Entries tagged with: Fabrication

23 result(s) displayed (1 - 23 of 23):

Push-Button Gunsmithing and the Long Arm of the Law

California state Senator Leland Yee wants to stop people from being able to print out firearms with 3D printers. Like many other folks, Yee was startled by the work of Defense Distributed, a group working on designs for guns that...

Posted on May 14, 2013 2:30 PM

New FC: Material Issues

My new column for Fast Company is now up. The Desktop Manufacturing Revolution looks at the possible impact of 3D printing, which seems to be on the verge of the same breakthrough we saw 25 years ago with desktop publishing....

Posted on July 14, 2009 1:11 PM

Long Tail Micro-Drones

$25 Arduino-based UAV Controller Our first commercial autopilot, the Arduino-compatible ArduPilot, has been released and our goal of taking an order or two of magnitude out of the cost of an autopilot has been achieved: it's $24.95! Combined with a...

Posted on February 5, 2009 11:59 AM

Tuesday Topsight, September 30, 2008

New site logo -- what do you think? • Spam spam spam spam: C Sven Johnson has a post up today at Futurismic that's definitely worth a look: When 3D Spam Got Old. It actually takes place in the Superstruct...

Posted on September 30, 2008 4:32 PM

3D Print-to-Order

Whenever I talk about the rise of low-cost 3D fabrication, one inevitable question (after "how expensive is a printer?") is "does anyone do print-on-demand fabbing?" Real soon now, the answer will be yes. (Update: As Sven notes in the...

Posted on July 22, 2008 3:38 PM

Molecular Rights Management

I'll have more to say about this soon, but I just want to toss the idea out to the noösphere and make it visible. Molecular Rights Management refers to the panoply of technologies employed to prevent the unrestricted reproduction of...

Posted on September 27, 2007 2:43 PM

The Future Feels a Little Bit Closer

I write often enough about 3D printing systems and "desktop fabrication" that when something that I shouldn't be startled by just how fast this industry is advancing. And yet: the ZPrinter 450 looks just amazing. The promotional video is almost...

Posted on March 28, 2007 5:21 PM

RoboFactory

(Cue "Powerhouse," by Raymond Scott) Nanofabbers are on my mind right now. They've shown up in some work I'm doing with IFTF; they're the focus of a project underway with CRN; and they're one of the manifestations of the "software...

Posted on January 4, 2007 5:20 PM

End-User License Agreement, StuffStation Deluxe

BY CLICKING "I AGREE" YOU ACCEPT THE PROVISIONS OF THIS LICENSE. I will not use this product (STUFFSTATION DELUXE) to build, repair, or in any way constitute weapons of mass destruction; I will not use this product (STUFFSTATION DELUXE) to...

Posted on December 20, 2006 11:41 AM

The Future is Here: The Wonkafabber

Okay, it's not Wonka, but still: it's a fabber used to make chocolate bars! High school student Noy Schaal used the Fab@Home system design to make a fabber that could print out chocolate bars, including fancy textures. It's crude, but...

Posted on December 15, 2006 3:55 PM

Bioprinters vs. the Meatrix

One of the odder manifestations of the fabrication future may well revolutionize the world of medicine -- and quite possibly change how we eat and offer a new way to fight global warming, too. Bioprinters use ink-jet printer technology to...

Posted on December 14, 2006 4:29 PM

CopyBot and the Abundance Economy, Revisited

Lots of good observations in the comments to my post from a few days ago, Second Life, Economic Evolution and the CopyBot. Rather than try to address them in the comment thread, I thought I'd go ahead and bring them...

Posted on November 19, 2006 2:46 PM

Second Life, Economic Evolution and the CopyBot

Two related quotes from previous Open the Future posts: When you are able to manipulate atoms as easily as you do bits, the rules of the bit world apply. The rules we come up with to grapple with virtual objects...

Posted on November 16, 2006 6:36 PM

Backlog

So, gone for about a week, followed by a week of meetings and deadlines, and I end up with a serious backlog of interesting/cool/relevant links that really should blog more thoroughly. Rather than bemoan my fate and slowly trickle them...

Posted on October 31, 2006 2:26 PM

The Nightmare Scenario

While reading a story about the "gray goo" attack in Second Life, I was struck by what could well be the nightmare scenario for molecular manufacturing: Spam. Hear me out. We all know the logic behind email spam: the cost...

Posted on October 17, 2006 8:51 AM

UEVs

New Scientist reports on the planned use of the Aerosonde drone to measure the conditions inside a hurricane, including the temperature, pressure, humidity and wind velocity. The Aerosonde will go where no human-crewed aircraft could -- just a few hundred...

Posted on September 20, 2006 2:40 PM

Devolution

I'm posting this via a computer I haven't used for a few months. My current machine, a 2.0 GHz MacBook, began this morning to exhibit the "random shutdown syndrome" that apparently afflicts most of the units made prior to July...

Posted on September 15, 2006 2:08 PM

Abundance, Scarcity and Beta-Testing Tomorrow

I often cite molecular nanotechnology as a transformative technology because of its significant potential implications, especially societal implications. In principle, given inputs of relatively common raw materials (including materials recycled from objects no longer in use), a full-fledged nanofabrication device...

Posted on September 12, 2006 3:23 PM

Friday Topsight, September 8, 2006

Just a quick one today, with not as much text -- but good links to hang onto. • Smeed's Law: What happens when you add cars to traffic? The number of accidents goes down. On average, annual increases of traffic...

Posted on September 8, 2006 5:10 PM

(Virtual) Weapon Smuggling

Three men in Shanghai were convicted this week on charges of producing and selling weapons -- only the weapons existed solely as computer data for a virtual world. Prosecutors allege the trio earned illegal profits of more than 2 million...

Posted on September 6, 2006 5:06 PM

Monday Topsight, July 24, 2006

The temperature here hit 100° in the last hour or so; it's a bit insane to say that this cooling trend is welcome, but when a projected max of 103° is the lowest max temperature in about a week, it's...

Posted on July 24, 2006 4:25 PM

Remaking the World

My friend J. Eric Townsend posted a truly thought-provoking essay on his design blog, All Art Burns. In "On the Path to a Spime-full Future," Eric talks from a designer's perspective on what it would take to transition to a...

Posted on May 1, 2006 4:26 PM

Everyware, Blogjects and the Participatory Panopticon

I love to watch the future take shape. For the past few years, I've closely watched the emergence of a set of technologies that make possible constant, widespread, and inexpensive observation and annotation of ourselves and the world. Cheap processors,...

Posted on April 28, 2006 2:12 PM

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