Link: 'Fabbers' could launch a revolution.
Price tags for these machines average around $100,000, but you can build your own Fab@Home for about $2,300 worth of off-the-shelf parts. The prototype, designed by Evan Malone, a Ph.D. candidate in Lipson's Computational Synthesis Laboratory, is slower than the commercial models, and its resolution, or ability or produce fine detail, is lower, but people are finding practical – and often unexpected – uses for it.
Commercial machines can't be modified, which, Lipson says, impedes the progress of the technology, but the Fab@Home is "open source." Anyone can download the plans at http://www.fabathome.org, which is getting about 20,000 hits a day. The site also includes construction hints, ideas for applications, notes on the history of 3-D printing and discussion groups. People are invited and encouraged to make improvements, and a sort of cult is slowly forming.
