A 3D printer just wasn't enough. And adding a desktop CNC mill just wouldn't cut it. Well, it would cut... it just took up too much space along with the printer. Then, where do you put your laser engraver? You need a whole room for all the desktop creation gadgets some makers require for rapid prototyping.
That's the situation Zaib Husain and her husband found themselves in.
Husain's husband, Amir, is interested in vintage computing and enjoys building vintage computer cases (he's also co-founder at SparkCognition Inc.). But it started to gobble up too much of the garage. Husain had spent years as a financial analyst before starting Techjango, an open hardware company that created Darkmatter Xbox laptop and the Ordbot 3d printer. So Zaib set off with her friend Azam Shahani, an engineer with a knack for problem solving and prototyping, and began building the type of tool they think all makers would love to have.
"We were just facing a lot of frustration with the devices we had," Husain said. "We spent hours just calibrating 3D printers to just get to the projects were were trying to do. We did some brain storming on what we'd like to see in a product. It was wishful thinking and dreaming for a little while."
But, months later, they had developed a tool they thought fit the bill. It 3D prints filament and resin; carves and mills most materials; engraves on many materials; has tiny suction cups and electromagnetic heads for picking and placing parts on things as small as a circuit board; and it can even assemble and disassemble some things. And, if that's not enough, you can get a little development kit and have the Makerarm build new tool heads for itself.
Husain reached out to Josh Harris, an industrial designer at Bolt, to help clarify and perfect the idea. And then enlisted Dragon Innovation to help tweak the industrial design and set up manufacturing deals in China, as well as helping with supply chains for parts.
But that hinges largely on whether Makerarm seduces the makers of the world to pre-order or donate money to fund the project on Kickstarter. With Husain's experience in the industry and connections to the maker community, the campaign is moving at a good clip -- $141,000 of a roughly $350,000 goal with 28 days to go.
The Makerarm starts out at $1,399, and, if funded, it's expected to ship in October 2016.
The campaign video shows the full range of the Makerarm's capabilities as it builds a laptop from scratch. It has also been used to make custom icing on cakes, helicopter toys, jewelry, casings and containers and many other things.
"It really, really speeds up the prototyping process for a lot of different items," she said.
Husain said she sees a lot of potential applications in schools, where students could use the device to learn how to create circuit boards from scratch to learn both how to program a device and to learn how circuit boards work at the same time.
And the arms can be programed to work with one another, to create an assembly line on a relatively small space.
"My desk space is limited," she said. "And I wanted something that could be at my own desk and give me some workspace there."