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The Beckoning Promise of Personal Fabrication
posys noted an interesting talk from Neil Gershenfeld's called "The beckoning promise of personal fabrication". It's a TED talk which I've found greatly enjoyable in the past, and is worth your time, assuming you have 20 minutes to see something really neat.
If you are interested, you can also return to the original TED page.
Anyone care to give a transcription of the video for those of us too lazy to watch it?
Embedded Video? Sweet!
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This is awesome!
Demented But Determined.
WTF is TED? I suppose I could RTFA (or even JFGI), but given that there is NFA, I don't know whether I should bother.
Wow, I'd no idea so many initialisms had 'fuck' in them.
ps: enlightenment dawns: maybe that flash thing I blocked isn't an ad after all, and is worth clicking on.
Stuff that's 2 years old...
"Filmed Feb 2006; Posted Feb 2007"
cyclic links?
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
When I read title "the promise of personal fabrication", I thought they meant the benefits of making up lies for oneself.
Honestly I did.
Has Slashdot got slashdotted?
Making babies? I'd love to know but the embedded video is broken.
Crackin' Wise - Blogging about whatever we want
I read this story, it may seem to have some credibility .. but let me tell you .. it's all fabrication.
Ba da Bim
do Asimov law's apply to replicators? if not how long till whackjob's start making weapons in them?
-Ours is the wisdom of Solomon, the magic of Merlyn, the fall of Icaris.
I didn't have time to RTFA, but this is about writing resumes, right?
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Fabrication and prototyping has always been more expensive than manufacturing. That will not change simply because lots of people are infatuated with devices that take hours upon hours to construct, and make very poor looking "plastic" things made out of globs of goo stuck together.
I like TED as much as the next guy, but more and more of it seems like a whitewash, style-over-substance dog and pony show.
Please help metamoderate.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Stereolithography machines aren't magic. They're a useful way of making plastic shapes in small quantities, expensively. But that's about it. Much of the same work can be done with a CNC milling machine. Roland makes some nice little desktop CNC mills. They also make 3D "scanners" which work by touch, carefully servoing a tiny stylus with a phonograph pickup like device over the surface of a 3D object. So you can copy existing objects.
All this stuff works fine, but it's a niche market. It's mostly used by people designing small, handheld devices.
Making plastic parts by injection molding, vacuum forming, or hot stamping is incredibly cheap and fast compared to building them up with a stereolithography machine. Making, say, a keyboard key in an injection molding press costs maybe a penny. Making one in a stereolithography machine will cost about $40. Yes, you can make one-offs, but not cheaply.
Realize that most manufactured goods (with the notable exception of wood products) are made by some kind of moulding process involving a master - stamping, casting, injection moulding, blowing and vacuum forming, etc. That's also true of photolithography, used for ICs and circuit boards. Building up something in layers or carving it out of a solid block costs orders of magnitude more.
If you want to use a stereolithography machines, and you're in Silicon Valley, sign up with TechShop. They have one of the better ones, plus workstations with the necessary design software. It's not used much. Their laser cutter, which cuts flat sheets, gets much more use.
I was going to watch the video, then I started thinking about the premise and then I saw your comment confirming my suspicious. Thank you for my time saved.
I do not believe in karma. "Funny"=-6. Do good and forbid evil. Yours, Oft-Offtopic Flamebaiting Troll.
I think you've missed one of his points - these fab labs are for bespoke solutions for the individual (or small community). The reason factories are cheaper and more efficient is due to economies of scale - the unit price for a unique item is a hell of a lot higher than the unit price for 10000. To create a product requires significant (compared to the cost of producing that unit) overhead in setup, design etc; that is where these labs come into their own.
I'm sure that if someone came up with a brilliant item in one of these labs, a saleable item, they could take it to a factory to be mass-produced more cheaply. But until that happens, these labs represent one of the best opportunities for home-grown solutions from non-technical people.
We Build Beautiful Websites
Wake me when we can fabricate females to have them around as servants and other things. Although it would be fun to fabricate an effigy of my boss and watch him melt in the microwave.
DIE YOU BASTARD DIE!!!!
It took a bit to realize that the random whitespace under the summary was in fact supposed to be an embedded video.
Also, I'm expected at least 90% of the the comments to be prefaced with tl;dr because they didn't RTFA because it's too long. Or should it be tl;dw and WTFV?
Keep in mind that any time you have a factory make something for you, there will be delays and costs associated with getting the product into your hands. Over the last few decades, they've done an amazing job streamlining this process. Still, it costs five bucks and three days between the time I place my order for my widget and the time it shows up at my doorstep.
I think that for many goods, that's fine. For things that cost a few dollars to make, spending five dollars on shipping will seem like madness. Plus there's always the "gimme now" factor, which seems to permiate our society.
There's a reason most people have printers in their houses. We may send our photos off periodically to get printed in bulk for cheap, but still print the one or two off when we feel like it.
I'm kind of curious about all this. It seems like the threshold to rapid manufacture/prototyping is being drastically lowered every day. I've seen past Slashdot stories about assembling prototyping machines for a few thousand dollars. Slap a few small motors, some wheels, and a manipulator arm on these 3D plotters and you really might start to have something . . .
Besides a low nine figures in funding, a small army of engineers - mechanical, electrical, and especially software, and an iron mine near a river (for easy hydro power), what would be required to setup an honest to God working Von Neumann machine?
"Good Morning all you rich bastards. Isn't is great being rich? Hope your rounds of golf and shiatsu massages went well. In the future some people might be able to have as much sex and electronic gizmos as us. Meanwhile, there's a free iPhone under your seat!"
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
Isn't this essentially what Alvin Toffler predicted. Home based fabrication replacing the mega-industrial state?
?
I must be misunderstanding something, as I watch videos relating to personal fabrication almost daily.
I mean, I'm sure most of us here do. Right?
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
Watch it, its mainly about fab labs they set up in 3rd world countries where people are inventing brand new things on their own. Its not about mass production is about unlimited customization.
"Personal Fabrication"
You mean like lying to yourself every night so you can catch a sound sleep? I've been doing that for AGES!
Signed,
W.H.Gates III
Since the /. effect has shut down the original site, check it out on youtube
There are two reasons that factories produce better products more efficiently. One is economies of scale (addressed in another comment), which clearly doesn't apply in some cases (see the so-called "Long Tail"). Two is that the best machines have always also been the most expensive. But there is no a priori reason that better machines must be more expensive; it is entirely plausible that some technological advance will produce machines that are better than anything we've got now, and can be made and operated by one person in a small space for very very cheap. It is even plausible that there would be no (or more likely no immediately obvious) improvements that can be made to them simply by throwing money at them. So, from that time until the next tech advance turns things around again, it would definitely be better and more efficient to run these small fab ops in everyone's home, at least for the small time jobs where economies of scale don't apply.
Your argument boils down to "It's always been this way, and so it will always be this way." which is not logical. I'm not claiming that the current generation, or even any generation, of these personal fabricators will meet the criteria I described above, but merely that logic does not dictate that they won't.
SIGSEGV caught, terminating
wait... not that kind of sig.
Suppose that you could have a personal fabricator that could build clothing. Just supply it thread, cloth and zippers and it will do everything else for you. It would turn the economy on its head overnight.
...
Even if a manufacturer in China can build clothing cheaper than you can with your fabricator, you can't buy clothing for that price. The garment that comes out of the factory for $5.00 sells for $200.00 at the local mall. That's where the personal fabricator shines. It cuts out all the middle men and the transportation. Of course, it would also lead to the death of the mall as we know it but
You're not wrong.
But consider one very narrow aspect of this make-it-yourself-with-a-fancy-machine trend that we've actually got some real-world experience with: photo-printing.
A photo-printing service can crank out reams of ultra-high-quality laser-printed photos with a gigantic, capital-intensive piece of equipment. Due to the economies of scale, the cost per print is actually very low.
A personal inkjet photo-printer is slow, balky, finicky and has a voracious appetite for expensive supplies. Yet people buy and use them anyway, because they print -- or reprint, if they don't like the first result -- right here, right now.
There seems to be plenty of room in the marketplace for both of these options.
... is lack of resolution. Until they can bring the accuracy of part making down to the order of a few microns, it's not going to really be that practical.... for crying out loud, even the human eye can resolve measurements of only 35 microns. They need resolutions at better than half that before I'd ever look at getting one.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
The problem with this video is that it looks to much like an Apple marketing show. But he is brilliant IMHO. If Americans don't want him, he is more than welcome in Europe :-).
:-). Anyway it truly looks like the final stage of "Object oriented" language :-).
Well here is a brief summary:
He presented several new concepts and Fab labs. Fal Labs vulgarize sciences and technologies. His thesis is that non-technical people have technical skills too. The goal of a Fab lab is to provide an environment where they can create their own stuffs. he cited several examples, including children who produced a more efficient design than MIT engineers for a very specific task/tool. But well English isn't my native tongue, so I suggest you to watch the video clip. Anyway it looks like a very interisting approach but he was too "selling his stuffs", it wasn't an objective approach.
Then there are also several concepts and proofs of concept (such a pity that he didn't provide more information). Most of them were related to "the code won't be abstract anymore". Basically your code becomes a "real" thing.
For example students have used molecules as bytes (?). The idea behind this experiment is when you compile...Your compiler would produce molecules. The ultimate goal would be to use all these complex molecules as instructions, then as functions to program "living things" or complex material. Well I really wonder how the debugger and the compiler will look like
It is really interesting (IMHO), sure it is mainly about "ideas" but interesting ideas.
Isnt loading in SWF player, but FLV is working fine
http://static.videoegg.com/ted/movies/NEILGERSHENFELD_high.flv 53mb
...for now
I met Neil Gershenfeld at the Supercomputing Conference in 2007. He has set up these mini-fabs at MIT, Africa, Scandinavia and elsewhere. I remember reading about someone else setting up something similiar in Silicon Valley. Each time, they were a huge success. It gives people a chance to make a one-off prototype of a idea they have. Before this was a terribly expensive proposition. Once the initial capital costs are paid, these shops run fairly inexpensively. This is such a great way to unleash the creativity of so many inventors that normally would not be able to afford it.
byteherder
I saw Neil at SC07. He came off as quite insistent that his way of thinking is right and everyone else's thinking is wrong when it comes to development of compute power and the networking / programming interfaces we develop around that. How you could make buckets of compute power and if you needed more, just throw another bucket at it. He then went off on some tangent of making lightbulbs and buildings "intelligent". He showed off his internet0 devices. He then went on a long talk about his fab labs, showed off some videos etc. It seemed really cool on the surface of it. Still it was more visionary and philosophical than anything else. It would require quite a paradigm shift to move to his way of thinking. I just don't think its going to happen anytime soon.
...as it is clearly evident.
It takes a man to suffer ignorance and smile
Be yourself no matter what they say
Good point... sort of... The expense of R&D would destroy any benefit a personal fabricator would have to the average Joe, unless something like the open source movement develops for tangible items... Which is already happening. Look at all the free CAD-type stuff you can get already. Even without the ability to produce it readily available. Also, plastics aren't the only materials being used. Some are experimenting with Field's metal, and I'd guess that it won't be too long before I'll be able to download the Blender file for my car's intake system and produce it out of aluminum.
I recommend a single article recommending that people keep an eye on TED instead of individual users, who apparently have just discovered TED, submitting "articles" suggesting everybody watch the latest one they stumbled upon. Actually I'd like to recommend people do that for a number of web sites, like LifeHacker and Wired. I'm glad you just discovered TED, but the fact that you are now aware of it doesn't qualify as news.
I discover new information on the internet every day and I realize that just because it's the first time it's come into my periphery doesn't make it newsworthy. Just last night I watched a video about OOP by Dan Ingalls, as great as it was and however new to me, it was 20 years old to the rest of the world.
Verizon: Latin for "poor rural service".
So these "fabs" won't come with scanners to measure/model "original objects" then.
Remember how bad Diablo economy, in the original game, became once "duping" was common? No one respected your hours of hard work down in the catacombs and caverns any more. It was all "Godly Plate of the Whale" for all!
I only look human.
My mother is a halfling and my dad is an ogre, so that makes me an Ogreling
1) Mass-produced products are not better quality. They are often worse.
2) What you want may not currently be made in a factory. It may be an "obsolete" style or model of something. I have a perfect example right in my kitchen: tupperware. I have three different sets of mis-matched tupperware. I don't like the "new" style. I like the old style. If personal fabrication devices ever become reality, Tupperware is toast. Their entire business, like fashion and other 'design' industries with extremely low raw materials costs, seems to revolve around changing the style of their products every few years and forcing you to purchase a completely new set.
3) Not everything is made on an assembly line. Many products are simply not being produced in the most efficient way possible. Which is cheaper, paying someone to build something for you in a one-off fashion, or building it yourself in a one-off fashion? "Just-in-time" manufacturing was supposed to reduce costs by building things at the last minute as the parts arrive from your suppliers, but what it has really reduced is efficiency and quality, as parts are not inspected before they are installed and more often arrive "at the wrong time" rather than "just in time", completely screwing scheduling and any semblance of an assembly line at the manufacturers that implement it poorly.
4) As the Open Source movement has proven, many times end-users have better ideas about how products should work than the people who make them. Personal fabrication can do for manufacturing what personal computing did for information technology.
5) For certain 'disposable' products, personal fabrication has the potential to reduce waste and environmental impact. Recycle products instead of replacing them.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Doing computing at home will never become practical. The machines are too expensive, and if they are able to bring the prices down some, it will still be less expensive to do it on a big centralized computer with trained professionals.
Saying that one-off fabrication can never become practical is about as short-sighted as saying the world market for computers is 4 or 5. It isn't that fabricators need to be able to crank out a million identical parts for less than a factory could, it's that a fabricator will be able to crank out 100 special-order parts for much less than just the setup cost at one of those factories and with no loss of quality. When fabricators can reproduce themselves (as several projects appear to be close to doing, other than a few very inexpensive components), the price of a fabricator will come down to raw material. Expect to see the remainder of the processing (including creating electronic components and actuators) within 10-25 years (depending on how complete you want it to be - in 25 years I believe you'll be able to dump in some iron nails, a few pennies, dirt, water, air, some aluminum cans, an old mercury thermometer and some old NiMH and Li-Ion batteries, add a bunch of energy, and have it pop out just about anything you want - maybe in 50 years you can connect it all to Mr Fusion which runs off of water, old beer and banana peels).
I often see products that I really like go out of production and the replacement has added features I don't want and taken away features I want. If I had a personal fabricator, I'd be able to replace broken parts or recreate the whole damned thing if I needed to, and not have to rely on that part or product still being available (at any price) from the manufacturer.
I often see products that are perfect except for ONE thing; I'd love to be able to re-make one little part to bring it to perfection, but often that part is just too difficult to fabricate using what I have available. A home fabricator would be perfect for that, even if it takes a couple hours to crank out a part, and costs 10 times what a factory would cost (though the cost to me would probably not be any more than what I pay for the factory part, given distribution costs and markup).
With the advent of molecular manufacturing, even the very chemical compositions will be able to be replicated. The shampoo you really like changes their formula and now it sucks? Just make your own, screw them. I see it as the equivalent of FOSS, there will be vast libraries of stuff you can download and manufacture yourself - when the chemical composition, the physical form, and the controlling software is all available as freely modifiable source code, things will really be different. I see a future in which the very concept of a shopping mall or grocery store is ridiculous. Lowes or Home Depot? Radio Shack? Furniture and hardware stores? Going someplace to buy things that were manufactured somewhere else? Why?
Wealth in the future will be: energy, raw materials, real estate, human creativity (e.g. entertainment), human services (e.g. concierge services), attention (e.g. youtube), and for a while control of force (as in government). If you really want to be rich in the future, start buying used-up landfills and worthless real estate out in the middle of nowhere and start building a political base. Even after we get off this planet, land will still be valuable, people will want to be here for a long time to come.
Factories that mass-produce goods will probably be able to make things cheaper, but not necessarily better than you can.
A factory is motivated by one thing: profit. A business -- any business -- will try to find the balancing point where the product is good enough to be accepted by consumers but cheap enough to to maximize profit. If you make the product cheaper, consumers get fed up with the shoddy quality and buy a competitor's product instead. If you make the product better, costs (usually) go up, and again consumers buy a competitor's product.
On the other hand, someone looking to fabricate an item for their own personal consumption can take as long as they want to get the product exactly the way they want it, since they are not seeking to maximize profit.
Case in point: I own a bass guitar that was built by a guy at my church. The bass is a work of art; the inlays and detail work are incredible, it's got a neck-through-body design for better sustain, it has absolutely stunning highly-figured woods for the body, and it plays like a dream. Tonal quality is simply amazing. For him, building basses is a hobby, a way to unwind after work and on the weekends. He doesn't care if he makes a profit on his guitars. While I also own some really nice Fender guitars, they aren't nearly as nice as my custom bass, because -- other than the Custom Shop guitars, which are designed to fill a really small niche -- Fender is in the market to make guitars that are good enough, but not so good as to be priced out of reach of amateur musicians like myself.
If you look around, you will see this played out in any market you want to research. Do you own a Ford, Chevy, Toyota, Nissan, etc., or a Ferrari, Lamborghini, Hummer, etc.? Is Windows (or even OS-X, for that matter) a high-end product, or is it good enough, most of the time? Do you wear a Timex/Casio/Armitron watch or a Rolex?
So yeah, a factory will probably make it cheaper, but better? Not necessarily. If you are a passionate amateur craftsman, you can probably make a better product if you are willing to spend the time to get it exactly right.
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
He's talking about the future of the Santa Claus Machine?
Just put it in the garage beside my flying car, m'kay. Thanks.
---
"I can't complain, but sometimes still do..." Joe Walsh
3D printers that build structures with plastic beads exist. We also already know that it's possible to arrange molecules with a scanning-tunneling microscope. Why is it such a leap to imagine that process for complex structures could be automated?
Yes, there are significant hurdles to overcome, but comparing the concept of 3D molecular deposition to a belief in magic dragons is off-base.
It's important to strike a balance between luddism and vaporware, to be sure, but you're refusing to extrapolate logical successors to existing technologies because they exceed your personal sense of the possible. But others do believe it's possible, and they will keep trying to achieve it until one day they succeed.
And you will work for them.
Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.
The interesting question to me is what layer of abstraction did you have your gear change fix at?
Somewhat off topic, but anyway... Gear changing was abstracted to "change to desired gear" at the Galil motor controller, which is a programmable device interpreting a simple little programming language of its very own. The higher level computers would send it a UDP packet with the desired gear number, and every 50ms, read back the status. During gear changing, it would report "busy", and once gear change was complete, the new gear number would be reported.
We had a GUI for debug, showing various buttons and meters. The transmission was represented with "D", "L", R", and "N" buttons. The current gear showed in green. During a gear change the button turned yellow, then green once gear change was complete.
At the next level up, the "speed server", running on a QNX machine, was responsible for throttle, brakes, and transmission. It handled the interlock conditions for gear changing (vehicle speed zero, brakes locked, RPM at idle). The speed server was basically doing a "cruise control" job. It also handled the "rollback" problem.
The level above that, the "move server", took requests like "advance forward 20m at 3 m/sec with turning radius 30m", and issued commands to the speed server and steering system. The move server understood stopping distance, including hills, and had an input from the simple anti-collision radar to stop if a big obstacle was in range. Move requests were replaced with new ones every 100ms by the map system.
At the level above that, the map server/planner, operating at "back seat driver" level, was in charge of deciding where to drive. It didn't have to worry about vehicle dynamics. It just decided when backing up was necessary, and issued a backwards move. This would result in everything winding down to the vehicle stopped/brakes locked/engine idle condition, a gear change, a brake release, and acceleration.
We lost the Grand Challenge, but the vehicle drove itself and never hit anything. We had about +- 2 degrees of compass noise, and that was enough to get the LIDAR-built map out of sync. The vehicle would stop, rescan, rebuild the map, and recover, but that was too slow. We tried to get by without a $40,000 FOG gyro, heading from dual GPS phase, or SLAM, and that wasn't good enough.
As the penultimate nerd, what I think I'd really like is a fabricating machine with which I can fabricate 25.4mm scale miniatures on demand for fantasy wargaming, only requiring model files for the minis I want to make, and I could make as many as I want (I can paint 'em myself... so color isn't an issue for me). The minimum feature size supported would have to be phenomenal to be viable for this though... probably no larger than 0.1mm. I absolutely loathe shelling out oodles of cash every single time I need more miniatures and would love to be able to make em myself.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
> "The beckoning promise of personal fabrication".
I'll take a Shania Twain and Sela Ward, circa age 42, a Sandra Bullock circa age 38, and a Valeri Bertinelli circa age 25, all with nonsentient robot minds tuned to be physically in love with me...and each other.
Then a Kate Beckinsale fabrication knocks on the door, and she's Shania's daughter and, well, they miss each other so much...so very much...damnit, the future's gonna r00l!!!!!!!!!!! Where's that holodeck?!?!?
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
The first Fab Lab giving people the technology to create technology. Not very original Mr Gershenfeld! I can do science me!
>>I like TED as much as the next guy, but more and more of it seems like a whitewash, style-over-substance dog and pony show.
Welcome to academia. =)
Also, TED's a little too self-congratulatory for my taste, but they do have some fun talks.
A professional printing press still has many advantages
over a home or office printer as well, and certainly isn't
going away for precisely that reason.
Does that support the idea that cheap printers to the
people hasn't changed anything about how we work with
printed materials?
Nope.
Also, the personal one-off fabricators get the limelight,
but probably more important are the middle ground:
Professional short-series fabrication, analogous to the
internet book publishing services
You still use a professional service that gets better
price/performance than you would at home (at least
beyond true one-offs), but _they_ still use general
purpose fabrication with no retooling that beats a
factory for series well into the hundreds.
sudo ergo sum
Saves carrying along loads of redundant spare parts.
Every space colony should have one! (actually, every space colony should have at least two, so that when one breaks down, the second machine can print spare parts for it).
Eric Baird