DIY Manufacturing, Robots & More
I have been reading a lot the last few years about DIY manufacturing coming to the garage tinkerer. (Design your own salad tongs!) And, I just read about 3D printers that accurately create fossils. (Make your own Australopithecus xxx skull to study.) Combine that with the open source use of the X Box for robotics, and it starts to get interesting. Add in crowd sourcing projects, unexpected uses of devices like the iPhone and Android phones, and much more and you come up with a situation of pregnant potential in my opinion.
Here's an excerpt from Scientific American...
Open hardware is not just about making fetishes; it’s also about saving the world. Much like the student Protei, hackers in Japan quickly sourced and shared the components and software to build stationary and mobile radiation monitors after the meltdown of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant began in Japan on March 11. By April 9, affordable Geiger counters paired with Arduino microcontrollers for wireless communication were helping build a crowd-sourced map of radiation in Japan, according to programmer and developer Shigeru Kobayashi. Similarly, the open hardware community built clip-on devices to turn an iPhone into a pocket radiation monitor. Given the inability (or unwillingness) of the Japanese government and TEPCO to share such information, in this case open hardware provided the first comprehensive open access radiation maps. Hackers Use Open Hardware to Solve Environmental Problems | Observations, Scientific American Blog Network
It seems to me that we are about to achieve critical mass on several technologies and methods. I can't tell you what is about to happen. But, without being overly dramatic, I sense that we are about to enter another world rewrite like the printing press, the industrial revolution, and the internet. The problem I have in conveying my reasons for believing that we are entering a focal point is because of the seeming eclectic mixture of ingredients.
The printing press...
The cotton gin...
The gas combustion engine...
The atomic bomb...
The internet...
All begin with "the" as in singular. But, when I read about DIY manufacturing, robotics, artificial fish with artificial muscles, X box crowd sourcing control for robots, use of iPhones to detect radiation, there is no THE.
Just thinking...
