Introductory Information on Digital Fabrication

     Please visit the following sections of fabbers.com for information on the technologies and applications of fabbers and digital manufacturing.

What is a Fabber?   An introduction to fabbers and what they can and cannot do.

Fabber Applications.   Examples of how fabbers are being used around the world in manufacturing, medicine, and other fields.

The RP-ML.   Visit the virtual community of fabber users and developers. See what today’s fabber users have been talking about and join in the conversation.

Technical Resources

The StL Format.   Technical information on the de-facto standard data format for fabbers.

Future Vision

     These articles and speeches present a vision of the future of fabber technologies and how they will impact the way people live, work, and play.

• Napster Fabbing — Internet Delivery of Physical Products, about the marriage of fabbers with the “peer-to-peer” Internet to provide a radical new means of product distribution.

• Atoms from Bits: The Digital Revolution in Manufacturing, presenting the radical future of fabbers in the home and office, and how this will change the world.

• The FAB–ulous Fabber! — How to Profit from the Next Technology Revolution, slides from an exciting presentation on how fabbers are used in industry, medicine, and business.

• Fabbing the Future: Developments in Rapid Manufacturing, a detailed presentation on fabbers and how to use them.

• Automated Fabrication—The Freedom to Create, based on Marshall Burns’ first corporate keynote presentation, compares the impact of fabbers on manufacturing to the impact of books on literacy and of cars on transportation.

• The Household Fabricator describes a residential subdivision built in 2008, where the homes have a fabricator room, with fab materials supplied by underground pneumatic tubes.

• The Origins and Direction of the Fabricator Revolution, the farthest-reaching discussion of future fabbers, including “accretive fabrication,” modeled on the growth of biological systems.

• Using Fabricators to Reduce Space Transportation Costs explains how fabbers are the critical element that will finally make space habitation feasible for the first time in history.

• The Personal Factory, Brock Hinzmann’s vision of people using fabbers at work and at home.

• Automated Fabrication: The Future of Manufacturing explains how fabbers will undo the harmful effects of the industrial revolution on mankind, returning manufacturing to the community.

• Growing Autofab into the 21^st Century, based on an invited lecture at a United Nations conference in Ibadan, Nigeria, discusses the three basic areas of research in fabber development: process, materials, and control, with examples of the sorts of problems studied in each area.

• Perspectives on StereoLithography: Automated Fabrication in the 19^th, 20^th, and 21^st Centuries was Marshall Burns’ first keynote address, given to the 1992 StereoLithography Users Group Conference in San Francisco. He presented many of the exciting lessons learned in the research for his book, Automated Fabrication, which was published the following year. This included the origins of and future prospects for this dynamic industry, with suggestions on handling its challenges.

Links to Other Useful Sites

     Follow these links to other Web sites of interest in the fabber community.

The Worldwide Guide to Rapid Prototyping Resources provides information on digital fabricators and their use in rapid prototyping, rapid tooling, and direct manufacturing. Broad coverage of technologies, patents, and products, including a comprehensive listing of digital fab shops (“rapid prototyping service bureaus”).

TurkCADCAM.net, a Turkish-language site, is an extraordinarily comprehensive and profusely illustrated collection of information on anything related to computer-aided design and manufacturing, including digital fabrication. An English version is under development.

The Rapid Prototyping Report is the primary trade publication of the fabber industry, providing user case studies, technology assessments, and news on research and business.

ScaleModel.net is a listing of Web sites related to the making, selling, exhibiting, and discussion of scale models of vehicles, weapons, buildings, and other big things.

3D Ring is a 3-D graphics Web ring, offering articles, interviews, reviews, and other resources on 3-D computer graphics.

ModelPress, a Web publishing and visualization system for 3-D CAD models, compresses standard CAD files by 70 to 99 percent. Producer Informative Graphics is following Adobe’s business model for making Acrobat the standard for 2-D document distribution on the Web. Rapid Prototyping Report rated the software highly in a review in December 2002.

3D Object Converter is a shareware viewer and translator for 3-D files. It claims to support 324 file formats, including both ASCII and binary StL. Developed and distributed by Zoltán Kárpáti in Hungary, it is available for Windows95/98/Me/NT/2K/XP.

MadeForOne.com is an information portal for news and analysis of developments in mass customisation.

     Digital sculptors are innovative artists who design their works on a computer, then output the results with a digital fabricator. Some of the pioneers in this cutting edge medium are:

     e-Fab means ordering custom products online. You send a digital file of what you want to the online vendor, who then fabs it and ships it out to you. Some leading e-Fab shops include:

• Xpress3D
• eMachineShop

Feedback

     Please let us know at if there is some additional information that would be particularly useful to you.