How long before "Tea, Earl Grey, hot"?

[khaosworks]

Bringing fabrication to the desktop

When your master's thesis consists of building soccer-playing robots, what do you do for a Ph.D.? For Evan Malone, a graduate student in mechanical engineering at Cornell University, the answer is clear: you design a three-dimensional fabrication machine capable of building complete robots—power supply, electronics, body, and motors—that can walk right out of the machine when complete.

When Malone can do that, he'll walk out of Cornell with a doctorate, but in the process of working on his robot fabrication technology, he became interested in a different challenge: bringing fabrication to the desktop.

Three-dimensional fabrication tools, or "fabbers," have been common in industry for years. They can be used to make rapid models of car parts, gears, or other bits of industrial machinery in a matter of minutes. Most rely on a slow process of deposition in which various kinds of plastic are built up in layers to form the desired shape. Unfortunately for those who want to put this incredible technology to use in the home, the machines run $20,000 and up. Way up. Many of the machines cost well above $100,000.

Malone's goal was to build something cheap and reliable, something that hobbyists could use to kickstart a "home fabbing revolution" that would have analogues to the personal computer revolution that hobbyists helped to launch in the early 1970s. The result was Fab@Home, an open-source project that provides drivers, applications software, and detailed design plans for assembling a three-dimensional desktop fabricator. Total cost: under $2,400.

Malone's machine puts fabbing within hobbyist budgets for the first time. Since the first Model 1 Fabber began life in the summer of 2006, Malone has launched a wiki and built a community of enthusiastic tinkerers, all in his spare time.

The project has already attracted worldwide attention; Malone has taken his device to South Africa at the request of the government there, and one of the first Model 1 machines has already been requested for an exhibit at the Science Museum in London. Early machines are still primitive, but they work reliably. A Model 2 revision is already in the works.

More...

Comments

[chaotic-nipple.livejournal.com]

Personally, I'd settle for a home lego fabricator. There are sooooo many cool pieces that are just not available in the colors I want, dammit!

[mdlbear]

We have a commercial version of this at work -- CAD files in, pieces of plastic out. Very cool.

[astro-not1.livejournal.com]

I actually saw this piece about two or three weeks ago, from a link in the message forum of a science-fiction oriented model building website. I'm curious how you found out about it. Do you build models, too?

[khaosworks.livejournal.com]

I believe it was from a Boingboing link.