About a week ago I was surfing the channels on TV when I got enthralled by a presentation given by an MIT professor, Neil Gershenfeld [1], on C-SPAN (I never watched that blah-blah-blah channel) who is in charge of MIT's "Center for Bits and Atoms" [2].
The presentation, or what attracted me to it was its Open Source ideals and usage as well as philosophy - I shan't get into the details of what it is about, etc as I will leave that to the curious. But in short they are working on a means to let people pretty much produce anything they need with some relatively simple and affordable tools and some minor building blocks (microcontrollers, etc). The Fabrication Lab also note a great dependence on Open Source software and here-in is the gEDA connect. These FABLabs have been proven in the field - there are a handful of centers world-wide already (India, Ghana, Norway, etc). Has anyone contacted Neil and/or his colleagues to see if there are areas of mutual interest to be worked on ? Has anyone looked into their work, flow/tools and results to better summarize things for us or to better improve on what is available ? Is there any interest in establishing better communication with this project in hopes of getting support _and_ enhance the collective offerings ? The FABLab project, from what I've heard and read (their website leaves alot to the imagination btw) is able to produce semi-accurate micro-meter devices, circuit boards, etc and they anticipate the manufacture of chips in the next 10-15 years all for roughly $20,000 in total (not per project, but in total as in startup and upkeep costs). In any regard, just wanted to see if anyone is interested in their work. It would have been ideal if some contact was established to further both efforts forward. [1] http://web.media.mit.edu/~neilg/ http://cba.mit.edu/projects/fablab/ [2] http://fab.cba.mit.edu/ BTW: the links above are mere examples, do please google. NOTE: I am _NOT_ affiliated nor am I part of the aforementioned project and/or work, I simply saw something on TV which seemed very interesting, very promising and thought it would interest others on this list. Regards, .tf. __________________________________ Yahoo! Messenger Show us what our next emoticon should look like. Join the fun. http://www.advision.webevents.yahoo.com/emoticontest
