Hey Texans, your state just got a whole lot Make-ier. Our friends at Tech Shop, who already have five locations (three in California, one in North Carolina, and one in Michigan) are about to launch their sixth location. The Round Rock, TX location, just north of Austin, features 17,000 square feet of tools and learning spaces for members to explore their brilliant ideas. Tech Shop and MakerBot have a great history together. In fact, that’s a picture of three of our staff members and a MakerBot Replicator at a Tech Shop above.

Here’s some background information if you’re not familiar with this cool company.

TechShop is a do-it-yourself workshop, sort of like a fitness club, that offers its members access to a complete range of tools and equipment, software, classes, personal coaching, and access to other creative people so you can build the things you have always wanted to make.  Membership is about $125 a month, and classes start at around $50.  They currently have over 5,000 active members system-wide.

The TechShop team is throwing a TechShop Austin-Round Rock Pre-Opening Party this Friday and Saturday, and they invite everyone in the Austin and Round Rock area who is interested in making things to attend.

Several awesome companies have been formed inside Tech Shop locations, and it is exciting to see them growing into a whole new region. If you want to get in on this free event tonight and learn more about Tech Shop, head over to their page.

Every now and then we hear a story from our users that really inspires us. I’ve shared a few of them (here, here, here, here, here, here…), and many of you readers supply the rest. Here’s another great one to file under MakerBots and Entrepreneurship.

In a senior design course at MIT, Pablo Bello, Carson Darling, and Thomas Lipoma were matched with a neurologist at Massachusetts General Hospital who works with sleep disorders. Dr. Matt Bianchi told the group that the general way of diagnosing sleep apnea just wasn’t cutting it. After all, who can sleep in a strange place with 30 or more sensors attached to their body? Like they say in infomercials, there’s got to be a better way. There is, and it turns out a MakerBot helped make it happen.

The guys tackled the problem for the class and started a company, now called Rest Devices, right after graduating in June, 2011. From the beginning, they wanted to create a device for insomnia and apnea diagnosis that was “so easy your grandmother could use it.” We think they nailed it. This is the Sleep Shirt.

 

The magic in the shirt owes a lot to the thin-film respiration monitors that the Rest Devices team developed.

As a person breathes, the shirt stretches and we measure the tiny change of stretch in the shirt. Our design is completely on the outside of the shirt so there is no electrical contact to the body or exposed leads. As a result, it’s incredibly easy to use. Just put the shirt on, snap the data recorder in, and you can go to sleep.

Easy peasy. And here’s where the MakerBot came in. I asked Thomas why Rest Devices bought a MakerBot. Here’s his answer, and you can hear a similar answer in the video above.

When we started to seriously design the original consumer device for trials, we wanted something more polished. We essentially had 3 options: carefully modify existing cases to fit our components, pay a prototype injection mold house to make cases for us, or make our own. Looking at the cost and pros/cons of each, we decided to go with a MakerBot because it allowed us to make cases of a high enough quality for what we needed, but also allowed the cases to be custom made to the electronics we had.

These guys had never used a 3D printer before but had some rapid and awesome success with their Thing-O-Matic. We’ve gotten a chance to look at the Sleep Shirt in-house and have been amazed how well crafted it is and how well all the MakerBotted components fit together.

I’ve been wanting to share this story on the blog for a while now, and when I took a minute to check in on the Rest Devices website recently, I noticed they’ve now launched the Infant Monitor to give anxious new parents some peace of mind.

Fantastic innovation being done on a MakerBot. If you have more stories for us, share them at [email protected].