Pensa’s DIWire is about to ship to Kickstarter supporters

Are you a hardware hacker? Do you need to make things stronger? Meet Pensa’s DIWire — a desktop wire-bender long-awaited among makers.

We got a look at the first production-run models of the DIWire on Friday, in Pensa‘s Think Tank. The staff was running quality and performance tests on one of the machines to make sure all was well before starting to ship the units

Mark Prommel and Kathy Larchian walked Technical.ly Brooklyn through what’s to come for the wire bender and other developments inside Pensa. We first covered DIWire here.

Maker Faire prototype of the DIWire

Prommel said that the team made a few updates to the design before sending it off to get built. They improved the software, improved the gearing and motors and gave it a more rigid housing. You can also see two pins in one of the photos. There was only one in the Kickstarter design. Two pins work better because they don’t have to drop down and go under the wire repeatedly to make bends.

Two pins on the production model of the Kickstarter DIWire.

DIWire will spin off into its own company, called Pensa Labs. Looking forward, they are looking at models that get up to 3/16″ wire and maybe even one day 1/4″ in steel.

Pensa is a company that invents. They both invent on behalf of other firms and make their own products, such as StreetCharge and DIWire. The team has many different skill-sets on board. “Different disciplines is the electric mix that makes us unique,” Prommel told us. Most of their work is traditional design and engineering consulting. The company has worked for firms like Pepsi, Panasonic and Oxo (they make the Good Grips line of kitchen equipment).

As we’ve written previously, Pensa is the design half of the New York team competing to build the ideal urban bike. Prommel told us, “This is a New York story. We really wanted to look at how people cycle here.”

Prommel couldn’t go into too much detail, but he said the team wanted to honor the tradition of the bike frame and not completely rethink it; however, he promised to shift cyclists’ thinking somewhat around the anti-theft system.

You can take a look at the DIWire making repeated bends in a piece of wire in a short video below.