"10 of the Most incredible Open Source Hardware projects born in 2013"

I am eagerly awaiting my delivery of my Shapeoko 2

"Shapeoko 2 is a simple, low cost, open source CNC milling machine kit that can be built over a weekend. Assembly is required before you can use it.  This is version 2 of the fastest selling CNC machine in the history of the world. The machine has been under development for the last five years. Edward Ford has been designing, redesigning, and building what he hoped would be a CNC machine that anyone can build."

https://www.inventables.com/technologies/desktop-cnc-mill-kit-shapeoko-2

Excellent, I'm happy that Inventables calls Chicago home.  A great group of folks there!

Looking ahead a bit ...

Combining 3D printing and CNCs of various kinds, OSHW has both additive and subtractive manufacturing capability, so within the constraints of precision, there is no real limit to the kinds of physical machines that can be manufactured.  This includes machines that can manufacture smaller versions of themselves.  For the most part, the laws of materials physics don't change fast enough as you shrink objects to invalidate miniaturization by 2-3 orders of magnitude, maybe more.

This puts us in the ballpark where we can start exploring Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS), an area that industry has barely begun to harness but which is ripe for investigation by enthusiasts, in much the same way that early radio was embraced by the enthusiast community which eventually evolved into the sector now called Amateur Radio.

Although nanotechnology is beyond our (direct) reach at this time, MEMS machinery can act as a launching pad for building equipment to study the nanoscale.  Instruments like AFMs and other types of scanning probe microscope are very popular in the research labs of academia, and there's no reason why enthusiast communities can't produce their own versions of such devices for themselves using OSHW manufacturing.

Evolving new engineering capability and doing science are not the exclusive province of well-funded labs.

There's also another extremely important angle to such work (or fun) performed in the open community.  When published, it can establish prior art, and you all know why that's important.

Morgaine.

So why was I talking about MEMS and building nanoscale instrumentation in an OSHW context?

Because this is the future of OSHW --- open source hardware designed with atomic precision:

Interesting times ahead.

[For more on this fully designed Molecular Planetary Gear, see Zyvex and Ralph Merkle's nanotech pages.]

Morgaine.