Fabbers

While many stores are caught up with rush (the time of year when students come in to buy textbooks for the semester -- a peak season), we thought it would be nice to have a fun story or two. Today's is about fabbers. You may have heard about fabbers -- these are essentially 3d printers -- printers that allow you to manufacture or produce 3-dimensional devices, such as a coffee mug, on demand. Talk about POD! Many of these devices cost in the tens of thousands of dollars (or more), and have material limitations. But as the technology continues to evolve costs will go down and capabilities will improve. There may be a market for college stores, particularly on campuses where students need or want to develop prototype products for demonstration purposes. Or a student wants their own customized coffee mug on demand. :) It turns out that it may be possible to build one of these fabbers on your own -- sort of an open source fabber. You can learn more at http://www.fabathome.org/ to see how it is done, see some sample products produced on fabbers, and learn more about the technology.