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.

Comments

they will never change the advantages of a factory

[SuperBanana]

The whole point of factories is efficiency via spreading capital investment across a greater quantity of product. If fabricators become cheap enough for personal use, the factory ones will get cheaper, which means that they'll still make things cheaper and better than you can. They have more money for better equipment, trained staff to produce a high quality product, etc.

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.

Re:Embedded Video?

[MindStalker]

http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/90
Is a working video

Re:they will never change the advantages of a fact

[MindStalker]

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.

YouTube link

[SteveMurphy]

Since the /. effect has shut down the original site, check it out on youtube

Re:Embedded Video?

[Anonymous Coward]

Working version: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5n-APFrlXDs

Re:they will never change the advantages of a fact

[oliderid]

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 :-).

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 :-). Anyway it truly looks like the final stage of "Object oriented" language :-).

It is really interesting (IMHO), sure it is mainly about "ideas" but interesting ideas.

Re:The overrated promise of personal fabrication

[Animats]

You gotta find first gear in your giant robot car

I've dealt with that problem.

We had problems powering the shift lever in our DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle. The base vehicle was a Polaris ATV. We put a motor driven screw jack with analog feedback on a push-pull cable to drive the shift linkage. Positioning the shifter wasn't enough. We had to position it to the right place, then wiggle it back and forth under computer control with decreasing amounts of wiggle until the transmission fell into gear.

Then there was "rollback" to deal with. Normal procedure was to release the brakes, then rev up the engine. On a hill, this results in a rollback. That had to be dealt with in software. On the first try, the vehicle would release the brakes, roll back a bit, the driveshaft encoder would report backward motion, and the software would jam on the brakes. On the next try, in "hill" mode, the engine was revved up until the tachometer reported enough revs for the transmission to be delivering some power, then the software slowly released the brakes and the vehicle started up the hill.

So, yes, I've actually had to find first gear in my giant robot car.

Re:The overrated promise of personal fabrication

[mollymoo]

Stereolithography machines aren't magic. They're a useful way of making plastic shapes in small quantities, expensively. But that's about it.

Evidently you didn't watch the video, but there's no mention of stereolithography in the summary either, so I'm not sure why you went off on that tangent. The video is about personal fabrication, the technologies used for it are almost an aside - he gives examples of everything from CNC to proteins. They do, however, have a collection of technologies, called a Fab Lab. It's not a stereolithography machine or indeed any single machine or technology, but a $25 000 lab of kit which is sufficient to make stuff that does stuff. Think machine shop + electronics lab + design tools.

You should watch the video, it's pretty interesting.