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

Re:do they apply?

[denis-The-menace]

RE: how long till whackjob's start making weapons in them?

don't worry. This stuff will be illegal as soon as it is available because it will kill the revenue stream of too many rich people. And thanks to "the Shrub", only the terrorists will have access to this technology.

The overrated promise of personal fabrication

[Animats]

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.

Re:they will never change the advantages of a fact

[Sirch]

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.

Convenience and distribution costs

[PIPBoy3000]

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.

Re: the advantages of a factory

[Lagged2Death]

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.

Neil has a very good idea here.

[byteherder]

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

Exactly

[benjamindees]

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.