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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.
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.
I read this story, it may seem to have some credibility .. but let me tell you .. it's all fabrication.
Ba da Bim
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.
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.
Obama's legacy: (N)othing (S)ecure (A)nywhere and (T)error (S)imulation (A)dministration
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.
... Duped Mar 2009
It's true I tell you, feller at work's next door neighbour read it in the paper.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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"
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.