Fab@Home: the personal desktop fabricator kit

abstract

Purpose – Solid freeform fabrication (SFF) has the potential to revolutionize manufacturing, even to allow individuals to invent, customize, and manufacture goods cost-effectively in their own homes. Commercial freeform fabrication systems – while successful in industrial settings – are costly, proprietary, and work with few, expensive, and proprietary materials, limiting the growth and advancement of the technology. The open-source Fab@Home Project has been created to promote SFF technology by placing it in the hands of hobbyists, inventors, and artists in a form which is simple, cheap, and without restrictions on experimentation. This paper aims to examine this.

Design/methodology/approach – A simple, low-cost, user modifiable freeform fabrication system has been designed, called the Fab@Home Model 1, and the designs, documentation, software, and source code have been published on a user-editable "wiki" web site under the open-source BSD License. Six systems have been built, and three of them given away to interested users in return for feedback on the system and contributions to the web site.

Findings – The Fab@Home Model 1 can build objects comprising multiple materials, with sub-millimeter-scale features, and overall dimensions larger than 20 cm. In its first six months of operation, the project has received more than 13 million web site hits, and media coverage by several international news and technology magazines, web sites, and programs. Model 1s are being used in a university engineering course, a Model 1 will be included in an exhibit on the history of plastics at the Science Museum London, UK, and kits can now be purchased commercially.

Research limitations/implications – The ease of construction and operation of the Model 1 has not been well tested. The materials cost for construction (US$2,300) has prevented some interested people from building systems of their own.

Practical implications – The energetic public response to the Fab@Home project confirms the broad appeal of personal freeform fabrication technology. The diversity of interests and desired applications expressed by the public suggests that the open-source approach to accelerating the expansion of SFF technology embodied in the Fab@Home project may well be successful.

Originality/value – Fab@Home is unique in its goal of popularizing and advancing SFF technology for its own sake. The RepRap project in the UK predates Fab@Home, but aims to build machines which can make most of their own parts. The two projects are complementary in many respects, and fruitful exchanges of ideas and designs between them are expected.

Introduction

Solid freeform fabrication (SFF) technology is capable of manufacturing objects with almost arbitrary geometry (Sequin, 2005) – making it in this limited sense a "universal manufacturing technology." We believe that, manufacturing systems based on SFF technology can be made capable of the manufacture of complete functional devices without compromising the aforementioned geometric freedom. Such manufacturing systems, dubbed "compact factories" or "fabbers," may have the same potential to transform human civilization as another "universal" technology – the digital computer. The ability to directly fabricate functional custom objects could transform the way we design, make, deliver and consume products. Moreover, rapid prototyping technology has the potential to redefine the designer. By eliminating many of the barriers of resource and skill that currently prevent ordinary inventors from realizing their own ideas, fabbers can "democratize innovation" (Burns, 1995; Gershenfeld, 2005; Lipson, 2005).

Ubiquitous automated manufacturing can thus open the door to a new class of independent designers, a marketplace of printable blueprints, and a new economy of custom products.

Despite the formidable potential of rapid prototyping technology, its acceptance over the last two decades has remained disappointingly slow, with worldwide annual sales still being measured only in thousands (Wohlers, 2006).

At present, SFF systems remain very expensive and complex, focused on production of mechanical parts, and used primarily by corporate engineers, designers, and architects for prototyping and visualization. These factors are linked in a vicious cycle which slows the development of the technology: Niche applications imply a small demand for machines, while small demand for machines keeps the machines costly and complex, limiting them to niche applications. Alternatively, if one could provide either a large market for SFF machines and products, or a simple and cheap SFF machine with which end-users could invent products and applications, then this same feedback coupling could instead drive a rapid expansion in SFF technology and applications.

Conclusions

Few technologies can truly transform human society to the degree that computers have. The universal digital computer, from the early experimental machines of the 1950s to the home computers and embedded devices of today, has affected almost every aspect of human existence. It is not easy to foresee such disruptive technologies in advance, but it has not escaped many that SFF technologies bear many of the same traits. Like universal computation, universal manufacturing, embodied as compact factories or "fabbers" based on SFF technology, has the potential to transform human society to a degree that few creations ever have.

In order to accelerate the spread and development of SFF applications and technology, and to escape the "chicken and egg" paradox, we have developed an open-source, low-cost, personal SFF system kit, which we call the Fab@Home Model 1. The current kit design has a parts cost of roughly $2,300, requires only basic hobbyist tools and skills to assembly and use, and can be used to deposit almost any room temperature liquid or paste, and to build objects comprising multiple materials. We have employed a usereditable "wiki" web site as well as free discussion forum and free open-source software development services to foster the growth of a user community and to promote the exchange of ideas and improvements to the technology. We have thus far built six complete Fab@Home Model 1 systems, three of which have been delivered to users outside of Cornell University. Several more Model 1 systems have been built or are under construction by individuals inside and outside the USA, including units being used at the University of Washington in an engineering course. Generating an initial wave of interest does not seem to be a concern – what remains to be seen is whether we have provided a system design cheap enough and simple enough, and a social/ technical network complete enough to support a chain reaction of innovation, application, collaboration, and commercialization similar to the one that allowed the digital computer to infiltrate and revolutionize nearly every aspect of civilization today.