Fab lab

Hey, I found this video today while looking for something completely unrelated to RepRap. As soon as I started watching, it amazed me how close what this guy is saying correlates to the RepRap message. It's fascinating how the people at MIT developed a similar diagnosis of the world, especially the less developed parts of it, without any contact with this community (I assume). It's also amazing how similar their solution is, just at a larger scale (although I suppose that makes it a different solution, as small scale is one of the main points of RepRap). The video is 20 minutes, but well worth the time in my opinion.

[www.poptech.org]

wow,
so they need a RepRap!! Cool video thanks.. the media lab is a cool place i was not aware of fablab..

Fab Lab has been around for a long time. Like the Media Lab it seems to be an outfit that gets a lot of publicity but does very little of real value. Pretty typical Ivy League stuff.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/16/2007 11:52PM by Forrest Higgs.

Forrest, did you watch the vid? I could be missing something, but the examples of projects that the natives came up with seemed eminently practical.

Ah yes, the "natives". How droll. I guess I'm a native, then. I see they've set up another expensive "Fab Lab" in Ghana this time. I guess the ones at the University of Pretoria where I got my doctorate and Shoshanguve nearby weren't far enough into the bundu for them. The point is that once you move out of South Africa and up country you have to give "the natives" a Fab Lab, because they can't afford one in the first place and certainly can't afford to keep one running.

That's why I find projects like RepRap attractive and Fab Lab ridiculous. You can run a RepRap on car batteries and make spare parts for it with itself. Try that with a Fab Lab.

Utterly ridiculous, but with great media connections and presentation skills. That's the Ivy League down to the ground.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 05/17/2007 01:01PM by Forrest Higgs.

I think the guy also misses a whole part of the technology:
Economical empowerment through iterative reduction of production costs. Meaning, that once you have a RepRap built, and it's able to reproduce itself (how strange he didn't talk about that issue, right?) the subsequent costs of the RepRap machines themselves decrease by a factor of 1/N. The cost of repraping any item tends towards the cost of the base products for printing, plus some computing price and maybe an internet connection.

To think that when everybody has a 1000$ desktop fabber at home will be the end of the story is being shortsighted. Nevertheless, you can see in the video how this amazing concept is already making people to think in a creative way, even in a form using half its potential.

Okay, so the technology as he accidentally developed it doesn't scale well, while reprap will ultimately be logarithmic in its deployment. The multi-thousand dollar parts themselves are interesting. Also, if you type in the link from the video, and dig a bit, you find a list of the tools they're using.
Most, if not all, of those tools are adaptable to RepRap. Both the laser cutters would be, additive fabrication is covered, (although in a quick scan, I didn't notice what material was being used, glue and starch, I suspect, for one.) Plasma cutter...dremel, (at least thats what I think of when I read "mill").