The Microfactory: A machine shop in a box

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/327919589/the-microfactory-a-machine-shop-in-a-box

by bshanks • 12 years ago

31 18 12 years ago

bshanks• 12 years ago

yes, the kickstarter is expired, but https://twitter.com/Mebotic indicates that the project is still alive.

mebotic• 12 years ago

Hey guys, just saw this thread. Yes the project is very much still alive. we are making a less expensive version of the machine which we hope to have up on Kickstarter in the near future. In the interim we are having a ton of fun posting projects we've been making with the machine which you can find on the bottom of our homepage www.mebotics.com

THANKS FOR THE SUPPORT!!!

Blahah• 12 years ago

That thing looks amazing, but probably before its time, $5k is a lot to throw down on a preorder for a machine. I would happily put down that if the thing was already available though... perhaps they should explore more traditional funding routes to get production started?

Turing_Machine2• 12 years ago

You can get a milling machine + lathe + a bunch of tooling for way less than that, and have plenty left over to make it CNC if you so desire.

http://littlemachineshop.com/

Turing_Machine2• 12 years ago

Also: http://www.mini-lathe.com/

shpxnvz• 12 years ago

Not to mention that LittleMachineShop sells complete proven CNC rigs for about the same price with no risk, and which are obviously much more rigid as well.

adamwong246• 12 years ago

How much longer till a machine can produce an identical, working and complete copy using only raw materials and a blueprint?

marcosdumay• 12 years ago

After we discover a way to make microchips in factories that cost $1k instead of $1G, and deal with the revolution in economics and computing that follows it... Then we can think about machines that reproduce themselves.

mikeash• 12 years ago

As chip technology advances, does any of it make it substantially easier and cheaper to make old, slow chips? In other words, while massive factories are clearly the way to go for current technology and they let you pump out cheap chips in massive quantities for ridiculously low per-unit prices, what if you wanted to, say, fab an 8086 today? If you jump a few decades back, can you make those chips individually today through some reasonable process, or is the whole business just inherently large-scale even after all this time?

sbierwagen3• 12 years ago

Depends on what you'd call a "machine", and how "raw" your raw materials are.

Bob Freitas wrote an open-sourced book on this a decade ago: http://www.molecularassembler.com/KSRM.htm

For simple tinkertoy-ish machines, floating in a sea of parts, and sitting on a shaker table, (to provide power) it's already been done.

For anything with a microchip in it, full closure would require machine-phase nanotechnology. Partial replication should be possible with conventional technology, (a "clanking replicator" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clanking_replicator ) if you supply the replicators with "vitamin" parts they can't produce themselves. (Chips, stepper motors, anything made of rare minerals)

A lot of work was put into this for the Advanced Automation for Space Missions study in 1980, a proposal for a solar panel factory on the Moon that would build more solar panel factories: http://www.islandone.org/MMSG/aasm/

BryantD3• 12 years ago

In the interests of transparency, please note that one of the four founders didn't complete fulfillment on his last maker-oriented Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1738994529/kikori-open-...

storborg2• 12 years ago

It's amazing to me that Kickstarter allows delinquent creators to start another project.

BryantD3• 12 years ago

I don't know how they'd track it when it's not the same account.

I pledged to the Kikori Kickstarter (which, btw, means I've got some bias in this although I wasn't up for any rewards) so I knew who the guy was, and I happened to notice that he was involved in this one. Even a human reviewer wouldn't have caught that. Well, you could do simple name matching but I don't think that's good enough -- compare this to the no-fly list, for example.

So I'm OK with word of mouth being the governor here. It's also a good indicator that you should research before you pledge. I do a quick web search if I'm backing something from someone I don't know. It helps set my expectations.

The Microfactory: A machine shop in a box

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