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Peer To Peer Meets Manufacturing
Crashmarik writes "Small times has an article detailing UCB advances in desktop manufacturing. They raise the possibility for effectively downloading physical objects through the net. We have allready seen the reaction "Property Holders" over downloading music, what is the likely upshot of being able to copy physical objects. More importantly what are the implications for our society as we move out of an age of scarcity to an age of plenty ?" Great article - the author of it also won The Foresight Institute's prize in communications for 2002.
July 25, 2003 - Imagine your kitchen blender conks out the day you're hosting a large cocktail party. You search an online catalog, decide on a model, and click the "buy" button. But instead of waiting three days for the appliance to be shipped to your door, a new kind of printer on your desk springs into action. Layer by layer, the miraculous machine squirts out various materials to form the chassis, the electronics, the motors - literally building the blender for you from the bottom up in a matter of hours.
Call it desktop manufacturing. For gadget geeks in need of instant gratification, it's a miracle. For designers deep in the iterative prototyping process, it's a revolution in product development. And thanks to small tech, it's becoming a reality.
University of California, Berkeley engineering professor John Canny and his colleagues are building such a printer. They call the technology "polymer mechatronics" or, more simply, flexonics. The revolutionary approach to desktop manufacturing is enabled by recent advances in 3-D printers, organic electronics and polymer actuators.
Three-dimensional printers are commonly used to make prototypes of new product designs. For example, a designer may load a digital design into a Fused Deposition Modeling machine. The FDM then extrudes thin beads of ABS plastic in .01-inch layers, until you have a completed passive
functional part or device. While the printers are dropping in price, the leap
from producing passive to active devices is monumental. That's where organic
electronics come into play.
Organic electronics were born in the 1970s when researchers discovered that chemically doping organic polymers, or plastics, increases their electrical conductivity. Since then, researchers have worked to develop the most effective and inexpensive organic compounds that can be patterned on flexible substrates to create useful circuits. In the private sector, companies ranging from Bell Labs to IBM to UK startup Plastic Logic are also working to develop quality organic transistors that are fabricated far more cheaply than silicon circuits. Organic semiconductors will most likely first hit the market in the form of inexpensive radio-frequency identification (RFID) tags and flexible display screens.
Canny's co-investigator in Berkeley's flexonics effort, Vivek Subramanian, is one of many researchers harnessing the microfluidic precision of inkjet printing technology to deposit organic semiconductors in desired patterns. The key ingredient in Subramanian's organic circuits is "liquid gold." Synthesized in his laboratory, liquid gold consists of gold nanocrystals that are only 20 atoms across and melt at 100 degrees Celsius, 10 times lower than normal.
The gold nanocrystals are encapsulated in an organic shell of an alkanethiol (an organic molecule containing carbon, hydrogen and sulphur) and dissolved in ink. As the circuit is printed on plastic, paper or cloth using inkjet technology, the organic encapsulant is burned off, leaving the gold as a high-quality conductor.
Combining Subramanian's circuit printing technology with a 3-D printer enables electronics to be embedded within the housing of the device being printed. The chassis and the electronics are fabricated as one single structure.
The next step is to add the actuators that provide electromechanical capabilities to the devices - for instance, a mechanism that causes the blender's blades to spin when switched on. For this, Canny plans to fill inkjet cartridges with electroactive polymers that contract when zapped with a voltage, enabling components to flex in desired directions. Additionally, the polymers generate a voltage when compressed, so buttons and switches can also be embedde
http://216.239.57.104/search?sourceid=navclient&ie =UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=cache:http%3A%2F%2Fwww.smalltime s.com%2Fdocument_display.cfm%3Fdocument_id%3D6413
Visualize the world of wine
The article wasn't raising the idea of downloading a physical object at all. Basically, the idea is that if you have a general piece of manufacturing equipment (the "printer" they're talking about uses polymers to build its products) then all you have to download are the instructions for this generalized manufacturing hardware and it will build whatever it needs. In the short run, this isn't probably going to get off the ground because products are built out of many different materials and I think we don't yet have a strong enough grasp on molecular manipulation to make this happen. But in the long run, if we could say have a device that could spit out steel-like material just as easily as plastic-like material, there's no reason manufacturing would have to happen in plants anymore. And ultimately, this leads to a society where people can drive their goods to market for much less money - you just need to come up with the idea and sell it to people. Of course, this type of society could only function with some type of control over the operation. If you had rampant downloading, as you do with current P2P networks, there would be no profit in sending a design to market and the markets would dry up.
I hate liberals. If you are a liberal, do not reply.
umm, he meant the site was on cold fusion.
.cfm?
:)
You know,
Cold fusion is a red herring anyway, but that's another matter entirely
Diamond Age, Neal Stephenson...
They have those replicators (printers) connected to "feeds" (component reservoirs) and can get/create almost anything they want on the molecular level.
AND the society of this age is a thriving nanotech/Private Community mix.
AND diamond, coming from carbon (the most inexpensive stuff possible), is so common it's a natural construction base...
Go read it, its a good book
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
Are you serious?
This has got to be the biggest troll/flaimbait posting ever
Red Hat in itself isn't an operating system, it is a distribution of linux. The licensing is what keeps Microsoft from stealing code from linux and putting it into their own operating system and selling it. MS-DOS didn't originally have a TCP/IP stack, in fact Microsoft didn't really introduce networking features until Windows 3.11 for Workgroups. If you don't understand the importance of the linux shell, bash is one of the many, then maybe you should reconsider using linux. There are a shitload of games out there available for linux, and there are comparable Office software, and somewhat-comparable internet browsing software.
Just move along...do NOT feed the trolls. Keep your arms and legs inside the trolly at all times. REPEAT: DO NOT FEED THE TROLLS!
Really? Meet the Doomslayer
The Republican party has long had an average contribution of around $50. The average Democrat party contribution is much higher, in the hundreds and the amount of millionaire money going to Democrats v. Republicans is heavily skewed towards the Democrats.
As for systems, The US is a republic as is most of the 1st world, the rest being monarchies. The republics generally get their leaders via democratic means and always have. It's technically true that the US is not a Democracy but so what? Pure democracy sucks compared to democratic-republicanism. The only thing wrong with democratic-republicanism is that it's just too long a label.