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Online Vendors with Cool Tools for Builders?
fwc asks: "I've been using ExpressPCB for quite a while to make smaller printed circuit boards various projects. They provide a free (beer) schematic capture and PCB layout software which makes it very easy to design your board and order it online. There are of course other vendors that do this for PCB's as well, along with vendors which make stencils for Surface mount devices, Front Panels and foam inserts for plastic cases. Recently a friend told me about eMachineShop which has a very cool design tool which allows you design, price, and order almost anything a machine shop can build - brackets, gears, molded products, etc. - and out of almost every material you can imagine. What other cool resources of a similar nature are out there?"
According to Neil Gershenfeld and Ray Kurzweil, what ammount to basically "3D" printers are set to revolutionize the way we interact with the world. Essentially the same types of repurcussions we're facing with digital media distripution will be met in the physical world. No more then what many people already know as "replicators" from Star Trek, "fabricators", a printer that assembles matter at the molecular level, will drastically change the way the world operates. eMachines and other businesses, although addressing the problem of 3-dimensional printing from different angles, are slowly converging into this new industry.
One book that discusses this field directly is called "FAB: The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop." The author makes a comparison to the PC "revolution" from the 90's to the "Personal Fabricator (PF)", estimated to occur in line with the rest of development in nanotechnoligies, starting around 2015 and culminating in 2025.