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Where leaping to conclusions is my primary form of forward motion.
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Amazing On Demand Manufacturing
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Friday, August 19, 2005
The Peculiar Genius of Personal Fabrication
As a follow-up to my emachineshop post a few weeks ago, there's a great article in the September issue of Wired (on your newstand now, not yet online) about mini fabrication labs popping up all over the place. These labs use the latest in affordable, computerized tools to build one-off devices and parts. Author Clive Thompson interviews eMachineShop founder Jim Lewis and uses the eMachineShop software to create his own one-off guitar to test the process. The author also discusses MIT professor Neil Gershenfeld's worldwide network of fab labs and spends some time inside Saul Griffith's California-based SquidLabs.While the equipment isn't cheap, it's not as much as you'd think. Everything in the shops discussed in the article - vacuum formers, laser cutters, milling machines - could be bought for between $50,000 and $100,000. Further, software like eMachineShop makes using the tools possible for anyone. After each one of Gershenfeld's mini labs opened, people showed up to create an amazing array of things. Among the samples in the article:
- A Norwegian sheepherder built GPS-enabled tags for his flock
- An Indian businessman created and electrode-driven device to measure the fat content of milk
- A Boston teen created a motion-detector security system for her dairy.
The implications for this - the idea that the cost of prototyping is dropping to near zero and tools for design will be understandable and available to anyone with high school-level computer skills - are profound. Today the market is for one-offs - things no big company will make. But in the future this may well replace the R&D and design departments at many, even most, product companies. What has begun to happen to software - small, innovative (and often open source) software companies spring into existence to be quickly bought by big behemoths who can no longer innovate on their own - could well become the norm physical products. Have a better idea for a derailleur shifter on a bike? Prototype it on your own. Designed a spiffy new fuel injector nozzle to drive up fuel mileage? Crank out a few and see if they work.
There will likely never be anything as cost effective as mass production, and there will remain a need to understand materials science, engineering, etc. But today the understanding isn't enough. You need access to massive amounts of capital to test and develop new products. It's this accumulation of capital that allows big corporations to make the rules about what is saleable, profitable, and appropriate. In the future your knowledge of some basic engineering principles combined with a good idea may be all it takes to completely remake a product category. That has to be a scary idea for big corporations everywhere.
Terry Frazier at 2:22 PM
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Thursday, August 4, 2005
Amazing On Demand Manufacturing
If you’re worried sick about all the outsourcing to China, losing sleep over the wholesale shift of manufacturing jobs to the Asia-Pacific region, and constantly banging your head on the wailing wall of “free” trade please have a look at the future – www.emachineshop.com.
A friend in the modeling business pointed me to this site and it is, in a word, amazing. If you’ve ever tried to have any custom manufacturing done you know what a nightmare it is just to get someone to quote your project. Getting it approved – i.e. making sure it can actually be done the way you want it done – is nearly impossible. It doesn’t matter where you do it – here, Singapore, China, wherever – it’s all the same. One giant, expensive, unreliable pain in the ass.
CAD programs made it possible to design complex objects via computer. CNC machines made it possible for those drawings to become complete machining instructions. 3D printers made it possible to build accurate models without investing in tooling and dies. But none of these things were connected in a way that helped the small innovator get to market. And none were especially affordable.CAD programs are renowned for their steep learning curves and hideous license fees. 3D printers still run close to a half-million dollars. And getting a CNC shop to talk to you about your small project? Priceless.
eMachineShop has automated this error-prone process and removed the need for human intervention in the frustrating estimate/quote/approve cycle. They provide a free, – yes, free – CAD program you can use to design your project. When you submit the drawings you get an automatic approval. If the machine you want to use can’t do the job you get suggestions on how to change it. You can do one, or thousands. And you get a quote right away. You can do what-if scenarios to your heart’s content and no snarky sales guy is going to bitch about your changes.
I know what you’re thinking. I thought the same thing – this CAD software must be crap. Well, eMachineShop is the brainchild of Jim Lewis, founder of Micro Logic Corp. and developer of the venerable PIM Info Select.His software is not crap. And this idea could change everything. All kinds of niche products become viable, and the information gap between regular people with ideas and manufacturing specialists with access just got crushed. This is what happens when smart software people put their minds to things, and it’s why all the moaning about outsourcing and China may be moot in the long run.
I can already think of at least two dozen people who, with a few thousand dollars, can now launch new businesses around cool ideas they’ve had for years. If you ever had a product idea but didn’t know where to begin you owe it to yourself to check out eMachineShop.com
Terry Frazier at 10:13 AM
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Thursday, May 5, 2005
Update on Skype Performance Issues
I got some help from Skype tech support on the CPU usage issue. In addition the list of conflicting programs listed on the Skype site, I was instructed to turn off the built-in speech recognition function in Windoze:Also, be sure to turn off Windows XP speech recognition feature. The speech recognition engine kicks in when you begin a call and can cause your CPU to run at 100%. Turn off the speech recognition by opening the Control Panel and selecting Regional and Language Options. On the Languages tab, under Text services and input languages, click Details. Under Installed services, click Voice Recognition under the language you are using, and then click Remove.
I didn't even know this was on, and removing it did make a significant difference in performance. Skype still hogs CPU at logon, and whenever I initiate new activites, but it doesn't seem to hang during calls, or when I send an IM during a call. I tested it for about 15 minutes this afternoon and results were acceptable.
Terry Frazier at 5:54 PM
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