First and foremost, and on a personal note, I would like to thank my wonderful wife, Jen, for putting up with the long hours of writing this text, turning various parts of our house into electronics, 3-D printing and scientific labs as the need arose, her support and also for reading and critiquing the manuscript.
I would like to thank my children, Emily and Jerome, who actually helped with some of the making of my first 3-D printer and with various experiments throughout the years.
I would also like to thank the rest of my family: Mom and Dad, Solomon, Mary Rachel and Elijah for their support and encouragement. A special thanks to Mary Rachel for giving me a copy of Makers by Cory Doctorow, which laid some of the ground work for this book.
I would like to thank Elsevier for having the foresight and courage for both publishing this book and also ensuring that it is maintained in the open-source ethos by making it available to the widest possible scientific audience. For this, I especially thank Beth Campbell, Jill Cetel, Paula Callaghan, Cathleen Sether, and Laura Colantoni for making this book a reality.
This book was truly a massive international and asynchronous collaboration that extends back years and contains the genius and insights of people I have worked closely with, but also many whom I have never met (or may only know of through their esoteric Internet handles).
First, from the past and present members of my own research group at Michigan Tech—the Michigan Tech Open Sustainability Technology Lab, I would like to thank for fruitful collaboration: Nick Anzalone, Megan Kreiger, Chenlong Zhang, Ben Wittbrodt, Allie Glover, Brennan Tymrak, Meredith Mulder, Ankit Vora, John Laureto, Joseph Rozario, Jephias Gwamuri, Alicia Steele, Thad Waterman, and Paulo Seixas Epifani Veloso. Special thanks goes to Rodrigo Periera Faria, Bas Wijnen and Jerry Anzalone for collaboration and contributions to major sections of this book and for reading drafts of portions of the manuscript. I would also like to thank other Michigan Tech collaborators and supporters: Doug Oppliger, John Irwin, Allison Hein, and the support and leadership of both of my department heads, Steve Kampe in Materials Science and Engineering and Dan Fuhrmann in Electrical and Computer Engineering.
In addition, my former students at Queen’s University helped me get started with the wondrous RepRap and on the train of thought that led to this book: Christine Morris Blair, Kristen Laciak, Steven Keating, Christian Baechler, Matthew DeVuono, Amir Nosrat, Ivana Zelenika, and Rob Andrews.
I would also like to acknowledge the funders, supporters and corporate sponsors for some of this and related work, including the McArthur Internship at Michigan Tech, the National Science Foundation, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, Superior Ideas (and supporters through it), the Appropedia Foundation, Re:3D, Tech for Trade, Ocean Optics, Type A Machines, MatterHackers, Ultimachine, and the Square One Education Network.
I would like to acknowledge helpful discussions about enabling innovation from Scott Albritton, Gabriel Grant and Garrett Steed. For their ongoing support, I thank the Appropedia community and, in particular, Lonny Grafman and Chris Watkins. A giant thank you 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 we rely on. I would also like to thank the Arduino founders, Massimo Banzi and David Cuartielles, and all their collaborators for making the control of scientific equipment easy and fun. The entire world owes a great thanks to Adrian Bowyer and his many collaborators on making the RepRap project into the incredible success that it is. I would like to thank all the fantastic open-source hardware individuals, groups and companies that keep enabling us to reach higher. I want to thank the Open-Source Hardware Association and all their members, in particular, Alicia Gibb and Catarina Mota. I want to thank all those who have shared their brilliance with the world and help make my research a success because of their contributions in the scientific and engineering literature, as well as Github, Thingiverse, and Appropedia users. A special thanks to everyone who provided examples that are cited or shown in the book. Finally, I would like to thank the growing number of makers in the burgeoning maker community that inspire and teach us all.
Although many people contributed to the contents of this book, all errors and omissions are mine alone. The technologies described in this book are constantly changing, and while every effort was made to ensure accuracy of this work, it is always best to go directly to the sources for the most up-to-date information on the various open-source hardware projects described.1
Finally, if any of the hardware is not good enough for you or your lab, remember it is free so quit whining and make it better!
1Wherever possible hyper links are shown in the footnotes and will be enabled on the digital version of this book.