Two experts from Cornell University are going to commit a veritable revolution in the home workshops around the world. Hod Lipson and Evan Malone have developed a voluminous printer, which can be assembled of the easily accessible parts and in the same time it wont cost as an atomic submarine. The price should be about $2.5 k.
As we know 3d-printers (along with rapid prototyping system) had been invented quite long ago and are developed inside research centers and design studios. But the minimum price of the device with four zeros is surely not conducive to wide distribution. The machine developed by Americans which was named "Fabricator", is a constucotr set of "make by yourself". All drawings, instructions and a control software are available for free from the project site FabAtHome. According to them the mentioned $2.500 are spent exclusively for the purchase of necessary parts. As a result there comes a Microwave oven sized device with a capability to reconstitute CAD models with plastic and other materials. However, the choice of materials is not very rich, because of the construction applies only that you can drive from the syringe and harden quickly.
But according to the developers plans their aim is to create "universal fabrikator" device capable of working with many different materials and to have as a finished product not a separate components, but ready-made operating units. Ideally, such a universal Fabricator must be able to create its own copy. Before that, of course, still very far away, but in any case the appearance of FabAtHome creators have already been compared to the advent of the notorious recruiting Altair 8800, marked a shift in their time of mainframe to personal computers.
