Health & Fitness
For Want of a Nail; What If You Could Build Whatever You Can Imagine?
Product designers often use the Thing-a-Matic, which creates any object you program, up to a cubic foot in size, to build prototypes. Will it be a game-changing technology or end up on the trash heap?
A 600-year-old old nursery rhyme warns us to always be prepared by telling the tale of the loss of an entire kingdom due to the need of a single horseshoe nail. Had that kingdom-losing king lived today and had the foresight to purchase a Thing-a-Matic by Makerbot, he would have been able to retire from the battle, kingdom intact, and the nursery rhyme would never have been written.
The Thing-a-Matic along with its smaller cousin Cupcake CNC is a relatively affordable home version of an industrial 3-D printer. A 3-D printer, for those not yet in the know, is a machine that uses ink-jet printer technology, along with melted plastic, powder or metal to make just about any three dimensional object up to a cubic foot or so in size. It applies millimeter layer upon layer of material, slowly building the object from the bottom up. Industrial printers cost several tens of thousands of dollars and are used to quickly prototype parts from CAD drawings. Makebot, the creators of the Thing-a-Matic however, sell their product for under $1,400. Their Cupcake CNC is priced at under $700. Granted, both come in build it yourself kits suitable only for the sufficiently techy-type user, but how far off is the day when we all have one sitting in the corner waiting to create a much needed horseshoe nail or anything else we can imagine.
The earliest home computers were sold in a kit form as was the Altair 8800, and we all
know they evolved to the indispensible home and office computers that are so much a part of our lives. Likewise the Magnetophon, the first reel to reel tape recorder, bulky and unwieldy, morphed into audio cassette tapes and later digital technology and eventually lead to the revolution in digital audio and video recording that is still underway. I’m wondering if the Thing-a-Matic is pre-cursor to the next game-changer technology. Or, is it destined to remain a fun, albeit really expensive and complicated, toy that will forever only produce trinkets, oddities, and a host of horseshoe nails that end up biding their time until the next summer garage sale. Ah, if only I knew.
