Fab: The Coming Revolution on Your Desktop--from Personal Computers to Personal Fabrication
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.46 (938 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 0465027466 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 288 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2017-02-12 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
What if you could someday put the manufacturing power of an automobile plant on your desktop? According to Neil Gershenfeld, the renowned MIT scientist and inventor, the next big thing is personal fabrication-the ability to design and produce your own products, in your own home, with a machine that combines consumer electronics and industrial tools. Personal fabricators are about to revolutionize the world just as personal computers did a generation ago, and Fab shows us how.
A programmable PF, predicts Gershenfeld, will make it possible for users to design and create their own objects, instead of shopping for existing products. Interest in such cybercrafting became evident in 1998, Gershenfeld says, when an overwhelming number of students took MIT's How to Make (Almost) Anything course, aimed at "fulfilling individual desires rather than merely meeting mass-market needs." After inspecting those students' unique creations, Gershenfeld offers a history of how things are designed and made, from the Renaiss
Very upbeat Following along on the latest "Maker" phenomenon this book gives a very upbeat blueprint for the future. Upbeat unless you are a large scale manufacturer.This book describes a project out of MIT to put the means of custom manufacture in the hands of everyone. And I do mean everyone. They have taken their scheme to the African continent, the most remote parts of India and the urban centers of the US.The premise is that small scale, custom manufacturing of any level of technology s. Not Focused enough In general the book was interesting, however it seemed unfocused. Often Gershenfeld seemed to be rambling from one point to another without a logical transition. Indeed, sometimes a whole section seemed to lack a discreet point, but instead was just a series of observations.If you enjoy the topic the book will be interesting, but it lacks enough detail to be useable as a reference and the writing isn't quite focused enough to be IMHO a good read.. Not for Stock Pickers Frankly, one of the reasons that I bought this book was to use it as an assessment tool - to help me root out who the up and coming players would be in the general field of desktop manufacturing. You know the drill (pun intended): find the undisocvered player, take a sizeable position, add time, get rich.What I got I felt were a lot of examples about how fab students were able to get new technology to do new and interesting things, but if you're already a high tech version of a s