My friend Jeff Rutzky stopped by the NYC Resistor workshop to share his detailed knowledge about all things CraftROBO. (For those of you not in the know – it’s a computer controlled cutting device made by Graphtec, and while it is sold for things like scrapbooking use the enterprising designer/artist/geek uses it for all sorts of fantastic uses. I’m a proud owner of one, and it’s been a lot of fun!)

Jeff specifically showed them some of his special techniques for making complex folding models out of polypropylene:

(this is one of his best secrets – when he explained this method to me I was just amazed. We made all sorts of cool stuff by using this technique!)

Jeff went to the event after talking with Bre Pettis, all-around-Maker-extraordinaire; here’s a shot of the setup from his flickr photostream:

And a shot of all the kids watching the fun, compliments of littlegreenfroggy:

I’m really pleased to see someone bridging the gap between the often-insular origami community and the geek-community-at-large – there’s tons of fantastic stuff to be done, and the more people involved the merrier. We need more talented technically-adept geeks to be involved with origami, because that’s how innovation happens!

(ps: 8/8/8! hope you all did something lucky today!)

-Eric