 Hey everybody, I'm here at the Milwaukee Maker Faire with John from Village Plastics. How you doing John? Great. How are you Jim? I'm doing great. So I got this new microphone and we're trying this out for this interview He works with Village Plastics, which does all sorts of filaments as you can see the glow filaments behind me under that black light too the wood filaments PEGG, ABS, PLA and everything right? Carbon Fiber, Flexibles, Nylons, Polycarbonates, you name it. We make. So a lot of us haven't heard about Village Plastics Can you tell us a little bit about it? Sure. One of the reasons we haven't heard about us is we started off early in 2004 We'd never had our own filament. We were making filament for people like MakerBot, 3D Systems, LulzBot But we didn't have our own brand So we were making filament probably more than anybody in the country, but it wasn't ours So nobody would know who Village Plastics was unless you were a larger manufacturer who was buying direct from us So in 2017 we kind of branched out on our own after a short Period of time where we were with 3D Systems So in 2017 we're on our own Started our own brand so essentially we've only been part of the market for The last year and a half to two years And how many extruder lines do you guys have? So currently we have 15 extrusion lines So I think there's one other manufacturer in the US that has more than we do He has so much really cool colors and so many really cool prints to show off We actually did this one. He let us have a PLA translucent blue And I threw this on an Ender 3 and we can zoom in and show this a little better But from here you can see the shine and the sparkle is just it's amazing on this filament And then if you throw it in under the black light it even glows So if we want to find you where do we find you? Village plastics dot-com would be a great site and we have we're on Amazon as well So one of the things that makes us a little different than other filaments in the market is our Traceability on the spools that we produce a lot of filament manufacturers master wind and master spools So they'll run plastic as fast as they can on to a 30 pound spool From there they take that 30 pound spool and Rewind it on to a 1k g-reel Half k g-reel and plastic has a memory to it So you'll introduce a little bit more brittleness to it and you lose traceability where you were on that spool So we run everything through a three-axis laser system directly on to the 1k g-reel We'll get about 250,000 data points on a spool and we can tell you we can then share that information with you So you even know what the standard deviation is on that particular reel You plug that number into your slicing software and you have total control of your flow and your prints are way better So that is that is so cool. So if I buy a roll of filament from you I just reach out and say here's the roll I got. Can you send me the data? That is cool. We're on the other side of the booth here And we were talking a little bit about a master spool and you guys actually came up with a spool It's a little bit different than the spools that are out there as far as how it interacts and everything Can you tell us a little bit about the spool? Yep so we developed it with a company called slant 3d who's a service provider out on the west coast and Instead of a threaded design where you have one file for one half one fire for the other and you screw the two together This one is a three-quarter turn. So the each side is a mirror image of the other one. So what happens is You can unlock the spool Right and then just slide the two pieces back together Three-quarters of a twist and now it's locked into place and the five pound version This would be the 1kg version. Why would we use this master spool? We were talking a little about the coils that you guys make here Can you show us that and and? Essentially show us the coil and why we would use that so with the with the master coil You're only buying the coil itself So you can print this version of this the STL of files available on our website You print this you purchase the coil, which is about 25% less than purchasing the standard Filament on a reel and then you just get the coil you put it onto your master spool and away you print When you're out of the filament, then you buy another coil or reuse the same spool and there's no waste of empty spools nice and and Basically what you would do is this is this is what one of the coils looks like, right? But and basically you can see there's there's four zip ties holding it all together And what's really cool about this is it is reusable spools so you can actually take this you slide it onto your spool You put the other side on it, and then you take off your zip ties, right? Don't forget to take your zip ties off at the end because that'll be a mess if you don't yeah But that is cool, and you save about 25% is what what he just told me in all this stuff again, you can find at villageplastics.com and Are you guys on any of the social medias we have with Twitter and Instagram and Facebook and LinkedIn and all those things It's all under Village Plastics awesome, so check out villageplastics.com John. Thank you so much. I really appreciate the time. Thank you Hey everybody, we're here at the Milwaukee Maker fair with Rob and Nick from maker mashup.com. How you guys doing doing great? How are you? Doing awesome myself So we were walking around and we found the 3d printer section here at the Milwaukee Maker fair and This thing is awesome. Can you tell me a little bit about what it is what it does and what makes it special sure So the layer of hues x 302 is our prototype printer, and what's great about this printer is it's a very open design It's core x y so it's built with a lot of linear rails for high precision And all of the parts are all commodity parts so you can get them online build it yourself And we've been doing that with this printer as well These will be part of our YouTube videos that allow you to go and see how the printers built and build it from scratch But the nice part of this is multi-materials so you can print your supports in different type of filament than from your Filament that you're building your model with and it's open in the front as you can see here So easy to get your parts off Well, that's what I like about it not only is it wide open in the front, but I love the acrylic too But it is multi-materials so you could do a you could do a PLA or a PTG like we were talking and then do like a water-soluble Support or hips that one's soluble through that orange Orange clean yeah the citrus cleaner. Yeah nice and and so how this says 300 by 300 by 300 Which is a great build size anyways if I wanted to build this what would I have into someone so something like this We're running about 750 bucks and that's just buying parts on Amazon So if you were to order them through Ali express or any of the other China vendors direct you could probably cut the cost in Half and and you'd have a pretty solid machine this thing is all like it looks like it's all made of metal You have I believe the clone right the clone extruders on there the clone bond tax So none of it is plastic the only plastic for any of the motion control is right here for Just the attachment to the linear rails, but so there's very little movement. It's very solid printer And that's awesome. So you guys have a whole table of stuff. I see Looks like a little CNC over here. Did you guys make that as well? That has been upgraded though to have a trim router in it Which allows us to mill aluminum with it versus just milling wood with it So it doesn't it does make that a lot sturdier and faster The trim router goes at about 26,000 rpm. So you get a lot more to material off of what you're milling awesome, so You guys got a few machines looks like an Ender 3. This is a classic I have one I have two and two under fives myself But but I love the Ender 3 but it looks like you guys have done some really cool stuff to this one One bond tech extruder just like on there This is a custom mount magnetic mount So I can pull that off if I want to replace it with something else But yeah, otherwise, it's fairly stock otherwise. It's got a 32-bit board SKR Yeah, otherwise, it's fairly standard Well, I love the magnetic mount. So can you show me that one more time? I don't know if we can zoom in on the magnetic mount here No, that's cool. I like that a lot because say Maybe I get a clog Swap it quick I was able to get the jam out, you know heated up pull it out So yeah, it's much easier to look around in there when you can pull it off the machine That's cool. And then you guys said you're building this one too And you're filming how this one's built on for your YouTube channel. These these guys are with maker mashup.com So check that out. It's gonna be a I think the series is gonna be great I haven't seen them yet because I just learned about them But I'm gonna have to jump on and check them What what's going on with this is a little bit different than your core x y so that one's a Cartesian printer So with the Cartesian it's built for very low cost. So we're kind of targeting under 200 So maybe a 150 price range for this again all commodity parts and all the parts enlisted online You can either print them off of Thingiverse or have someone else print the the few plastic parts for you So it's a much more economical So it kind of reminds me of Obviously like the i3 frame right the i3 frame a little smaller bed, or maybe it's gonna be similar sized bed, right? It's actually a mix of several different parts. So the nice thing of building this one all together is you've got different varieties, so you've got a One variety of carriage there. You've got the i3 style Z access on there, and then you've also got a lot of parts there from the AM8 And then the other piece in there too is that unlike a lot of other printers We have to buy a special carriage the bed is actually made with 2020 extrusion So you don't have to get a special carriage plate. You just have to drill a few holes in there That's awesome, and then last but not least I saw the waffle maker stem project It's very colorful. So I thought I'd come over and try to check this out. So what what's going on with this? Well, it's essentially there's a waffle design. He made most of the pieces. So he's kind of the cat guy But yeah, it's a waffle. So it's kind of a You know you put the different parts in so you got these pegs that go in there You can put eyes mouth you got arms hands this links are kind of generic so you can do whatever you want with them So we got some light up shoes. We got all kinds of different stuff Expansion and how parts work together. So from an engineering perspective for educators, they can learn There's lesson plans available online solid source so they can build additional parts their students can build parts So it's an ever-growing community that focuses around the waffle, which of course all kids love waffles Who doesn't like a waffle, right? So you probably have one for breakfast the kids love it and it really gets them inspired into building an engineering So what comes to mind right away is the potato we won't talk about the potato But so basically we're going with a waffle, right not a potato and and I think it's cool because you Like the potato you could build it however you want and then you can pull it apart and start over You can make a spider out of it or whatever you're you can use your imagination and make you know something else too It doesn't have to just be a look like a person. It could be a spider or some other That's cool I mean, I wonder if we could make the food version With pretzel sticks and stuff like that that'd be cool. Well, like I said, we're here at Milwaukee Maker Faire We're here with everybody from maker mashup.com. So check them out and we'll see you soon Hey everybody, I'm here at the Milwaukee Maker Faire and I'm with Charles of the Briggs and Stratton booth What they got here is something totally awesome. I'm gonna let Charles explain what it is. What do we got? So what we decided to do is being here at Maker Faire We really want to emphasize a stem outreach for all the kids and children teenagers adults Whatever who are really looking to get into or potentially open their mind to be an engineer So what we decided to do was make an interactive game for them by taking a full-size Z1 which is a zero turn stand-on mower and replicate that into a small-scale factor. So what we designed is a Z1 mower that small-scale one to six ratio and what we did is made it interactive So as the the kid or whoever whoever happens to be driving it is driving it forward or back It's gonna control this down here and give them a good sense of how things are going so nice And what you can't see right now, but I'm gonna get you a shot in one second Is there's actually a one-sixth scale right you said Tractor that looks almost just like that and paint it in the same color as this one is and it drives When you actually control it right here the really cool thing is you're using 3d printing to print your brackets to print parts of the mower and everything Can you tell us what you went into with the like 3d printing side of things? Yeah, absolutely So over at our R&D center, which is where we designed this We actually Have a bunch of ultimakers and what we decided to do was since ultimakers are we just design on CAD and go test it and throw it out Or just any 3d printer to begin with I Just I went through a couple revisions of how I want to potentially control this guy And so after settling on this I did a couple test runs with with my leverages and my parts And I found a way to mount everything and then through using PLA I was just able to set my heights And luckily I was able to set all my settings perfectly so I could do it very quickly Yeah, and make it strength enough and yet flexible enough So when we have hundreds of hundreds of kids coming in wrenching on this these levers, we're not gonna risk Breaking any parts from being so tough together. So that's awesome So so when we do this when you push the controls forward the mower goes forward What we don't see and what I'm actually gonna bring over and show you now is that the lights over here On this course they actually kind of made like a yard So if we're looking at the yard and he's controlling it If you go down the row it actually shows where you mode on that yard because the lights go out And it's fully controlled right now. He's actually controlling it right here So as he goes forward as he goes backwards and turns and it's a zero-turn design It's actually controlling Just like that It is super cool. So I'm looking at the control board right now What did you guys design that with and you know, what did you make the control board as far as programming it? Yeah, so what I did done is I was given just a regular run-of-the-mill Remote control And so those are prepared which means that the remote control itself I received that and what I had done is I took it apart destroyed it and that's where this is right here And I kind of reverse engineered the the entire board And managed to figure out what sort of lines I need to do and things of those sorts And so what it took me to do Because I determined that the way it is Without using this microprocessor is that this thing is way too fast. So I had to write a couple functions in my Script on this circuit board to input my data. So delivered power to my potentiometers those potentiometers Then based on their its resistance based on its possession Goes into the circuit board circuit board throws them in different functions depending on what's going on and it will give me a true Analog output through this line directly to my transmitter and then over the air through 2.4 gigahertz Frequency sends it to my receiver, which is then mounted on the the small mower itself So so that's the one-sixth scale mower that drives around and as you can see the LEDs are lit up And when he drives over those LEDs it simulates mowing the lawn like you got that part of the lawn I really like that you designed it that when you drive over the LEDs that use infrared and tells it You know technically you've mowed that part of the grass, right? So we were just checking out how it mowed around on the grass how he controlled it by these two control handles on the full-size mower You just said it has a special mode. What is it called? so a co-worker of mine tomorrow he actually had He mentioned he goes so since you're limiting it. How about we have some fun with it and you put program a ludicrous mode Which means just like in a Tesla how? Just how I count a Tesla you can go crazy fast And so I just the flip of a switch and this thing is even faster than it is otherwise So it's pretty cool Charles. I really appreciate you showing me I've not seen anything like this before a lawnmower a mini lawnmower controlled by a full lawnmower on Infrared for kids to mow the lawn. It's just super cool absolutely You know what this is a project took us about a month a month and a half We went through so many revisions before we really decided like yep This this will be good for now now. Don't get me wrong It's a still in like prototype stage or beta if you will so even next next year when we're here It's gonna be even better and a whole another step up. It's just a little bit more time will allow us to do that So why really appreciate you let me check it out and film you guys. Thank you. Thank you so much