Make:cast

The last place you might expect to find a makerspace is at The George Mark House, a pediatric palliative care facility in San Leandro, California. It is a place that cares for families who are going through the difficult end-of-life process for their child. I talk with Dr. Joan Fisher, the medical director, and Dr. Gokul Krishnan, a pioneer in the practice of maker therapy who just received a NSF grant to design and build a makerspace at the George Mark House.

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You can learn a lot about the health of a hive by listening to the sounds that bees make, as a beekeeper would do. The developers of the Long Hive project, featured in Make Magazine, Vol 75, tell us about their efforts to use machine learning to detect the presence of the queen bee by recording the sounds of the bees in the hive.

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Italians have a love of innovation and design and it shows at Maker Faire Rome. In this episode of Make:Cast, I look back at Maker Faire Rome in October 2019 during a pre-Covid time when live events could happen. I was guided through Maker Faire Rome by Alessandro Ranellucci, the curator of Maker Faire Rome, along with Massimo Banzi, co-founder of Arduino. Maker Faire Rome 2020 is happening as a virtual event this weekend.

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Ten years ago, a community came together around a definition of open source hardware to be clear about what it means to share designs for physical things, and doing so in a way that allows others to make, modify, distribute or use those things. This definition has been managed by the Open Source Hardware Association (OSHWA). In this episode, I talk with Alicia Gibb, Executive Director of OSHWA and board president, Michael Weinberg about the growth of open source hardware, its certification process and the role of open source hardware in the maker response to COVID-19.

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Tim Deagan, a maker in Austin, TX, is a polymaker with many interests and fabrication projects that range from from flame effects to ham radio to leatherworking. He is the author of "Make: Fire - The Art and Science of Working with Propane" and "Modern Leatherworking for Makers." In this conversation, Tim joins me from his garage workshop and we talk shop.

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In this episode, we talk with Sarah Boisvert, an entrepreneur with extensive work experience in manufacturing, laser technology in 3d printing, who has been focusing on workforce training. Digital fabrication technology is creating new manufacturing jobs that she calls "new collar jobs" which require digital and physical hands-on experience. In 2018, Sarah published "The New Collar Workforce: An Insider's Guide to Making Impactful Changes to Manufacturing and Training."
She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she runs a lab in association with the local community college where she's developed a certified program for 3D printing operators. In this conversation, we talk about digital badges for digital fabrication skills and how there should be better alternatives to college, how janitorial robots at WalMart need a human to take care of them, and how employers would like to find more people with problem solving skills, the number one skill they are asking for. Sarah has written the article "Fabricating the Future of Work" in Make Magazine Volume 75.

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For anyone wanting to do something, open source makes it easier for you to get started, for creative ideas to flourish and for difficult problems to be solved by collaborating with others. I talk with Joshua Pearce about his new book, "Create, Share and Save Money Using Open Source Projects." Joshua is a professor of materials science and electrical engineering at Michigan Tech University where he directs the Michigan Tech Open Sustainability Technology Lab - acronym MOST. He's also the editor of Hardware X, a peer-reviewed journal dedicated to open source scientific hardware.

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The co-founders of Maker Works in Ann Arbor, Michigan have written an operations guide for makerspaces. In this episode, we talk with Tom Root, one of the authors of "The Intentional Makerspace: Operation" about how to think of recipes as a way of managing a makerspace, predicatably and safely.

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Over the last year or two. mHUB Chicago has begun offering product development services that allow makers, engineers, and others to work on paid projects for corporate clients, filling a need for rapid prototyping for those companies and helping entrepreneurs bring in some money while they get started on their own project. Recently, mHUB was awarded a three-year, $1.3 million grant from the federal government to scale these services, developing new opportunities for talent and providing a service to client companies.

In this episode of Makecast, I'm talking about matching talent to opportunity with two of mHUB Chicago's founders, Haven Allen, who is executive director and Bill Fienup, who is director of innovation services. We are also joined by Bianca Thai, who is a program manager at mHUB.

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