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The Beckoning Promise of Personal Fabrication
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Wed Feb 27, 2008 11:23 AM
from the can-it-make-me-a-sandwich dept.
from the can-it-make-me-a-sandwich dept.
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.
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This is awesome!
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st getting s...
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deo!
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Re:Embedded Video? (Score:4, Informative)
Is a working video
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Re:Embedded Video? (Score:5, Funny)
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Summary (Score:2)
TLA (Score:3, Funny)
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.
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Meaning Category
Tactical Enforcer Drone Community->Law
Target Exit Device Governmental->Military
Teamwork Effort And Deadlines Business->General
Technology Entertainment Design Community->Media
Tenders Electronic Daily Business->General
Tending To Emotional Disorders Medical->Physiology
Terrance's Eye For Detail Miscellaneous->Funnies
Test and Evaluation Directorate Governmental->Military
Text Entry Display Computing->General
Thaddium Elemental Diverter Acade
News for nerds... (Score:2, Offtopic)
"Filmed Feb 2006; Posted Feb 2007"
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Re:News for nerds... (Score:4, Funny)
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personal fabrication of (Score:3, Funny)
I thought something else (Score:3, Funny)
Honestly I did.
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I don't believe it (Score:5, Funny)
Ba da Bim
Personal fabrication? (Score:5, Funny)
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Yes, or it could be about selling Structured Investment Vehicles (subprime mortgages?)...
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they will never change the advantages of a factory (Score:4, Informative)
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:they will never change the advantages of a fact (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Parent
Convenience and distribution costs (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Re:they will never change the advantages of a fact (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: the advantages of a factory (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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Re:they will never change the advantages of a fact (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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Re:they will never change the advantages of a fact (Score:3, Insightful)
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 wi
Re:they will never change the advantages of a fact (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Exactly (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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The overrated promise of personal fabrication (Score:5, Insightful)
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 [rolanddga.com] 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 [techshop.ws]. 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:The overrated promise of personal fabrication (Score:4, Interesting)
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Re:The overrated promise of personal fabrication (Score:4, Funny)
See how much more sense it makes when I say it?
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Why so dismissive? (Score:3, Interesting)
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 s
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We also already know that it's possible to arrange molecules with a scanning-tunneling microscope.
One single molecule.
Why is it such a leap to imagine that process for complex structures could be automated?
Now figure out how many molecules make up, say, a 10 cm cube of your favorite material. Sure, you could do it if you want to wait a million years.
The only way things like this are even remotely possible would be with self-replicating robots, to do parallel assembly. But then you have the probl
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You've just made the argument that life is impossible. Im sorry, but all human beings are in fact, living nanotechnology. What exactly do you think every baby on earth is? An incredible feat of engineering.
http://aimediaserver.com/studiodaily/videoplayer/?src=harvard/harvard.swf&width=640&height=520 [aimediaserver.com]
Re:The overrated promise of personal fabrication (Score:5, Interesting)
A part from any of these rapid prototyping machine is almost always useless by itself. You need hardware, motors, metal shafts, electronics, different materials, and some skill in putting it all together to make much of anything interesting. There might be a revolution, but it's for the people that have been fabricating for years anyway who are finding new and better ways to do the same jobs. I took a manufacturing class with one of the pioneers in applications for stereolithography, it's a useful process with some niche applications, but no revolution. It's no personal computer, life is a little harder when you're pushing around real matter instead of information.
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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.
OK, gear change abstraction (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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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 L [mit.edu]
Better and better (Score:2)
Besides a low nine figures in funding, a small army of engineers - mechanical, electrical, and especially software, and an iron mine near a riv
The Third Wave (Score:2)
Personal Fabrication (Score:2)
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?
My biggest issue with these things.... (Score:3, Interesting)
Neil has a very good idea here. (Score:3, Insightful)
byteherder
Xkcd is the prophet again... (Score:3, Funny)
General Advice? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:do they apply? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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Perhaps - depends on how you look at it [oreillynet.com]. And the way I look at it, anything taco says translates to "help me get money - blockhead".
What I think is funny is how the lingo has gone from "...worth a read", to a supposedly apologetic "...and is worth your time, assuming you have 20 minutes to see something really neat." Oh, 'really neat' - well, in that case... (next time try not dating yourself).
hey, LFTenan' taco: 20 should be twenty, except the whole thing,