet, au-delà d’une certaine taille, elles sont attirées les unes vers les autres et cherchent à s’unir. Ce phénomène peut alors faire “boule de neige”, jusqu’au moment où l’argent précipite et se dépose au fond de la solution sous l’action de la pesanteur. Bien sûr, plus il y a d’argent qui précipite, plus le produit perd de son efficacité.
3. Outre le phénomène de précipitation mentionné ci-dessus, la taille des particules détermine aussi leur surface de contact avec les micro-organismes, et celle-ci détermine à son tour une grande partie de la valeur thérapeutique du produit. Plus les particules sont fines, plus leur surface de contact est étendue et plus elles seront à même de pénétrer et de se disperser dans les tissus. En d’autres termes, pour augmenter la capacité germicide d’une quantité d’argent donnée, il faut exposer à l’eau une surface de métal maximum. Ceci s’obtient en fragmentant l’argent en particules les plus fines possibles. Ainsi donc, un produit de haute qualité contiendra un maximum de particules de la taille la plus petite possible.

The book that isn’t but ought to be:

“How to Conduct a Cattle Raid” by Medb and Aillil of Connacht, with a forward by CuChulainn, author of “How to Stop a Cattle Raid When Your Enemy is Stupid.”

Sorry for the lack of post the past week, interim thesis presentations are coming up and this juggling of a research job while getting a masters thing leaves me with little time to update this site.(i’ll be back to daily postings soon! i’ve bookmarked alot! and thanks for the email recommendations! i’ll be posting them soon!) Here’s an update of a diagram, working models and some of my thesis mates, Ahana and Chuan Dian.

more next time!

Hi,

New job for Business Development Manager – Jeddah, Saudi Arabia

A global leader in steel manufacturing industry specialized in design, fabrication and supply of structural steel, power transmission and telecommunication towers; storage tanks, pressure vessels and similar products for Oil and Gas and Petrochemical industries need competent personnel for the following positions for its operations headquarted in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.Common for all positions these skills (presentation skill, computer proficiency, sound product knowledge, excellent communication skill in English and interpersonal and human relation skill) are required.

Qualification:

• Univ. degree in Business Administration, preferably MBA.

Experience:

• 7 to 10 yrs experience in the occupation in similar industrial environment.

Skills Required:

• Marketing and intelligence skill.
• Statistical and market analytical skill.
• Client relationship management and service orientation.
• Capable of managing large client base.

Please send us your latest updated  resume with current, expected salary details and  required time to join to kbs@kbsconsultants.com

Further Information:

KBS Consultants
Flat H,Kulothungan Apts,
No, 5 Natesan Road
Ashoknagar,
Chennai 600 083.
India
Phone: +91-44 2489 5341 / 2371 9622

Visit Our Sites:

International jobs: http://www.jobsearchworld.com
SAP ERP Jobs : http://www.jobsvista.com
Core Engineering Jobs : http://www.gotachance.com
Technology Jobs : http://www.kbsconsultants.com
India Jobs : http://www.kbsconsultants.org.in

Hi,

New job for Branch Manager (for Eastern Province) – Jeddah, Saudi Arabia

A global leader in steel manufacturing industry specialized in design, fabrication and supply of structural steel, power transmission and telecommunication towers; storage tanks, pressure vessels and similar products for Oil and Gas and Petrochemical industries need competent personnel for the following positions for its operations headquarted in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia.Common for all positions these skills (presentation skill, computer proficiency, sound product knowledge, excellent communication skill in English and interpersonal and human relation skill) are required.

Qualification:

Fabrication System:

Molds for Casting:

Module pseudocode:

‘ Draw Curves’

‘ Draw Srf from Planar Curves’

‘ Rebuild Srf U(10) V (10)’

‘ Turn Control Points on’

‘ Reposition Control Points in x, y, and z axis’

‘ Rebuild Surface U(10) V(10)’

‘ Extrude Surface’

‘ Cap Surface’

First, an update on a couple of modifications I made to the Soapbox.

1 – I put in a seat back to support the rider in those crazy curves:

2 – I had a friendly machine shop weld the freewheeling cogs so that they won’t freewheel anymore:

The reasons for the first of the above are perfectly understandable by anyone; for the second one they may not be so obvious: it’s all about control.

From my little experience with the Soapbox PoC so far, I have gathered two conclusions:

1 – the current controls are extremely non-linear; both the brakes and the accelerators lack proportionality in response and stability in behavior.

2 – even if the controls were absolutely linear, I doubt that any average human being is capable of controlling such a vehicle above very small speeds. Our neuro-motor capabilities are just not up to the challenge.

So, as fun as it is now, it is time to hack the controls of this trike to pieces and re-engineer them into something more usable.

Analyzing the real-world application brings up 3 main problems:

1 – Differential Steering: to steer the vehicle, we need to regulate the speed difference between the two wheels very precisely, and this difference decreases non-linearly with vehicle speed;

2 – Traction Control: the same old basic problem every kind of wheeled vehicle has – applying as much torque on the floor as possible while accelerating or decelerating without skidding – that’s why they invented ABS and ASR, to save us from the messy floors we put ourselves over;

3 – Stability Control: in such a vehicle where the center of gravity rests behind the only wheel axle, the probability of over-steering is quite large; therefore independent wheel torque control to counteract body rotation (also known as ESP) is essential for any real-world usage.

So yes, I’m trying to build what is probably the world’s first Trike with ABS + ASR + ESP.

There is another fundamental design problem which is also linked to the control equation: if the center of mass is located too close to the front wheel axle, the vehicle may flip over the axle during hard braking and land the rider on its head. If the center of mass is too far back, then the over-steering becomes a big problem even for low speed and long curve radius. To solve this delicate balance, I plan to locate the center of mass adequately close to the front and also rely on the ESP control above described, among other small details.

In the coming weeks, I’ll be hacking up a new electronic control system for the Soapbox. A digital one, of course. Firmware is a lot more flexible than analog circuitry.

This is why welding the freewheels stiff was an essential step: I want the electric motors to have full control of the wheel speed and torque, and so I needed a direct transmission. Exactly how this system will be made, I don’t know and is still under evaluation; but I do know what kind of control algorithm I want to run on it.

There will be a logic or virtual controller for each of the three problems stated above: Steering, Traction, and Stability. You can see them in the diagram below.

This diagram was built with Scicoslab (an open source alternative to Matlab/Simulink) and is a very simplified version of the full simulation I’m working on. The PID blocks are just placeholders, they don’t really have to be PID controllers; in fact, I intend to use Hysteretic control for the motor currents, and possibly Fuzzy control for all else. I hate PIDs.

I’ll be posting news about this later, when it has enough consistency.