83-Year-Old Inventor Wins $40,000 3D Printing Competition 146
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.”'"
Engineering isn't a secret club (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm glad some people still attempt projects like these without engineering degrees.
Re:Engineering isn't a secret club (Score:5, Funny)
If he used common sense then he's obviously not an engineer.
Re:Engineering isn't a secret club (Score:5, Interesting)
If he used common sense then he's obviously not an engineer.
That's right. If he were an engineer, he would have thought of all the reasons why it couldn't be done. Whereas by being "uneducated" he was too ignorant to know that it couldn't be done.
Years ago, my dad worked for a businessman that only had a high school diploma but an idea for a medical device. The engineers said it couldn't be done. The biz guy told them to STFU or get out . The engineers finally figured it out by trial and error because what they were doing was never taught in engineering schools.
The biz guy made tens of millions. The engineers got their $25K/year and laid off after the project was done - this was back in the 70s.
I can't remember the guy's name.
Re:Engineering isn't a secret club (Score:4, Interesting)
Reminds me of that poster on my ex-boss wall. "Aerodynamics say the bumblebee cannot fly. The bumblebee doesn't know and flies instead".
He, too, wasn't someone with a pretty degree. But what he had was a lot of knowledge of human nature. He looked at an applicant and within a few minutes it was stay or go. No matter the degree, he did take a look at your previous experience, though, but even that wasn't too important, he actually went more by his "gut feeling" as he called it. I don't know what exactly it was, but it allowed him to assemble one of the best and inventive groups I was ever part of.
Odd fellow. Later he once told me one of the reasons he hired me was that I appeared in jeans and pullover for the interview, since he believed when a tech guy tries to hide in a suit he doesn't believe enough in his own skills to get him the job. And I have to admit, I made that part of my own interview strategy. 'cause he's right, odd as it may seem. If a guy shows up for an interview in everyday clothes, it usually means that he's quite confident that his skills can land him the job despite his attire.
Re:Engineering isn't a secret club (Score:4, Interesting)
Reminds me of that poster on my ex-boss wall. "Aerodynamics say the bumblebee cannot fly. The bumblebee doesn't know and flies instead".
Sadly for your ex-boss and anti-scientists everywhere, the aerodynamicists (be they scientists or engineers) were quite right: the bumble bee could not fly if one assumed rigid wings. Their research led to greater understanding of a rather interesting organic control system which produces significant lift.
Re:Engineering isn't a secret club (Score:5, Interesting)
No, you missed the point entirely. Science never thought it was impossible. Science quite correctly proved flight with rigid wings was impossible. Science went on to conclude, correctly, that since bumblebees fly, their wings aren't rigid.
Please stop promulgating that teabagger meme that "scientists [have] an established mindset." As a very funny British comedian once said, "of course science doesn't have all the answers. If it did, we'd be done."
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I think you changed the argument when you made engineers into scientists. He was trying to say that if you tried to get engineers to build a flying bumblebee-plane the engineers could only have used trial and error to figure it out. There was no existing solution for the problem they could template from.
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Nonsense. Engineers have the bumble bee itself to template from.
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The point is that a scientist doing back-of-the-evelope calculations from wrong premises concluded that the bumblebee could not fly, and someone decided that he accounted for all "science" ;)
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All true. But as you can see, it managed to somehow get into popular culture and popular conscience. Enough even that a poster exists that perpetuates the "fact". How many other "facts" are out there that started from false premises and wrong expectations?
What I wanted to express is that we often accept something as true or false because someone we deemed important made a mistake, until someone comes along and just tries it.
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What's an aerodynamic?
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The biz guy made tens of millions. The engineers got their $25K/year and laid off after the project was done - this was back in the 70s.
Wow, seems like a nice guy. Seems like those asshole bosses that never understand what you do and make you work in McGuyver condition (not enough server, no license to the tool you need, no test, develop on prod, ...) but blame you you when you fail and even blame you if by luck you succeed.
Re:Engineering isn't a secret club (Score:4, Insightful)
Wow, seems like a nice guy. Seems like those asshole bosses that never understand what you do and make you work in McGuyver condition (not enough server, no license to the tool you need, no test, develop on prod, ...) but blame you you when you fail and even blame you if by luck you succeed.
Haven't you heard? --
- Success is due to leadership (i.e. executives)
- Failure is due to execution (i.e. engineers and to a lesser degree middle managers / marketing / sometimes sales).
Re:Engineering isn't a secret club (Score:5, Insightful)
If he used common sense then he's obviously not a(n) design engineer.
There fixed it for you. He sounds like a real field engineer; someone who knows where to apply the 10 lb monkey wrench to fix the problem.
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No, but a member of a dying breed.
Re:Engineering isn't a secret club (Score:5, Funny)
There comes a time in the life of every project when you must shoot the engineers and begin production!
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He took some engineering courses in college, so that he has the amplitude to complete an engineering-required task, much like an engineer [by training] trying to develop a DSP s/w driver on Linux (he's not a computer scientist afterall).
To most non-engineers, they only know one method of engineering that's easy to understand: trial and error. That is something all engineers take for granted and something that makes engineering intuitive...and why it is a discipline: that anyone can learn it.
Re:Engineering isn't a secret club (Score:5, Interesting)
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You are describing the difference between a scientist and an engineer.
Nowadays, people who write computer programs call themselves engineers, but then I see optometrists calling themselves "doctor". Who knows where it will end.
Re:Engineering isn't a secret club (Score:5, Interesting)
In the US, optometrists have a doctorate. Ophthalmologists go to medical school. Opticians do neither - usually an associates degree or less is required.
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I just looked it up again, and I think you are mistaken. In the US, all optometrists must get their Doctor of Optometry (O.D. - Oculus Doctor).
In other countries, the situation is different.
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Optometrists are not physicians, so they get a doctorate (specifically a DO). Ophthalmologists are physicians, so they do not (unless they go for their PhD-MD). Opticians just go to technical school, and do not need even a bachelor's degree.
Note this is all in the US - I don't know what country you are in.
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But if you're an ornithologist, you just need tits.
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At Apple store employees calling themselves "genius"?
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Engineering is part science and part art. I was fortunate to have engineering professors who had spent considerable time in the private sector before returning to academia. A case in point. Early in his career, one of my professors was working at General Motors. He and several other young engineers were assigned the task of designing a new torque converter. After many weeks of fluid mechanics calculations (on slide-rules), they presented their prototype. After several test runs, the senior engineer to
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Traditionally, engineering schools never employed professors without significant industry experience. Engineering _has_ to match up with reality. Navel gazers can go on about everything being socially constructed. Engineers can't afford such sloppy thinking.
Your experience is about the same as mine. There were of course profs with stronger theoretical background, but all had been around the block a few times.
Combustion plate (Score:2)
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 [slashdot.org])
Sorry for the off topic
Re:Combustion plate (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Combustion plate (Score:4, Informative)
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Like you, I'm also very happy to see non-engineers tinker with things like this, but I'm glad that engineers are designing airplanes, implantable cardiac devices, and elevator controls.
There is a big difference between a "one off" hobby endeavor and a safety-critical product that has to be manufactured and sold.
BTW, I've never met an engineer who believes that his/her discipline is some kind of "secret club"... Serious question: are you a non-en
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An engineering degree is only good for checking your work. Mechanical design is purely a function of creativity, experience, and problem-solving.
Example: Any Joe Blow can design a clothes dryer (heater, blower, rotating drum). It takes an engineer to size that motor properly so that it dies 4 days after your warranty is up.
Giant worms? (Score:1)
Am I the only one who think about giant worms each time i hear about the "Maker movement" ?
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So you think we should drown him to extract the water of life?
Seems kinda like a harsh way out for an 83 year old.
Trial & Error Works (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Trial & Error Works When You Can Afford Errors (Score:4, Insightful)
You don't want bridges, buildings, or airplanes designed by trial an error. The errors cost too much.
Re:Trial & Error Works When You Can Afford Err (Score:5, Insightful)
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. :)
Re:Trial & Error Works When You Can Afford Err (Score:5, Interesting)
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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Exactly, it is called engineering.
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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.
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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 p
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It's fine to design that way as long as you then rigorously validate the design before building.
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Hopefully.
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We often made jokes about that even back at my university days (engineering).
Engineers always spend lots of time for exact calculations, just to add a roughly estimated error margin that dwarves the exact calculation into insignifficance anyway. They calculate die diameter of a nylon thread needed to lift a brick to the 5th decimal, but in the end use a rope to lift it anyway!
Re:Trial & Error Works (Score:5, Insightful)
I watched the jaw of a physicist hit the table in a design meeting where I claimed that I was confident in my engineering model to "single digit percent" errors. The director of engineering was pleased with the answer, and my friend asked me afterwards what I meant and how that could possibly be good. I told her that we only have a certain level of confidence in the materials and fabrication capability, and that the environmental loads were really just a guide - anything closer then 5-10% was probably wasting effort for no actual increase in performance.
This is an appropriate place for this quote:
"Structural engineering is the art of modeling materials we do not wholly understand into shapes we cannot precisely analyze so as to withstand forces we cannot properly assess in such a way that the public at large has no reason to suspect the extent of our ignorance." -Dr. A. R. Dykes
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Good Engineers understand significant digits/error margins and safety factors.
They also understand that their own time is another resource that should be optimized.
What you describe sounds more like an Engineering student.
Re:Trial & Error Works (Score:4, Funny)
Trial & Error Works Often better than calculations.
Unless you're designing parachutes.
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Trial & Error Works Often better than calculations.
Unless you're designing parachutes.
Depends who's testing them
Not sure I understand. (Score:3)
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?
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Supply and demand, the same with everything else
This gadget will essentially take the control of the supply of the refined product (filament) out of the hands of the middlemen. It allows the end-users to refine the raw material themselves.
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The same reason normal printer cartridges are expensive.
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Common Sense is KEY to engineering (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Unfortunately, common sense is often present in clever, smart people when they start to learn, it's our school system that usually quickly strips them from it.
Think back to your school days. How long did it take you to figure out to forego common sense and ponder what the teacher wants to hear? Those who manage to struggle through school somehow yet retain their common sense are usually the few that can save a little bit of theirs.
Sadly, we rarely think of people who had bad grades as "clever" and "smart".
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Very true, but then again, I wouldn't want to trade. Yes, I won't be the darling of the market considering that I prefer thinking to mindless consuming and creating to consuming, but in the end I found that I don't really need a lot of money.
I get by, with my wits intact and my moral integrity at least halfway retained. The only thing that is still hard is to grin and nod when a superior declares his intellectual bankruptcy with yet another speech bubble.
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99.98?
If you were half that smart you would realize that intelligence testing is not that accurate.
You are good at test taking.
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Your common sense is unqualified.
He didn't use common sense. He used his 65 years of experience, knowledge of materials and methods, and trial and error. Which is his expertise.
Which of his neighbours could do the same?
The reason I am pointing out the obvious, is because the general term of common sense more often than not implies a tacit denouncement of expert knowledge, and is usually pulled out to justify a particular ignorance and save face. In this case, I expect it's good old modesty however.
I am a ph
Recycling ABS? (Score:3)
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.
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I can't see why it wouldn't work. The extruder just appears to be melting the pellets and shaping them as filament, then the filament is melted in a 3d printer to make an object, I can't see why you couldn't repeat unless there's some chemical in the ABS that becomes weaker with each melt and set cycle.
Re:Recycling ABS? (Score:4, Informative)
Thermoplastics tend to degrade slightly each time they're processed, generally losing strength. In industry regrind is mixed with virgin material before reuse. Most polymer manufacturers suggest maximum regrind levels on their datasheets. Usually it's 25-50%, but for non critical applications you can happily use 100% regrind.
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Filament quality? (Score:3)
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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You sound like an engineer. :-)
TFA itself contains many useful links, including a link to Thingverse, which in turn has a link to the BOM and everything else needed in the way of documentation.
http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:34653 [thingiverse.com]
Which is the best 3d printer? (Score:3)
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The Printrbot is cheaper and from the videos I've seen on YouTube, it seems to work just fine.
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Re:Which is the best 3d printer? (Score:5, Informative)
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/ [solidoodle.com] but I'm curious if it is worth spending more for a 'higher quality' printer.
Figure out what you want to print. There's a fairly large variation in build area, so if you're wanting to print stuff the size of textbooks you're going to want a larger printer. Likewise, most extrusion printers have a minimum print resolution in the 0.5mm or thereabouts area, so if you want fine detail you may be wasting your money on an extrusion-type printer. Printers with better resolution are usually photolithography-based and an order of magnitude more expensive, at which point a commercial print service like shapeways seems a lot more attractive.
With any extrusion-type printer, I think the most important item is that it's popular, because you're going to spend time debugging and adjusting and generally fussing around with it; if you get a snazzy brand-new design you're the beta tester. If you get something that has three years of hundreds of people working with it, all the problems you can encounter have already been encountered and dealt with.
If you want to get more printer for less money you can build it yourself: there are a variety of plans where you buy a printed set of parts, source all the structural parts yourself, and make your own. What I said above about finding one where design and implementation issues are well-known and there's a support community in place goes double for this option.
I strongly recommend that you only start down the 3d printer path if you have projects for which you already have need for printed items; if you get one just because it's the hip thing to do for geeks, you're likely to be wasting your money. With that said, once you have one, you suddenly start printing a whole lot of things you never thought you would, because you can: I have friends who print live animal traps, plumbing parts, and light bulb fixture components now that they have 3d printers.
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Unfortunately, I don't have any experience with ready-to-print extrusion-type 3d printers, just DIY ones, and the ready-to-print photolithography printers I've worked with, I can't recommend anyone purchasing.
If you're thinking about making chess pieces for standard-sized boards, that's going to be at the edge of the resolution an extrusion-type printer can do, so in any case I'd recommend finding someone/a hackerspace with a printer that has a 0.5mm or 0.3mm nozzle and seeing what their prints look like, t
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In addition to having an idea of what you'd use it for, I'd like to offer the following advice regarding how much to spend / what to buy:
How much work are you willing and able to do yourself?
The more effort you're willing to put into making the machine, the less expensive it's likely to be. Right now, the cheapest machine I'm aware of that's not total junk is the Prusa i3 ("Box frame" version) which you can stick together for under US$500 if you're savvy about where you buy parts from and you're handy with
The Engineer and the Balloonist (Score:5, Funny)
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."
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who said old dogs have no new tricks (Score:2)
Great to hear at that age, he still inventing stuff...
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O_O
Not smart enough to calculate torque but ... (Score:4, Interesting)
Mathematics Torque..etc. (Score:3, Funny)
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
Use a big hammer (Score:2)
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 gradu
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Or it is a very good school, and those who graduate are benefitting highly.
Failing out people is something a university should do. If more than 50% of people can graduate in 4 years than it should be closed down as it is clearly not strenuous enough to deserve accreditation.
Re:He's not the onlyh one (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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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.
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Business comes after they flunk out of Comp Sci. CS was where they went after they flunked out of Engineering.
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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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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.
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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.
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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 thei
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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 differ
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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 g
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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.
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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.
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The diameter of the filament must be 1.75mm, ± 0.05mm