The Three Phases of Personal Data

Jordan Staniscia describes an interesting link between current developments in 3D printing and "2D media" that we've all been using for many years. His concept is "custom personal data", data that can be mixed, manipulated and of course chosen by you. 

 

In the increasingly distant past, such choices were made by media execs in big companies during the broadcast era. But more recently we've all been given much more choice in what we can view and when we can view it. 

 

He's calling "Media" the first of three phases of custom personal data. The second is "Solid objects". This is a stage we'd be entering today, thanks to the development of inexpensive personal 3D printers that permit anyone to print basic, simple solid objects of their choice. 

 

The third phase would be "Complex machinery", in which working machines rather than simple, monolithic solid objects could be routinely created. Obviously, the third phase will take a while to emerge. Maybe quite a while. 

 

We think this is an interesting and probably reasonable way to look at the long-term situation. We are all simply manipulating data and sometimes mistake their physical manifestation as "it". The data ultimately matters most. Remember, "CDs" disappeared when replaced with portable digital files that have no relationship to a particular physical form. 

 

Objects will be the same. 

 

Via Jordan Staniscia

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

MakerBot Distributes Itself!

 

The buzz over MakerBot, the budget 3D Printer is clearly intense. Sufficiently intense that demand for their amazing device has almost outstripped their manufacturing capacity.

However, being an inventive crew, they've come up with a pioneering solution that we don't think has been attempted before. They are crowdsourcing a portion of their manufacturing. Even better, they are crowdsourcing to existing MakerBot printers. In other words, they are asking the clients themselves to help make more printers. And those printers will make more parts for even more printers, and so on...

It's not the entire printer, but it is one specific part (the "608 Idler Pulley"), and MakerBot will pay you USD$30 for a batch of 30 operational pulleys. Why this part? Simply because it's on their critical path and the barrier to larger scale production. But where else might this lead?

In a mind-bending twist, they've invented the embryo of a self-replicating client base; something the marketeers have dreamed of for millenia!

What will they do next week?

Via MakerBot

Information, Objects and Business

 

We just finished reading a fascinating 3-part post on Zeus Jones that resonated with many of the concepts we've been pondering. Fabbaloo readers will recall that our vision of the future includes a world where most people have desktop manufacturing equipment in their homes, and "shopping" for some, perhaps many objects is done by selecting a design from a repository (or by paying a service) and then producing the object on the home printer.

There's many implications of such a scenario to society, but Zeus Jones has captured one rather interesting notion: in that world, the information becomes the focus, not the objects. Consider that printed objects may break, disappear or become obsolete, while the associated 3D design remains forever in a repository. This leads to the fantastic idea that:

physical forms may actually be the temporary states for information, while digital forms may actually be the permanent states

Zeus Jones goes on to suggest several potential consequences of this paradigm:

• Products and services give physical form to information
• Information will be more valuable than objects
• There may be two classes of objects: those you can print yourself and those others must print for you
• Products are temporary and throw away
• Product design becomes information design

It's a different way of thinking about objects and information. We suspect that this paradigm is actually emerging today in the minds of designers worldwide, as their focus increasingly lies on models, and less on the resulting objects. Do you agree?

Via From The Head Of Zeus Jones, Part 1, Part 2, Part 3

Open Manufacturing

 

Reader Bryan Bishop points us to a new initiative: "Open Manufacturing", which at the moment appears to be a watering hole for discussions about how to supercharge our space. Now then, exactly how would that be done? Their tagline:

Open Manufacturing is about bringing free and open source software development methodology and philosophy to the design and construction of the physical world.

The philosophy is to take cues from the massively successful open source software community and see if analogous solutions could work with the 3D manufacturing space.

Eric Hunting lists many void areas within the "open" portion of 3D space today in a very provocative post. Some of his key points are:

• Makers tend to recreate existing objects instead of leveraging the tech to produce otherwise impossible objects
• Few if any standards for modular construction exist, ensuring that most projects are unable to leverage, say, huge libraries of existing part designs
• No repository for designs exists in the same manner as Sourceforge. (Well, one could suggest that Google's sketchup library is something like that, but it's not really like Sourceforge)
• Little standardized documentation and instructions exist for all of the required techniques, meaning non-commercial practitioners are largely on their own

We agree with all of this, and the rest of Eric's points in his brilliant article, too. One can find bits and pieces of the necessary stuff, but it just isn't organized in the same smooth operation we find with today's open source software. Once some of these capabilities emerge, we'll soon see 3D manufacturing "in the open" take flight.

Via Google Groups and Open Manufacturing

Step By Step

Replicator has a wonderful post that lists the essential steps for accomplishing 3D printing, although with a ZCorp flavor. Here is what they say (and we agree) are the steps you must get done:

• CAD Preparation - Always the first step, and perhaps the most difficult. You gotta have a model, and you're either making it yourself, buying one or finding it somewhere
• 3D Printing - This is the easy part. You send the model to the printer (or service) and simply wait for it to finish printing. We didn't say this was the quickest step, because printouts still take hours or even days to complete
• Cleaning 3D Printouts - Right from the "oven", the printouts are usually messy to varying degrees depending on the type of printer. The post illustrates the challenges in cleaning up models printed on dry powder media printers. The ZCorp requires a period in an actual oven to firm up the media glue
• Post Processing - For sure, they're never quite right. You may have to grind off supports, sand rough areas or other touchups
• Finishing - Unless you're using a ZCorp printer, you probably will be hand-painting your model, as most printers simply print in a single color and single material. Even ZCorp output may require painting if the colors are not sufficiently vibrant or varied
• Packaging - The post points out one aspect not well understood by those new to 3D printing concepts: the models just aren't very strong. To counteract this, they recommend encapsulating printouts in a package for protection

As you can see, getting a 3D model in your hands is a lot more than just pressing a button on a printer. This illustrates the challenges facing this industry, where mass adoption is impossible until the sequence of steps above is dramatically simplified. We've seen some attempts at this in some of the steps above, but no one has been able to put the whole thing together into a coherent and simple flow for consumers. Stay tuned!

Via Replicator

40,000 Lights are Better Than One

That's the claim made by Huntsman Advanced Materials, who recently announced the availability of their new Araldite Digitalis. It's a stereolithography machine that produces 3D objects by selectively hardening pixel-sized areas of a resin.

Most stereolithography machines utilize a laser to gradually "draw" each layer of pixels into the media resin. Huntsman Advanced Materials has a very unique approach to the hardening process, which typically is the most time-consuming part of the process. Instead of a single laser tracing the pattern, they use MEMS (micro-electromechanical systems) to produce 40,000 light pixels simultaneously! According to their website, the approach "significantly reduces production times and thereby costs".

We're fascinated by this development, as it is quite a break from most "single pixel" 3D printing techniques. Unfortunately, no statistics were immediately available from Huntsman, so we can't say precisely how much faster this technique might be. However, we can all imagine the possibilities here: solving the biggest issue in 3D printing today, time to print. Currently it takes hours to produce even the smallest items, and often several runs are required to produce all component pieces for later assembly. With the "parallel pixel" approach build times are sure to drop significantly.

Can other printer manufacturers develop similar approaches with their technology? Will this tech eventually make its way into home-based fabbers, and permit quick builds? Time will tell.

Via Huntsman and Develop3D

A 3D Spime Gateway in Every Home

We noticed an interesting article on the Cisco blog, where author Dennis Mancini postulates the future of Spime technology. Spime? Proposed by author Bruce Sterling, a Spime is "a type of technological device that, through pervasive RFID and GPS tracking, can track its history of use and interact with the world," according to Wikipedia.

While an exploration of Spimes is way beyond the scope of Fabbaloo, the idea is that they are self-locating and recording devices. They record a history of their situation throughout their usable lifetime until they are turned back into recycled atoms and their gathered metadata is harvested for analysis that will improve future generations of spimes. 

So what does this have to do with Fabbing? Mancini suggests that 3D printers are a logical place for Spimes to emerge. He says: "Spimes are the logical output of a logistics infrastructure based on now affordable fabbers."

This is indeed what Sterling suggests, as "Fabrication" is a fundamental step in his "Spime Meme Map", which demonstrates a closed atom/information loop. It's a conceptual way to look at object economics in a future of recycling and personal manufacturing.

We got thinking about this scenario, and wondered if this could be a possible distant future? Dark technovandals distribute secret code via botnet to millions of home 3D printing factories, and on command billions of tiny spimes flow onto the planet's surface, ready to perform evil actions to the highest bidder?

We hope not. For now, we'll stick with printing christmas ornaments and replacement lids. We'll worry about that other stuff another day.

Maybe we'll worry a lot.

(Image courtesy of Bruce Sterling)

Via Cisco Blogs and Bruce Sterling's Understanding the Spime Flickr Set