Maker Culture

I have become intrigued with the profusion of "Maker Culture" particularly in the last few years.  There have always been people that enjoy making things, whether they were weekend wood-workers with a garage shop, or crafters with a spare bedroom full of bead bins.  My grandmother probably produced several acres of knitting in her lifetime.  But in the last few years, there seems to be a spreading interest in making all sorts of things.  Some businesses, such as TechShop, have sprung up around this.  Make Magazine offers fantastic ideas and articles for people.  Likewise, the Maker Faire is a part science faire, part show-and-tell, part rave that is now appearing annually in at least three places in the country.

The cost of high-quality tools for making things has also been dropping, sometimes due to concerted development (such as machine tools) and sometimes due to very clever hacking (such as printed circuit board fabrication.)

Machine tools, even those aimed at "professional" shops, have come down in price dramatically in the last few decades.  And some things that simply couldn't be done at all are now commonplace.  I'm thinking of computer controlled fabrication tools.  Mills that used to cost in the hundreds of thousands or tens of thousands of dollars are now in the thousands.  Laser cutting / etching / engraving systems can now be purchased starting at a few thousand dollars.  And the computing power, both embedded in these tools, and in the desktop computers that everyone has, provide almost unlimited control capabilities.

Printed Circuit Board (PCB) fabrication is something near and dear to my heart as well, because designing the circuitry that gets turned into PCBs has been one of my primary job functions for most of the last 15 years.  The entire design flow goes something like this:  Circuit Design -> Schematic Capture -> PCB Layout -> Fabrication.

Every step along this chain now is accessible, in some form, to the home amateur.  There are design tools such as SPICE to computationally analyze the behavior of circuits.  Schematic capture and layout tools are now available in free open source software such as KiCad and gEDA.  And home fabrication can take advantage of technologies like ink-jet printing to print resist onto copper clad board with readily available consumer printers using a PCB starter kit from Full Spectrum Engineering.  Of course, if you get as far as generating Gerber files (the standard graphical format for PCB artwork fabrication), you can just send your art out to a service bureau and have them professionally fabricated, often for less than $50 for small boards.

I realize as I write this that the field is so vast that it merits a much more detailed look at what can be done, and since this is "Weekend Engineering," clearly I need to do some projects and post some results...  I'll try to include some original design work in upcoming posts.  But for now, if you are interested in making things yourself, look around online because there is a community of like-minded people in whatever you want to explore.  Some of the other categories of making that intrigue me:

- Silver-smithing
- Ammunition Loading (and even bullet casting)
- Home Video / DVD / BluRay production
- Do-It-Yourself Plastic fabrication
- Welding
- Robotics

And the list goes on and on and on and on...  How about you?  Leave a comment with what you like to make!