FABtotum on air!

 

FABtotum will be featured for a couple of minutes – August 22, 2013 on national TV, first channel 8.30 PM (GMT+2).
Piero Angela, the host of SuperQuark (a 18-year long running scientific show) is, among with his recurring guests such as Paco Lanciano, a renowed science journalist and an inspiration for millions of kids, as much I would call him the Carl Sagan of Italy.

Don’t miss the show! Along with FABtotum, many other startups and projects from the business incubator of the Politecnico di Milano University.

53:20 mark

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FABtotum: a brief background story

The following post was originally a brief presentation I wrote as an introduction to personal fabrication and social/technological aspects of it.
In this presentation I discussed the origins of computer assisted machining from a social standpoint, tracing a line to the present and the future.
This “documentary” is a tribute to the work being done worldwide in the field of rapid prototyping, personal fabrication and open source development.

I thought it would be nice to share, enjoy!

Read more

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FAbtotum wins S2P competition

Another update, this time good news!
We submitted FABtotum to the Switch2product (S2P for short) competition at the Politecnico di Milano University in Milan,a contest with the goal of promoting innovative products and business ideas.
FABtotum won the first prize and will be incubated in the business incubator (POLIHUB) of the university.
We are really proud of this result and we are looking forward to accomplish the next steps of this adventure!

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[Almost] Done…

Whoops!
We have experienced yesterday some major server problems that ended with us loosing some data from the mysql database, including the June,July and August updates.
We are however working hard to be able to show the machine and other things by the end of September,so we are not going to write down the old updates,instead the website will be improved and a documentation page will be added ASAP.

Thanks for your patience

the Fabtotum Team

 

 

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More planning! More machining! More testing!

hi there!
In the last couple of weeks we had some hard time keeping up with our daily life,so things slowed down a bit. Z axis is completed and tested,main frame is completed and tested,Y and X axis are 75% in the making, still  to be tested properly.

We took some time to organize the archives,document and print out all component specifications and give each of them a unique code id for quick reference.
Number of parts is pretty low (24) but many of them are similar to each other but with important differences,especially the X-Y axis parts, so we needed a way to easily recognize them.
In the next version we will adress this to reduce fabrication and assembly times.

We successfully tested Z speeds up to 2500mm/m with +/- 0.0001 mm teorical precision.
The testing electronics setup consist in a 12v 11A switching power supply, an Arduino Mega and a RAMP shield with 4 Pololus.
We are going to test everithing with standard Pulse/Dir electronics too,to make some comparisons with standard industrial/semi-professional CNC machines.
While we want to take some more time before showing the enclosed frame,we want to share some other custom components that we fabricated in the last couple of weeks.

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A Weekend of hard work..

Hi there!
it’s been just a couple of days since the last update,but Fabtotum it’s shaping fast!
We are working right now finishing the last parts and testing some semi-automated production solutions like automated aluminium pipe cutting for the motor mount we did a week ago.Let me take a brief moment to introduce you to our small lab (It’s actually Marco’s basement even if he thinks it’s a hi-tech rapid prototipying underground R&D facility).
The CNC machine you can see there it’s a custom made 3-axis CNC.It’s running with Mach3 software (occasionally emc2 too) to cut on a 10 mm thick Aluminium alloy plate.
It performs very well if you don’t rush too much,which is always a bad idea.
Marco is checking the machine while it does it’s job, with his hand on the emergency stop button, just in case…
On the background Giovanni is using the drill press to create the sockets for the countersunk screws on some of the pieces already made.
Since we don’t have a professional CNC setup (lack of tool change,just 3 axis) some stuff has to be made by hand.The lab it’s not that big (overall we have 35 sqm) and it gets easily messy,but it’s enought for our needs right now.
We have almost every tool we can ask for,but no seats or relax zone, yet 🙁

We are working very hard to meet our self-imposed deadlines,hopefully we will be able to share more of the project itself the next weeks.
During the week we primarily lives our lives and plan the next batch of parts,the next steps in the assembly process,preparing CAM NC and so on. In every spare time we have we rush in the lab and kill ourself with work.We end up exhausted but satisfied,and more excited for what we have to do next. It’s literally addicting…

Twitters!
Make sure to follow us on http://twitter.com/Fabtotum  we will start updating that too with small but tasty insights,plus you’ll be able to post us your feedback.

Cheers!

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Enter the Fabtotum

Hello World.

Fabtotum.cc  is the home of the Fabtotum project, a 3D rapid prototyping  machine. Yup, a 3D printer.
Fabtotum is being developed by a bunch of young folks here in Milan, Italy, sharing the vision of other projects such as the Arduino board (the Arduino team is based in Turin, not far from Milan,) and the RepRap project,from Bath university’s Professor Adrian Bowyer and his team.

Fabtotum stands as “factotum”, a latin word composed of facere (to do) and totum (everything). In the common language a Factotum is someone you would ask for help in any field,usually basic tasks,including humile jobs.Fabtotum however is not a renaissance servant,It’s a low-cost,hi-tech,computer-controlled, 3-Axis machine capable of delivering a set of tools for hobbyst makers, architects,  designers or developers.
This project will be open-hardware under the Creative Commons license (we are still figuring what to adopt for our purposes),and we will embrace a distributed development model.
This is extremely important as we want to make sure that we will be able to keep improving the machine itself while a common framework is used.
Being an Open Source hardware, Fabtotum can be replicated in more than one way, can be built by you or can be purchased too.

But let’s not rush this brief intro,more informations will be posted soon on this blog.
A lot of work is being done right now,right here, and once a finished we will be able to show more than just excitement for this project.

Marco

Head Designer, Fabtotum project.

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