Acknowledgments

First and foremost, on a personal note, I thank my wonderful wife, Jen, for putting up with the long hours of my writing this text and all the craziness that comes with it. In addition, I also thank Jen for driving as I write this now in the car, for turning various parts of our house into mini-makerspaces to work on projects, and for her support and her reading and critiquing of this manuscript. She is my most beloved and harshest critic—if you ever think your creation is good enough, you have not met her.

I also thank my children, Emily, Jerome, Vincent, and Dominic, who actually helped me make my first 3D printer and create some of the examples in this book, as well as various “epic makes” throughout the years.

Thanks also goes to the rest of my family for their support and encouragement: Mom and Dad, as well as siblings Solomon, Mary Rachel, and Elijah, who independently invented new ways to kill room lights late at night after reading for hours and getting too tired to get out of bed. Special thanks go to Mary Rachel for giving me a copy of Makers by Cory Doctorow, whose fiction inspired me to try to make some of the better parts real in this book.

In addition, I thank McGraw Hill for having the foresight to publish this book, and I especially thank Lara Zoble for making the book a reality.

This book was truly a massive international and asynchronous collaboration that goes back years and contains the ingenious and incredibly useful and beautiful contributions (from art to computer code) of people with whom I have worked closely, and of many whom I have never met (or may only know of through their esoteric internet handles that you will find scattered throughout these pages).

I also thank the past and present members of my own research group, the Michigan Tech Open Sustainability Technology (MOST) Lab, for their fruitful collaboration and the fun of creating new things to help people.

For their ongoing support, I thank the Appropedia community. A giant thank you also goes to the entire GNU/Linux community for really showing us what is possible when we all work together and providing us with the free software on which we rely. In addition, I’d like to thank Arduino founders Massimo Banzi and David Cuartielles and all their collaborators for making the control of any type of equipment easy and fun. The entire world owes a great deal of thanks to Adrian Bowyer and his many collaborators for making the RepRap project into the incredible success it is. I thank all the fantastic open-source software and hardware individuals, groups, and companies that keep enabling us to reach higher; the Open Source Hardware Association and all its members; and all those who have shared their brilliance with the world and helped make so many items easy to create because of their contributions in all the varied fields discussed in this book. Special thanks also go to everyone who provided examples that are cited or shown in these pages. Finally, I thank the growing number of makers in the burgeoning maker community who inspire and teach us all.