Mike Doty organized this topic.
MIT Course on "how to make just about anything"
Wearable computing with machines which can integrate circuitry and sewing technologies
Also, check out the Fab Academy.
Mike Doty is looking to make an "open source" fab shop in California Bay Area
Water cutter is an interesting technology
Z-Corp's 3d printer can do burnout.
CnC mill
Woodsmetal is a really low-temperature alloy. Used in old sprinklers. Can use it for low voltage systems to create circuitry printed into equipment.
Writing a trace with conductive ink and then plating it into something that is useful.
RapidPrototyper is a 3d addiive printer, as opposed to things which cut parts away from a big starting slab
Will we ever be at a place where we just feed stock into a machine and it prins out "stuff" ?
There are too many different kinds of components that need to be manufactured, and you will always have different machines for different kinds of parts and/or materials. What about economies of scale?
You should buy screws because they are cheaper? Bump that, eliminate the screws. If you make cleverly designed objects, you won't need screws.
Can most designs be reduced to one material? The overwhelming response from this group, is no. Many many things need so many multiple materials. Try making a pc board with plastic. It will be bigger. Your design trade-offs are different. A spark plug requires specialty ceramics.
What are the safety implications of open source 3d hardware? You use a lot of safety engineering?
If I have 500 RepRaps can I compete with a commercial production line?
If you're doing something like RF-circuitry then the board becomes part of the circuit because it is fine-tuned.
Kovia is doing rapid prototyping for transistors.
It should be rapid prototyping not rapid manufacturing.
Salad works is a good software
Blender can export STL files but it is not very good as a CAD, it is more for things like 3d graphic artwork
ShopBot and FabLab both have opensource software products
Others include Omax, MasterCAM
NIST has good open source gCode stuff available
Chocolate
Sugar
Pasta (Fabaroni)
Squid has many 3d models in 3ds
RepRap has many available bloggers around
James A. Barkley
Mike Doty
Peter Milford
Eric Bauswell
Scott Elofson
Kevin Braithwaite
Eric Gradman
Simone Syed
Cameron Colby Thomson