Make It or Break It

Six people sit around the table for the Wilmington makerspace’s first Arduino meetup of the year, on a day so bitterly cold that the local school district delayed classes..

Three of us are here for the first time. Paul is a serious postdoc from the University of Delaware, interested in using the Arduino in combination with pH sensors for his research. Jason, who works for eBay, drove 45 minutes from Pennsylvania to ask about using the programmable microcontroller for a hydroponics project. I pull out my own jumble of wires and 3D printed parts and tell my new acquaintances that I’m trying to build a mini robot. Jason answers my question about controlling multiple motors at the same time, and Paul suggests that I add a speaker for it to say ‘kill all humans.’

The two-year-old group, officially titled “Barrel of Makers,” just found meeting space a couple of months ago. A makerspace, a close cousin to the hackerspace, is a community space equipped with tools for making -- ideally -- just about anything. The “make” terminology was first used following the launch of Make: Magazine in 2005, a niche publication focused on DIY projects and the tools that could be used to make them. Since then, the brand expanded to encompass kits, books, and Maker Faires, events where artists, engineers, and tinkerers demo projects they have created.

Jessica Taylor, the co-founder of Barrel of Makers, got the idea to start a makerspace in Wilmington after attending a Maker Faire in New York City. A former art student, Taylor expected to spend all her time in the art section. Instead, she found herself taken with the tech exhibits. Now, she teaches soldering workshops to kids out of the space in Wilmington. On the night of the meetup, she shows me how to use a wirestripper.

The Wilmington makerspace is bare bones. The modest space the group occupies above a shabby athletic center was the product of a city government initiative to support entrepreneurship, and is only leased temporarily. Barrel of Makers owns just one 3D printer, a temperamental MakerBot that Taylor and her husband built themselves from a kit after soliciting donations in exchange for a promise to pass the machine around.

Makerspaces come in all shapes and sizes. Twenty-five miles by train from Wilmington, the premiere makerspace in Philadelphia is a 21,000 foot workshop downtown called NextFab. NextFab’s two story facility is all high ceilings and wide-open spaces, complete with a polished reception area and a kitchenette. There is a full woodshop, a walk-in paint booth, dozens of 3D printers of all varieties, a huge CNC machine that carves out designs with high powered streams of water, and one of the only publicly available pick-and-place machines in the country. All this does not come cheap -- a standard membership costs about $250 a month. NextFab, like TechShop and several other branded makerspaces, is a for-profit company and demonstrates the reality that having nicer tools costs more. It also limits the number of people that can afford to use a space.

Still, my tour guide Marcella points out that members can get their money’s worth just by using some of the space’s more expensive software programs. Compared to what using similar tools cost 10 or 20 years earlier, NextFab’s hefty price tag begins to look like a bargain.

3D printers, in combination with other computer-aided desktop fabrication tools like CNC machines, laser engravers, and 3D scanners, have been central to the maker movement. The availability of these tools at relatively low costs vastly expanded the range of what hobbyists and tinkerers can make without having to sacrifice too much time or money. Ten years ago, having a prototype made would involve paying someone to make a 3D model, paying to get an injection mould made, and shelling out even more cash to get the product manufactured. Now, a complete novice can design something using CAD software, upload it to a 3D printer, and hold teh physical product within a few hours. In combination with programmable microcontrollers like the Arduino, technically inclined makers can put together all kinds of gadgets, including robots, wireless connected smart objects, and even prosthetics. Within the last few years a number of major entrepreneurial projects have come out of makerspaces, most notably Square Inc. Co-founder Jack McKelvey built the first 50 prototypes of the company’s signature credit card reader on a CNC machine at a TechShop makerspace in Menlo Park, California.

McKelvey’s style of entrepreneurial spirit is not limited to spaces in the famously startup-crazy Bay Area. In 2013, Syracuse University senior Ben Marggraf was given an assignment for an entrepreneurship class to come up with a problem to solve. As an engineering student he did a lot of 3D modeling, but working with 3D objects on a 2D screen frustrated him. He started to think about the movie Ironman, and how Tony Stark could just reach and manipulate the holograms in his lab. “I thought, why can’t we just use our hands to do something like that?” Marggraf says. Two years later Marggraf’s company has a name (‘Contact’), a slogan (‘Feel the unreal’), and a neat $10,000 in startup capital from a university-sponsored pitch competition. But more importantly, Marggraf and his partners Tim Meyer and Tom Buchanan have a fully functioning prototype: a glove than can be used to control a hand in virtual space. The team, all bioengineering students, built and programmed the hand using Arduino and 3D printed parts fabricated at the Syracuse University campus makerspace. Marggraf describes the makerspace as the team’s headquarters. “It’s a huge asset,” he says.

Marggraf’s partner Buchanan adds, “And having John here. He’s a wizard.” The man Buchanan is referring to is John Magicaro, a middle-aged part-time musician with a ponytail who knows everything there is to know about putting things together. He sewed his wife’s own wedding dress, maintains a huge garden, and makes his own maple syrup. With the exception of a few years spent touring with his band, Magicaro has worked in the AV department at SU since the ‘70s. A few decades ago, he was fixing VCR tapes and projectors. Now, he puts together and maintains the cutting-edge machines at the makerspace, incidentally located at a former nightclub where Magicaro’s band played in 1979 (he has the poster hung up in his office). “I’m a guy that tinkers and builds stuff,” he says. “Since I was born.”

‘Maker’ is a relatively recent term, but people like Magicaro have always existed, tweaking and tinkering and taking things apart and putting them back together. Makerspaces offer a place for these people to get together and share tools and ideas, much like the Tech Model Railroad Club at MIT in the ‘60s, or the legendary Homebrew Computer Club in the Bay Area in the ‘70s. But part of what makes current maker communities different from hobbyist groups of the past are the online spaces that live alongside their brick-and-mortar counterparts.

“I think that ultimately it’s the Internet ultimately that’s the most helpful,” says John Baichtal, a blogger for Make magazine and author of 10 how-to books on topics ranging from Arduino based robots and DIY Drones to cool tricks for hacking your bike. “You can have groups of people who are interested in very specialized kinds of making.”

Baichtal recently published a book titled The Cult of Lego about the adult Lego community. He describes how enthusiasts often go through what they label a “dark period” where they stop tinkering with Legos because they worry about being too old to play with toys. Finding an online community with a similar interest can bring that dark period to a close. In some cases, the growth of niche communities can create demand for products that would be too outlandish for mainstream markets. Chris Anderson’s book Makers: The New Industrial Revolution recounts the origin story of Will Chapman’s company BrickArms, which goes where the Lego corporation is too family-oriented to venture -- he designs and manufactures weapons for Legos. When Chapman’s sons wanted to replicate a WWII battle in Lego, Chapman designed a few replicas on CAD software and printed them out on a desktop CNC machine. As it turns out, Lego AK-47s are enough in demand for Chapman to quit his job as a software engineer and ship his Lego arsenal to six different countries.

Anderson’s own personal narrative is also a strong testament to the power of the internet. After putting together a Lego autopilot for his son’s toy helicopter, the former Wired EIC started a website called DIYDrones.com for fellow drone hobbyists. Through the site he connected with a man named Jordi Munoz who had shared a particularly cool Arduino helicopter project. Munoz, who as it turned out was a 19-year-old with a high-school education and a so-so command of English, would eventually team up with Anderson to found 3D Robotics, now a multimillion dollar company. For the humble club meeting that gathers above the gym in downtown Wilmington, the web has been integral to connecting with new members. Taylor says most people who show up find the group through Barrel of Maker’s listings on Meetup.com. That’s how I ended up here, and the same goes for Paul and Jason. Jason mentions that he has heard talk about starting a makerspace in Kennett Square, his hometown in Pennsylvania. After about an hour, we pack up our things and bundle up to head out into the night. I leave with more than I came with: I’ve picked up a coil of wire, a couple of business cards and more than a couple of ideas for what to takle for my next project.