Have you ever had an idea for an invention but had no way to make it? Or wished that you could correct the perversities of a product’s design? What if you could download instructions for making your own custom products-a toaster that prints pictures on toast or a music player with enough headphone jacks for all your friends-as easily as you now download music files? And what if you could produce those custom-designed products in your own home?
You can do these things now, using something called a fab lab, or personal fabrication laboratory. Currently, a fab lab is a $20,000 minifactory that can fit in a small room. Soon it will fit into a $1,000 tabletop machine. In the developed world fab labs can make stuff you want that nobody else produces or has even invented. If fab labs spread, they will bring the ability to manufacture badly needed items to developing countries. Once venture capitalists figure out a way to apply the lessons of microfinance (see Forbes, Apr. 18) to microfabrication, then people all over the world will be able to produce high-tech, highly specialized inventions in limited quantities that meet local needs.
What’s in a fab lab today? Three computer-controlled cutting tools. One is a laser cutter, for making plastic parts. The second is a small but very high-resolution computer-controlled milling machine that produces 3-D shapes in materials the laser can’t cut, like metal. It can also work with wood. This machine can do the work of a drill press or a lathe. It can make everything from screws to molds to circuit boards. The third tool is a computer-controlled knife for plotting large shapes in flexible materials, like the copper roll that’s used for making antennas and wiring.
Fab labs can’t make chips yet. Instead we buy off-the-shelf microcontrollers at less than $1 each that can be programmed to act like custom chips. Standard items in the electronics industry, they are only a few tenths of an inch in size, but they are so fast we can use them for tasks like Web serving or acting as a telephone modem or generating video signals displayed on a television.
In the newest fab lab we’re building we’re adding a fourth computer-controlled machine, a plasma cutter, for making larger metal parts used in agricultural equipment such as machines for grain harvesting.
Fab labs also have the capability to receive complex instructions in digital form, sent from a faraway place. The design for a sensor developed in Cambridge, Mass., for instance, can be sent to a rural Indian village and produced right there.
We did just that in a fab lab we set up in Pabal, in western India, where we worked with the Vigyan Ashram, a rural science school for high school dropouts. In 2002 some colleagues and I spent a few months developing a fab lab there. Our Indian partners wanted to invent various devices to aid in agricultural production. Among them was a milk tester to monitor the quality of locally produced milk so that farmers could get paid fairly.
Back at MIT we came up with a design comprising antennas attached to a circuit board, which we sent electronically to Pabal. Our partners could then produce it in the fab lab. They used the computer-controlled knife to make antennas out of copper foil. With the milling machine and the microcontrollers they produced a circuit board that generates and analyzes electrical signals. You place the antennas next to the milk and send a radio signal into the liquid. It works by measuring the complex-frequency response of the milk, a standard materials-testing technique used in analytical chemistry labs.
One more invention is needed to make these fab labs a reality in the developing world: microfinancing. Instead of microloans, can we get venture capitalists to help out with equity capital? Obviously milk producers in India can’t make a pilgrimage to Palo Alto to pitch a $20,000 deal. It’s time to take the expertise of the VC industry and make it flow through to entrepreneurs and inventors in far corners of the Earth.
By Neil Gershenfeld, director of MIT’s Center for Bits & Atoms and author of FAB: The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop-From Personal Computers to Personal Fabrication (Basic Books)