Kelly Rio Saxton: Moar Wires

Continuing with some wire bending work, this time using pauses and rotations to make 3D shapes out of a single continuous wire.

The D.I.Wire Pro and Plus was Kickstarted about a year before I joined the team, and I’ve been working with it for about 2.5 years now. We redesigned the software, which had been made in Processing, to be Javascript-based. We created a new, bigger machine with modular hardware, so now you can bend a big range of (relatively) small wire and rod. I have been using the largest, 0.188″ stainless steel, for some small furniture projects, the lighter 0.125″ galvanized steel for stuff that needs soldering, and playing around with some smaller sizes for earrings and mobiles.

I use straight G-code to drive it, but you can also use SVG files with some tweak fields if you want. Working through the process of redesigning the software has been the best part of wire bending besides actually just playing around with wire.
It turns out that wire has quite a life of its own, and nothing beats hands-on experience for getting better at designing for a hybrid digital/physical system.

@kriosaxton