the Free Universal Construction Kit

by fffffat

Ever wanted to connect your Legos and Tinkertoys together? Now you can — and much more. Announcing the Free Universal Construction Kit: a set of adapters for complete interoperability between 10 popular construction toys.

Consider the frustrating experience of purchasing a new computer (a Mac, say) and discovering that it will not play your aunt’s Windows Media video of your little cousins. Likewise, imagine your aunt’s corresponding annoyance when she finds that her PC will not play the Apple Quicktime video you sent her of your cats. This humiliating little episode isn’t an accident; it’s just a skirmish in a never-ending battle between giant commercial entities, played out, thousands of times every day, in exactly such micro-punishments to customers like you. If you’re well-informed, you may happen to know about VLC — a free, open-source video player, developed by independent hackers as a grassroots remedy for exactly this problem. Until the advent of ubiquitous 3D printing, software remedies like VLC weren’t readily available for hardware products, like toys. That’s changing.

Today’s manufacturers have little or no intrinsic motivation to make their products compatible with anyone else’s. Indeed—despite obvious benefits to users everywhere—the implementation of cross-brand interoperability can be nearly impossible, given the tangled restrictions of patents, design rights, and trademarks involved in doing so. So we stepped up. The Free Universal Construction Kit is the VLC of children’s playsets.

Fig. 1. The Free Universal Construction Kit.

• Overview
• Motivation
• Download
• Implementation
• Legal and Commercial Implications
• License and Disclaimers
• Credits, Contact and Acknowledgements
• Keywords

Overview

F.A.T. Lab and Sy-Lab are pleased to present the Free Universal Construction Kit: a matrix of nearly 80 adapter bricks that enable complete interoperability between ten* popular children’s construction toys. By allowing any piece to join to any other, the Kit encourages totally new forms of intercourse between otherwise closed systems—enabling radically hybrid constructive play, the creation of previously impossible designs, and ultimately, more creative opportunities for kids. As with other grassroots interoperability remedies, the Free Universal Construction Kit implements proprietary protocols in order to provide a public service unmet—or unmeetable—by corporate interests.

The Free Universal Construction Kit offers adapters between Lego, Duplo, Fischertechnik, Gears! Gears! Gears!, K’Nex, Krinkles (Bristle Blocks), Lincoln Logs, Tinkertoys, Zome, and Zoob. Our adapters can be downloaded from Thingiverse.com and other sharing sites as a set of 3D models in .STL format, suitable for reproduction by personal manufacturing devices like the Makerbot (an inexpensive, open-source 3D printer).

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The Pirate Bay now lets you download physical objects

Other file sharing sites may be shutting down in the aftermath of the MegaUpload raid, but the Pirate Bay is expanding instead. The site announced Monday that users can now download physical objects as well — sort of, anyway. The Pirate Bay introduced a new content category called “Physibles” that’s being used to trade digital designs that can be used with 3-D printers to recreate physical objects. From the announcement blog post:

We believe that the next step in copying will be made from digital form into physical form. It will be physical objects. Or as we decided to call them: Physibles. Data objects that are able (and feasible) to become physical. We believe that things like three dimensional printers, scanners and such are just the first step. We believe that in the nearby future you will print your spare sparts for your vehicles. You will download your sneakers within 20 years.

The idea to share these kinds of designs online is, of course, not new. Thingverse has been offering tinkerers a way to share their own 3-D designs for years. However, the Pirate Bay’s approach is to completely ignore any property rights to these objects. The category itself currently only contains a handful of designs, but the folks at the Pirate Bay seem to think it’s a big enough deal for them to almost change the name:

We believe that the future of sharing is about physible data. We’re thinking of temporarily renaming ourselves to The Product Bay – but we had no graphical artist around to make a logo. In the future, we’ll download one.

It remains to be seen whether the sharing of “physibles” will be as popular as traditional file sharing any time soon. But it could complicate the copyright debate even if it remains a fringe phenomenon for the foreseeable future, as one of the Bay’s users pointed out in the comments to a torrent labeled “1970 Chevelle Hot-Rod 3d model”:

Disclosure: Thingverse is run by Makerbot Industries, a company that has received an investment from True Ventures, which is also an investor in GigaOM. GigaOM’s founder Om Malik is also a venture partner at True.

Image courtesy of Flickr user williac.

Lisa Harouni: A primer on 3D printing

Uploaded by TEDtalksDirector on 23 Jan 2012

http://www.ted.com 2012 may be the year of 3D printing, when this three-decade-old technology finally becomes accessible and even commonplace. Lisa Harouni gives a useful introduction to this fascinating way of making things -- including intricate objects once impossible to create.