Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “MAKE @ Engadget Expand 2014: Pensa – Wire Bender”.
All right we’re at the pensa booth here at engadget expand and i’m standing here with marco perry, one of the creators of the diyer. I originally saw diy er at maker faire in about 2012, and i was absolutely mesmerized at how cool this machine was well. A few years later, we’re actually all the way up to a commercial device which is equally as amazing, marco. You want to walk us through the history of diy-er and how you went from this to that. Okay, all right thanks totally so uh pre-2012. We were doing a lot of this and we were using it uh for prototypes, and the problem was that every time we needed to go through iterations really quickly, we just couldn’t really do it and we had 3d printers that couldn’t really print lines that well. So we decided to make this, which is our first diy bender, and we thought it was pretty cool.
So we kind of published it and showed it to people in maker faire and we open sourced it and people really wanted it. But didn’t have the time or the skills to necessarily make their own. So then we started experimenting and making something a lot more rigid and strong. So we went a little bit overboard here with these giant motors down here, and this was our next model that we showed in maker faire 2013. um and from that we were really convinced from a lot of people to really bring it up to kickstarter and so On so then, we exhibited here at uh engadget and got the insert coin award for the from the judges, which was really great, and it really gave us a lot of coverage as well as a nice big fat check from them to really get us going forward. So we made this one, which is our beta units. We made a series of these and gave them to schools and a couple of uh institutions and a couple of businesses to see what we could learn from that and we learned a lot of things to make. The final production one, which is actually we showed this one on kickstarter, but we actually shipped them this one, which should make them a lot happier because compared to the beta units, it’s got five times the torque, it’s all tool, steel, so you can bend titanium without Denting it and it’s got built-in ramps so, like the you can’t hit the mechanism and it’s a lot more stiff and the software has been really really improved as well all right.
Thank you so much marco for the for the overview of where what’s happened. In the last couple years, with pensa um, so if you happen to be in new york, city and you’re gon na stop by and gadget expand, make sure you see pensa and when you do come, see marco and ask him if he’ll make you one of these. Really popular things for the for the show these little cat ears, i think they’re cool you see them all over the place all right thanks again, marco thanks mark .