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.

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.