Ushering in the Era of Home Manufacturing

Vector Engrave on 1/4" plywood at 80% Power / 20% Speed (15ma limit on FSE 40W laser)

    If one were to glace around my 11'x11' bedroom in Santa Paula, it might seem more like a workshop than a living space.  My recently acquired laser cutter takes up a good portion of my room alongside the sewing machine, eggbot, and soldering station to name a few other tools laying about.  I'm still learning how to manipulate power and speed for the best results with the cutter and hope to post my findings/examples here for other laser users or anybody curious to see what I've been putting together.

    Here's an excerpt from a report to the White House regarding the emergence of home manufacturing.

Personal manufacturing is where personal computing was in the 1970s, before the advent of home-scale computers and consumer software. Recent rapid technological advances in personal manufacturing technology, combined with shrinking costs of machines, increasingly available design software and raw manufacturing materials, plus most peoples’ tendency to conduct more daily activities online, are tipping personal fabrication from the realm of hobbyists and pioneers to the mainstream.


    The full document can be found here.

Santa Paula Dead Drops

Today I placed Santa Paula on the Dead Drop map with two 4GB USB drives, bringing the total number of recorded drops in California to twelve.  A sort of digital Geocache, Dead Drops are an "anonymous, offline, peer to peer file-sharing network in public space."  It's a means of sharing files with people simply by connecting to a USB drive embedded in a wall!  Links to my drops can be found here and here.  If you visit any of them, share about it by writing a comment below!

BAMF2011

Over rapture weekend I visited the Bay Area Maker Faire and saw some pretty incredible (and uber-geeky) projects.  Amazingly, most of the art, technology, and fun to be experienced there was home built without any sort of corporate funding or monetary goals in mind.  Attending a Maker Faire is well worth your time, even if you're not technologically inclined.  Here are a few of my photos and video clips from the weekend.