Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “ShopBot Announcement: Ted Hall, ShopBot Tools”.
David bryan and bill young – and i would like to introduce you to what’s a new kind of tool. We’Ve got two or three of them over there and we call them handy bots and what they are are kind of a portable digital power tool. That will do a whole lot of different kinds of jobs. I think the best way to think about them is just as a smart tool. What we’ll try to do for those who are down in front you can sort of see what bill and david will show.
You and then i’ll flip through some broader shots of the tool um as we go along good, so we call it a handy bot and the way these things work is essentially with a touch of a button. It puts kind of an awesome cutting drilling carving machining capability right into people’s hands for doing specific jobs and tasks. It uses a high precision movement system for x, y and z that moves a a cutting tool around inside. What’S a pretty small form factor and basically creates a human extension tool on a job site or for doing a project, you can put the handy bot down on a piece of wood or up against a piece of material, and it actually does the work through its Bottom, you can sort of see the cutter sticking out here.
It sort of machines things through through its base, and many of you will recognize that at the core of this thing, it’s basically a tiny little cnc machine, but it’s a powerful kind of tool and cnc. It takes advantage of that cnc capability, but the thing about cnc is it’s not immediately associated with something you’d use on a job site, just because it’s simple and uh, because it’s uh complex and often hard to use. What is different about this handy bot concept. Is that, unlike a regular cnc tool, you bring the tool to the material? The other thing about it is that it’s smart and simple, because the tool is oriented to specific jobs or tasks. So let’s say we want to cut out a specially sized hole for, say a lighting fixture or something like that. We might take um our cell phone read a qr code off the instruction sheet that comes with the the fixture and then essentially run the app. The phone will load the project onto the handy bot.
The handy bot will start start blinking. So you know it’s ready. You hit the you line it up where you want the cut to be push the little green button and a few seconds later, you’ll have a perfectly cut hole.
What i’ll do is show you a video if it runs here of the handy, butt actually moving around and doing a little bit of that kind of work. So you get the idea of what it does. These are close-ups, underneath the base of the handy bot. You can see it cutting through the material press, the green button to to start a cutting project, and the operator interacts with the tool in the sense of holding it steady and holding it down. It really is sort of a human extension for light, carving sorts of drilling and machining projects. The tool has enough weight, you just sit it down and let it go for aggressive cutting, say cutting off the end of a two by six, as is happening right here.
Then the operator holds the handle on the side to hold the tool in position. While the cutting is going on here, we used a little jig so that a series of two by six rafters could be cut with a precision cut rafter tail on the end of it. The sort of thing you might do on a job site, but you never get a nice clean cut like that on the job site, and you can see the tool working away here. It’S able to cut to up to four inches in depth.
So that means you can do fancy joints on four by fours, on a job site or for a project. It will illustrate here a couple: precision cuts on the two by four that, in theory, you might do with other tools, but you’ll see here that the the precision of the cutting and the ability to get get the thing exactly right is something that most of us Couldn’T do by hand, or even with a power circular, saw by hand the the board underneath that’s being machined right now was a 4×4 and essentially dado that is grooved in a way that another 4×4 will fit precisely into. It starts to give you an idea of all of the different kinds of jobs. These tools can do and the sort of tools that they replace on the job site, precision fit of that four by four. The tool has a very, relatively small. Well, here it is uh in a fixture like the one over here kind of illustrating the up against the wall application. This is a a simple job, but you can imagine all sorts of fancy cuts that a tool like this handy bot can do when it’s been delegated, to do something with an app oriented to some specific project or task here, its small working area is being extended By a jigging fixture that lets the tool, move down a long board and carve out a a banner – and in this case it’s cutting a mortise in a four by four you’ll, see how accurately it’s able to do that.
It exactly fits the 2×4 having just measured up before sticking it in there and running the app here. In this case, it’s cutting a hole through a 2×6. You can imagine that this gives you an infinite size capability. You never run out of the right size hole cutter in your your drill set here, because you can cut a hole any different size. That’S basically the way, the way the tool works, uh.
What the idea of the thing is. Many of you will probably quickly scratch your head and come with ideas of applications on your own and whether it’s on job sites or for diy projects. Smart tools, like handy bots, are going to be a powerful way to get things done with a sort of preciseness that most of us just aren’t capable of doing by hand. We could lay out kind of dozens of possible jobs, tasks and applications for a handy bot.
Ourself, but we doubt that we as a company or really any company for that matter, has the imagination, the creativity or the resources to generate the sort of wide range of uh applications and ideas that will really fully enable the capabilities of these kinds of tools. So it’s the the emergent potential and the the power of the community that makes us particularly excited about releasing this tool. This new kind of uh smart tool as a open innovation project it’ll essentially be open hardware available for anyone to work on and one of the interesting features of the construction of the tool, at least as we’ve designed it to begin with. Is it’s readily digitally fabable? That is, you can cut it on a shopbot or other cnc tool, both the plastic and the aluminum components.
There are a few commodity items that we’ll have to purchase, but otherwise the the design and the accessorizing of the tool can be done almost immediately by anybody with digital fab equipment, and that includes the handy. Bot itself might not be the most efficient way, but a handy bot’s perfectly capable of cutting all the parts for the next candy bot may not be self-replicating, but we like to think of it as self-morphing. Besides, releasing it as an open innovation project and as an open source hardware we’re going to be creating an ecosystem for the app development which will really be the critical part of uh, of enabling these tools and we’re hoping that in by generating uses, applications and some Uh wide adoption of the tool that there’ll be enough of a demand that we’ll be able to begin a distributed manufacturing process through digital fab, small digital fab shops across the country and, in particular, we’re thinking of the 100k garage digital fab network. That we’ve been involved in in creating, so that’s what a handy bot is the first batch of them we’re going to make available through a crowdfunding project in june. We’Ll have them out here again today, as we did yesterday, so you can come up and have a closer look. Try one out figure out whether it’s something you want to get involved in.
We hope you’ll follow us on the usual social sites as well as getting involved in crowdfunding, the handybot and perhaps being one of the early first adopters. Thanks a lot. .