Manufacturing Power to the People
Now anyone with $2400 (£1200) can build a machine at home capable of generating 3D objects from plastics.
Hod Lipson from Carnegie Mellon and PhD student Evan Malone have developed a desktop fabricator as detailed in this week’s New Scientist: Desktop fabricator may kick-start home revolution.
The developers define fabbing on the project’s main page:
Fabbers (a.k.a 3D Printers or rapid prototyping machines) are a relatively new form of manufacturing that builds 3D objects by carefully depositing materials drop by drop, layer by layer. Slowly but surely, with the right set of materials and a geometric blueprint, you can fabricate complex objects that would normally take special resources, tools and skills if produced using conventional manufacturing techniques.
The design is open source enabling anyone to download the blueprints and build their own.
I’ve been fascinated by the potential of home fabrication ever since I read Neil Gershenfeld’s Fab: The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop - From Personal Computers to Personal Fabrication a couple of years ago. It’s coming out in paperback in the UK early February and offers an inspiring if slightly breathless tour of the potential of giving the power of manufacturing to people. If you enjoyed Thomas Friedman’s The World is Flat you may well like this too.