$2,400 Home Fabrication Kit
I blogged the DIY fabrication kit made available by Fab@Home back in November, but it’s getting a new round of press, so it seems a good thing to flag again. The New Scientist has an article [spotted via Virtual Worldlets] about the do-it-yourself kit, which drops the price of a fabber from the $20,000 to $1.5 million range, down to about $2,400. “Full documentation on how to build and operate the machine, along with all the software required, are available on the Fab@Home website, and all designs, documents and software have been released for free,” as the New Scientist notes. The Fab@Home site has also been updated with some cool movies and galleries, and a small community of DIY fabbers is beginning to develop via the site’s guest book. As I urged in November: get to work. Also: Is anyone using one of these things to fab items they’ve designed in a virtual world? Let us know.
Feeds
I considered getting one of these to mess around with (as I’m pretty nuts for all this stuff), however the quality is not quite there. Now to be clear, I’m 200% in support of this project, but at this point you could get a tremendous amount of items fabricated with FDM for $2400 dollars.
FDM (Field Deposition Material) is the most similar “professional” process to what the Fab@Home machine does. They both produce a hard plastic like monochrome objects, but just from eyeballing I’d guess the FDM process has about 10 to 20 times the detail of the Fab@Home machine.
If you find fab@home impressive you might also want to take at look at the RepRap project out of the University of Bath in the UK…
http://reprap.org
Their soon-to-be released machine is also open source, has a proper plastics extruder presently qualified for polycapralactone which can make usuable, hard objects. Whereas the fab@home machine costs $2,400 for parts, the RepRap Darwin is on track to cost no more than $400.
A spinoff of the RepRap project, Tommelise, is focussed on the American parts environment and uses somewhat different technology and a different control strategy. It’s open source specification will let anybody with a few hand tools and primitive woodworking skills bootstrap themselves into 3D fabrication for about $150. Tommelise’s extruder is qualified for polycapralactone and is presently being qualified as well for both high density polypropylene (HDPE, the stuff your plastic cutting board is made of) and polypropylene (HPP, the stuff your coffee maker and plastic electric kettle is made of). You can keep an eye on the Tommelise project at…
http://3dReplicators.com
Both RepRap and Tommelise use FDM.
Have fun!
[…] Originally posted by Mark Wallace from 3pointD.com, ReBlogged by yatta on Jan 12, 2007 at 2:42 AM […]