[HN Gopher] Matty Benedetto Designed and Prototyped 350 Inventio...
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Matty Benedetto Designed and Prototyped 350 Inventions in 3 Years
Author : matthiaswh
Score : 174 points
Date : 2023-03-03 13:44 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (unnecessaryinventions.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (unnecessaryinventions.com)
| aynyc wrote:
| What we are seeing is the accumulation of years, perhaps decades
| of unseen hard work.
|
| Kudos, and much respect!
| pradn wrote:
| I recall some one say we should write poems in the every day - on
| receipts, post-it notes, anywhere anytime. Programmers do this
| sometimes for things that help us along, or just for the joy of
| it - a script to watch for reservations at a restaurant for
| example. All these forms of incidental craft should be
| encouraged. Matty is doing the same but for physical tools /
| machines.
|
| Many types of work require vast institutional support (particle
| colliders), but we should think about incorporating every day
| creation into our lives. The agency of making something of your
| own, instead of just buying something, lends dignity and power to
| our lives.
| jpm_sd wrote:
| As a comedy act, I love it.
|
| From an engineering perspective, if someone is this clever and
| creative, I'd love to see him put this much effort into something
| genuinely useful!
| hungryforcodes wrote:
| Comedy is genuinely useful and makes people laugh.
| [deleted]
| balls187 wrote:
| The hotsauce syringe is arguably a useful idea.
| samwillis wrote:
| Makers on YouTube or any other social media inspires people,
| particularly younger people, to get into making themselves.
| That in and of itself is incredibly "useful".
| conductr wrote:
| I'm sure he does and this is just the fun hobby / eg. Side
| projects for social media lulz
| 72mena wrote:
| From an engineering perspective, the entire project is
| genuinely useful: It serves as a fantastic example of applied
| ingenuity. It's inspiring in fun ways, especially for the
| younger audience. It shows the value of prototyping,
| craftsmanship, DIY skills, and not taking things too seriously
| (key for trying new things).
|
| Not to make this sound too grandiose, but I'm confident some
| children watching this guy will become engineers because they
| were inspired to build stuff. It is educational, and thinking
| "I'd love to see him put this much effort into something
| genuinely useful" seems to be missing the point on how useful
| this type of content is.
| bognition wrote:
| While the Matty's inventions may seem silly and frivolous, they
| signal something huge. He prototyped 350 physical inventions in 3
| years. Thats roughly 3 days per item.
|
| When compared to how hard this was a decade ago, the cost to
| build physical prototypes has effectively fallen to 0. This is
| both in terms of the money and time. I really believe we'll see a
| renaissance of physical goods in the next decade.
|
| Previously you'd need to find a factory and contract with them to
| manufacture a minimum number of items. It would cost several
| thousand dollars at least and take weeks if not months to get
| your product.
|
| Once you have the physical item in your hand, you can start the
| testing process which feeds into the next iteration cycle.
| ghaff wrote:
| There are tools/technologies to make creating certain types of
| prototypes fast and cheap. I don't think you can generalize
| that to physical goods broadly. If I want to experiment with
| new battery designs, I'm not doing that at no cost in an
| afternoon.
| cornholio wrote:
| > the cost to build physical prototypes has effectively fallen
| to 0.
|
| That's a bit of an exaggeration. The cost to build prototypes
| of soft plastic objects in unusual shapes has significantly
| diminished. The cost to build electronic prototypes has
| decreased only marginally, mechatronics, robotics and most
| types of actuation are still a big boys club etc.
| ghaff wrote:
| While 3D printers _have_ been very useful for certain types
| of prototyping, I 'd have to say that overall the
| excitement/hype around 3D printing you saw 10 or so years ago
| has significantly diminished.
| grogenaut wrote:
| Yes it's definitelyoved out of the hype curve into the are
| where it's actually useful. Which means it's actually doing
| stuff people aren't talking about yet or don't need to show
| off. I use my printers all the time and I'm Im only
| slightly more hyped now then when I figure out a new web
| framework, or a cool new way of thinking I about pandas.
|
| Just cause it's not hype doesn't mean it's not useful. How
| sexy is rail freight? Power grids. I don't see tons of
| hypes on my towns water supply.
| akiselev wrote:
| _> The cost to build electronic prototypes has decreased only
| marginally, mechatronics, robotics and most types of
| actuation are still a big boys club etc._
|
| I _strongly_ disagree. Not only have the non-recurring
| expenses in EE cratered thanks to extensive part libraries
| and reference designs but the cost of fab & assembly is
| easily a tenth of what it was a decade or two ago thanks to
| Chinese manufacturers. Open reference designs _with design
| files_ are more common than ever, allowing anyone with a
| little EE knowledge to bootstrap even complex designs. The
| equipment necessary to solder BGAs at home have fallen to the
| hundreds of dollars, cheaper than a decent used Metcal.
|
| 6DOF robotic arms isn't even a big boys club anymore with
| several open source versions available _off the shelf_ with
| fast turn around part availability from McMaster /Misumi and
| really cheap high tech parts like linear encoders, motors,
| stages, controllers, etc from Alibaba/express. All of these
| vendors allow hobbyists to prototype full blown industrial
| automation, let alone individual products. Open source 3d
| printers, CNCs, pick and places, and so on abound with plenty
| of quality open source firmware. People are even starting to
| tackle linear motors for high precision actuators, the kind
| you'd find in semiconductor fabs.
| nine_k wrote:
| As long as an electronic prototype can be made digital,
| things improved a lot with wide availability of Arduino, RPi,
| and ESP32 boards, and very accessible development tools for
| them.
|
| Many analog things can be modeled and evaluated using a fast
| enough CPU, which are cheaply available; see software-defined
| radios, for instance.
| weego wrote:
| _cost to build physical prototypes has effectively fallen to 0_
|
| ignoring the initial outlay of 3d printing and materials
|
| _Previously you 'd need to find a factory and contract with
| them to manufacture a minimum number of items_
|
| That's never how initial product prototypes have been made. His
| first versions may be less janky than historic prototyping, but
| I think we're risking rewriting history to make 3d printing
| more grandiose than it actually is.
| snovv_crash wrote:
| 10 years ago I was at a company prototyping a new widget. We
| had 3 day turnaround from the local 3d printer for something
| the size of a cellphone, it cost over $1000, and the quality
| was garbage.
|
| Once we did basic usability testing with this, we went to a
| low-volume manufacturing run using silicone molds in Shenzhen
| and FedExed back, turnaround time about 10 days. Price $15k+.
| Once we were happy with this we did alu molds in Shenzhen for
| a batch of 500, and you don't want to know the price.
|
| Today I can get 3 hour turnaround for items the same quality
| as the silicone molds, just by getting our own liquid printer
| for about $1k. This really does change things for
| prototyping.
| mediaman wrote:
| I'm a partner in a plastics manufacturing facility (injection
| molding, thermoforming).
|
| 3D printing has been big for us. No, we don't make money
| directly from it, or not very much. And it's extremely
| expensive per unit.
|
| But it allows us to design a part for injection molding, and
| then iterate it many times until we are happy with the
| functionality of it.
|
| Once we commit to an injection mold, it might be $15k or $30k
| to get it made, and it'll take 6 months. But we know that the
| fit will be nearly perfect by the time those first shots come
| out. Then we can roll with making thousands or hundreds of
| thousands of parts per day at the efficiency of scale.
|
| The way that 3D printing is used by hobbyists looks fairly
| different than the way it's used in industry. In industry,
| we're mostly still using traditional design-for-manufacturing
| principles for the prototype: for example, we're designing it
| so that it could be injection molded and ejected properly from
| a mold, even though the 3D print doesn't need that. That's
| because our intent is to merely confirm what we see in
| Solidworks in the real world, and to show a customer an idea in
| their hands in the shape and form it'd actually be produced at
| scale.
|
| I'm not compelled by the idea that 3D printing is going to make
| a big difference by allowing very small runs of parts (except
| for prototyping in the manner above). That's because like
| everything, there is a power law when it comes to parts. Nearly
| all the revenue comes from medium and higher volume products.
| Sure, it's useful in niche applications, and for things like
| jigs, but as much as people love to talk about the power of
| long tails, it rarely is as good a fit to the real world as the
| power law.
|
| But the idea that 3D printing is making a big difference in
| improving the design and innovation with those medium to higher
| volume products made with conventional manufacturing methods is
| absolutely true.
| hinkley wrote:
| Why does it take so long to make molds? Has prototyping
| reduced the number of molds you have made? Has that decreased
| the wait time, or are more people making molds and so the
| wait time is now increased instead?
| analog31 wrote:
| I've worked in the plastics industry. A lot depends on the
| kind of mold of course. A mold can be somewhat complex when
| all is said and done, and made from a combination of parts
| that have to be ordered, or materials that are difficult to
| work such as hardened steel. Producing multiple pieces that
| fit together correctly and aesthetically can be an art.
| Whether the mold actually works in your machine without
| problems depends on the quality of the mold maker.
|
| And it could boil down to the fact that mold making is a
| mature industry with a lot of established supply chain and
| lead time expectations, and nobody is trying to rock that
| boat.
|
| Of course you don't want to spend all of that time to get a
| mold that you can't use because you screwed up on your end
| and forgot to add a needed feature. The world has not moved
| away from the benefit of a physical object that you can
| hold in your hand and see that it's actually right. And the
| 3d printed prototype can also let you check other things
| while the mold is being made, such as the fit of things
| like circuit boards, buttons, and connectors.
| stavros wrote:
| > I'm not compelled by the idea that 3D printing is going to
| make a big difference by allowing very small runs of parts
|
| On the contrary, that future has been here for years. I print
| a ton of stuff for me (I'm printing one now!), they aren't
| prototypes (as in, I won't eventually make them "from
| something else"), they are the final part.
|
| 3D printing has enabled me to have custom parts, to my exact
| specifications, in record time, for pennies. It's amazing.
| _Of course_ it 's not going to make a difference to your
| revenue, the entire point is that, with a 3D printer, _I don
| 't have to come to you at all_.
| samwillis wrote:
| Rapid prototyping (both additive 3d printing and subtractive
| machining) has been readily available for decades. What's "new"
| in the last 10 years is the accessibility and cost of it.
|
| 15 years ago I could place an order with a local rapid
| prototyping company at 3pm and have the part (3d printed) on my
| desk by lunchtime the next day for under PS100 (or much less
| for very small parts). But those printers were tens if not
| hundreds of thousands of dollars. Now for well under 1k you can
| have a 3d printer yourself.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| >> it would cost several thousand dollars at least and take
| weeks if not months to get your product.
|
| Or you made it out of wood. Or metal. Or clay. Or carved it by
| hand out of a block of plastic. Building and testing three or
| four versions of a tool is just a normal day for a shop
| carpenter or metal worker. Many of this guy's "inventions" are
| just jigs for holding things. Youtube is full of metal shops
| fabricating and testing jigs for strange use cases.
| spenczar5 wrote:
| I don't know what carpenters you know who make 3 or 4 jigs a
| day, but that does not match my professional experience in
| carpentry at all. Maybe you get this impression from YouTube
| but that is very different from everyday work, it is theater.
| sandworm101 wrote:
| I used to work in film/tv/live entertainment. The shops
| pumping out scenery and stage devices are probably not
| normal, but every day was some sort of innovation. If you
| are building a different product every day, creating new
| jigs to make those products is a daily task. A new bit of
| metal to secure a bit of equipment to camera rig, aka a
| "camera cluster", was a very normal daily thing.
| spenczar5 wrote:
| That is very cool. But yes, it is extremely unusual. That
| is, like, the opposite of what most businesses want,
| which is to standardize the tasks and labor. A cabinet
| shop has a set of jigs that they use over and over and
| over.
| nickpeterson wrote:
| Yeah but Hollywood carpenters are in another class. They
| hire Han Solo to build doors in Hollywood.
| grncdr wrote:
| I just want you to know that at least one person
| understood the reference here.
|
| (The story is that Harrison Ford was "discovered" while
| doing odd jobs and minor carpentry for some high status
| person in Hollywood)
| ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
| I have a friend who was one. He'd get a kick from that
| comment.
|
| This is what he does in his spare time, these days:
| https://www.youtube.com/@jimkehoe6495
| stavros wrote:
| That looks fun, I especially like that he put a NEMA
| stepper in rather than a servo. I do the same thing for
| planes, where weight is a consideration (no turret there,
| though), and having no weight constraint is another level
| of fun.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| Luke looks at door: "What a piece of junk!"
| runnerup wrote:
| GP said 3 days per item, not 3 items per day.
| dangerboysteve wrote:
| Also take note of the companies what have sprung up to supply
| low volume manufacturing at good prices to aid in prototyping
| and access to specialized machinery.
|
| https://jlcpcb.com https://sendcutsend.com
| https://www.pcbway.com https://www.knifeprint.com
| stavros wrote:
| I use JLCPCB for small runs of fabrication and assembly of
| PCBs (I just got ten the other day), and love them. I have to
| wait a few weeks, but the quality is fantastic, and it saves
| me from soldering all the small SMD parts, for very cheap.
| yboris wrote:
| Semi-related. Who remembers this classic: _Cockeyed.com_ -
| several decades worth of fun projects (creations, experiments,
| etc).
|
| https://cockeyed.com/
| munificent wrote:
| Holy shit. I had completely forgotten about this site. You just
| opened a giant nostalgia door.
| john-tells-all wrote:
| As an artist, I found his "Age-Height Chart" fascinating. What
| do people look like as they get heavier? Taller?
|
| https://height-weight-chart.com/
| deafpolygon wrote:
| Some of this stuff is genius.
| zzzeek wrote:
| Relevant: Bloody Stupid Johnson
| backtoyoujim wrote:
| The jewel cooler seems only inches away from the assimilator.
| b800h wrote:
| Well I should imagine that "the street finds uses" (as per
| William Gibson) for his "Cob Quicky".
| avg_dev wrote:
| I've enjoyed several of his reddit posts about his latest works.
| They are very entertaining.
| bitwize wrote:
| This is top tier chindogu right here.
| kqr2 wrote:
| Reminds me of the Japanese
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chind%C5%8Dgu
| travisporter wrote:
| Is Instagram blocking VPNs? I can't see any images
| progre wrote:
| The shower curtain towel is genious.
| mgkimsal wrote:
| https://unnecessaryinventions.com/everything-apron/
|
| This rivals Bob's Burgers' "Spice Rack" and "Spiceps" that Bob
| and Linda invent in competition with each other.
| nerpderp82 wrote:
| I'd like to see something invented to handle the car key problem,
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--9kqhzQ-8Q
| dangerboysteve wrote:
| Do you know what is funny about Matt's invention? They are being
| knocked off. What high praise.
| apnew wrote:
| I did not even know this person until today, and I just learned
| he is living EXACT life I dreamt of (as a kid).
|
| This person deserves a lot of kudos irrespective of HN finding
| his work "necessary" OR "worthy". There is a joy in solving a
| problem (scratch an itch) for the sake of it.
| stavros wrote:
| > I just learned he is living EXACT life I dreamt of (as a
| kid).
|
| You can live the exact life you dreamt of as a kid with a $150
| 3D printer and $100 in various Arduino parts. The hard part is
| imagination and time, everything else is very easy. I would
| really encourage you to get into making things, it's extremely
| gratifying.
|
| Here's a random thing I made last night, and the reason why I
| slept at 8 am:
|
| https://twitter.com/Stavros/status/1631458555072065538
| yumraj wrote:
| which 3D printer? any recommendation(s)?
| stavros wrote:
| It varies depending on what you want and how much you want
| to spend. The Ender 5 is a good entry level choice, the
| Prusa is the Ferrari of printers, and there's the Voron
| that's equally great, but a bit more DIY.
| apnew wrote:
| DUDE!!! Can I buy you a coffee?:)
|
| EDIT: I was half expecting links to printer and arduino parts
| but coffee offer still stands because you just gave me my
| "duh!" moment.
| stavros wrote:
| Haha, next time you're in Thessaloniki, please do! :P
|
| I'll post the links to the CAD files and code shortly, I
| just need to find a name for the thing first.
| webnrrd2k wrote:
| This guy the continuation of Nicholas Cage's character in
| Raising Arizona... After the movie ends he gets seriously into
| 3d printing and crazy inventions.
| mywacaday wrote:
| I follow him on youtube as I just started 3D printing. Amazing
| that he's completed and build all those designs. He also just
| launched a board game that he managed to get stocked in Barnes &
| Noble
| imranq wrote:
| was all that work really necessary??
| sandworm101 wrote:
| This is art, not invention. A great number of these have
| already been mostly invented by others already. This is about
| an artist going through the creative process. The work is part
| of that process.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| no, but that's why it's good
| colin_jack wrote:
| Based on the domain name, no.
| imranq wrote:
| Alas my joke didn't really pan out as planned
| nerpderp82 wrote:
| https://youtu.be/UOUBOFZ3Tos?t=346
| theamk wrote:
| Look at the domain name of the submission:)
| zoklet-enjoyer wrote:
| I love this guy's stuff. Some of the most fun uses of a 3D
| printer I've seen.
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