August 2007
Intermediate to advanced
190 pages
7h 38m
English
Personal Fab
THE OBJECTS WE BUY TODAY ARE MADE in enormous factories, typically thousands of miles away. Like the mainframes that preceded personal computers, these factories are filled with expensive machinery, controlled and maintained by dozens of operators and technicians. Also like the mainframes, they’re about to be displaced by home machines.
Neil Gershenfeld of MIT’s Center for Bits and Atoms has written Fab, a book that describes the possibilities that home fabrication machines will create, and how people today are using fabrication labs that the Center created. A critical component of personal fabrication is CNC — computer numerical control. A CNC machine is controlled by a computer ...