Factory in a Box

I think this is very, very cool:

IF YOU ASK Neil Gershenfeld, there may come a day, perhaps not so far in the future, when we'll no longer need manufacturers to make our products for us. Gershenfeld, a physicist and computer scientist who runs the Center for Bits and Atoms at MIT, envisions a time when many of us will have a "fabrication center" in our homes. We'll be able to download a description of, say, a toaster -- perhaps one we designed ourselves -- to our computers, and then feed the designs and the raw materials into a personal fabricator. At the push of a button, almost like hitting "print," the machine will spit it out.

Wuh? Huh? How's that work then?

... The fab labs -- which consist of about $25,000 worth of high-tech equipment and supplies, including a laser cutter, a vinyl cutter (normally for making signs but used here to cut copper for circuits), and a 3-D milling machine to make circuit boards, all connected to Linux-based computers loaded with open-source design and manufacturing software...

In other words, a machine shop in a box. Very nice. This turns out to be perfect for use in countries or areas without an industrial infrastructure.

The idea is that they can be empowering, especially in rural, developing communities, by giving people the ability to design and create the tools they want or need to solve local problems. In Ghana, users are trying to find an inexpensive way to build large solar energy collectors to turn the country's near-constant sunlight into power. In Pabal, India, a small community more than 100 miles outside of Mumbai, lab users developed diagnostic instruments to help fix tractor engines with timing troubles. And at the lab in Norway, users are working on GPS systems for boats and de-icing machines for windmills.

But wait, there's more:

Gershenfeld describes the shift from large-scale, expensive machine tools to personal fabrication as analogous to the evolution that began 40 years ago from room-sized mainframes to personal computers. Instead of personalizing the ability to do digital computing, we're now able to digitize and personalize the ability to manufacture our own tools and machines.

As it currently exists, however, the technology imposes limits on what can be done. The fabrication machines used in the fab labs today can't produce anything larger than themselves. (The milling machine, for example, is the size of a printer.) The laser cutter cuts no longer than two feet. Nor can it cut very deeply: It would take a day for the laser to slice through an inch of plywood (they now use a saw when necessary).

What's particularly interesting is how even the very limited use of fab-labs so far show the different approaches that cultures bring to using technology. When Gershenfeld began teaching a course in the use of fab-labs at MIT:

...The students -- many of them artists, architects, or science students without a technical background -- "responded passionately to the tools," he says. Soon they stopped asking him for help. They worked alone and with each other to learn what they needed to build what they wanted -- things like a portable scream machine" that saves your screams and plays them back (a kind of high-tech stress release); an alarm clock that won't shut off unless you prove you're awake by winning a game against it; a bicycle that recharges batteries when you ride it.

Though Gershenfeld liked his students' designs, he says, "they were making things for a market of one." He began to wonder how the fabrication tools could make a difference outside of Boston...

Thus the following interesting results:

The labs also face other, social challenges depending on where they are. In Boston, it is sometimes difficult to keep kids interested in learning after they're told, for example, they can't yet build life-sized robots. In South Africa, whose government is considering starting a fab lab, the challenge is apathy. "People don't want to be scientists or engineers anymore," said Riaan Coetzee, an information officer at South Africa's government-backed Council for Scientific and Industrial Research, at the user meeting in Boston. He believes a fab lab might get people excited about technology...In Ghana, says Amy Sun, a grad student at the Center for Bits and Atoms who helped set up the fab lab there last summer, they ran an average of six classes a day for locals aged 4 to adult. She estimates that nearly 1,000 people came through the lab during her six-week stay.

The other encouraging sign is current lab users' desire to collaborate, even though they're in far-flung countries. Most of the labs, for example, want to build antennas for various communications purposes. Recently, the lab in Norway -- where farmers and engineers are collaborating to build a wireless radio network to track sheep and reindeer -- built an antenna and posted photos and instructions on the Web for the others to see.

Naturally there are plans for an upgrade:

Ultimately, Gershenfeld wants to build a machine that can make any machine -- one that can "print" 3-D objects that include all the circuitry and mechanisms they need to move around, heat up, make noise, connect to the Internet, or do whatever it is they're designed to do. Such a machine -- think of the "replicators" on "Star Trek" -- doesn't yet exist, but Gershenfeld and others say there will be a version of it in a decade.