CubeSpawn

Another very cool KickStarter project has appeared: CubeSpawn, by James Jones. The project's concept is to establish a standard approach to linking personal manufacturing machines together based on the common cube shape. In this vision, 30cm square cubes are placed adjacent to one another, and each contains some type of manufacturing machine. Results from one cube are passed to the next cube for further manufacturing.

The project envisions standard cubes with "the basic 20 or so industrial capabilities". With a library of functions like that, one could potentially assemble a manufacturing plant simply by arranging the appropriate selection of cubes in the right sequence and providing some coordinating software. According to CubeSpawn:

If the cubes can pass what they are working on between them and each cube can do one of more steps in making something, then a large collection of cubes with the basic 20 or so industrial capabilities, could make almost anything -- that is, anything of a size that would pass through them, of course.

In video Jones explains his goal to produce a set of standards that permits easy creation of a complete manufacturing process from end to end. He's starting by building two prototypes in 0.5m size.

If you'd like to support open hardware, we'd encourage you to contribute to this very interesting project. Good luck, CubeSpawn!

Via CubeSpawn and KickStarter