Joris Peels: How did Fab@home get started?

Evan Malone: I have always been interested in robotics, and I came to Cornell University for a master’s program in mechanical engineering and worked on a robotics project (RoboCup). Our RoboCup team won the world championship, and I was enjoying graduate school, so I met with a few potential advisors at Cornell.  Prof. Hod Lipson was newly arrived at Cornell, and had some funding for a fantastic project that I found fantastic, and he agreed to take me on as a Ph.D. student. The ideas was to make space exploration more automated, faster, and more cost effective by developing ways of using intelligent 3D printing systems to make complete working devices, in particular mobile robots, on the surface of other planets. I started researching materials and designing a “printer” that could print everything required for a working robot - wires, batteries, motors, sensors, transistors as well as the mechanical parts.

Hod and I were presenting this work at a variety of conferences, and there was strong interest from a variety of fields in an inexpensive system that could print with experimental bio-materials, and deposit multiple materials simultaneously.  Around the same time Hod was invited to the opening of a Fab Lab in Norway by Prof. Gershenfeld of MIT. Seeing the impact on the general public of access to inexpensive automated tools convinced Hod that we should develop an open-source, inexpensive, multi-material 3D printer.  When Hod presented this to me, I realized immediately that such a project would probably be of greater value to a greater number of people than my academic research, and I set about designing the hardware and electronics.  Hod developed the first software application, and a couple of other students at Cornell (Jennifer Yao and especially Dan Periard) contributed significantly through testing, documentation, and website design.  It was supposed to be a “couple of months” for the project, but it ended up taking about 18 months to get it rolling.

Joris Peels: What was the first thing you 3D printed?

Evan Malone: I believe the first significant thing that I printed with a Fab@Home machine was a rubber bottle (“squeeze bottle”), although I had parts made by SLA as far back as 1998 for engineering purposes, so I’ve been around the technology for a while.

Joris Peels: I read that you helped design a particle accelerator? Was it a pretty one?

Evan Malone: I did a contribute a small amount to the design of the Proton Driver – a major upgrade to the proton synchrotron accelerator chain at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory, in Illinois, USA.  I worked on the vacuum system, attempting to devise very large diameter vacuum chambers that could tolerate the vacuum forces without being overheated by the extreme magnetic fields variations generated by the accelerator.  It would have been pretty, but to my knowledge, it was never built.  The LHC at CERN stole away the funding!