An Interview with Bart Dring
Bart Dring, founder of BuildLog.net and former Director of Product at Inventables, discusses his journey from designing pinball machines at Williams Electronics to building custom CNC robots and motion control systems. He details the evolution of his open-source laser cutter kits and the Maker Slide linear extrusion, explaining how he managed early Kickstarter success and partnered with Inventables to support products like the X-Carve and Shapeoko. Dring then explains his recent work porting the Gerbil motion planner firmware to the ESP32, enabling low-cost, wireless, standalone controllers for small-scale robots like the NickelBot and Stringbot.