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Fabricatable Machines: A Toolkit for Building Digital Fabrication Machines

Published: 09 February 2020 Publication History

Abstract

Digital fabrication is changing the way we design and manufacture the objects around us. Digital fabrication machines enable mass-customisation. However, customising the machines themselves requires a high amount of expertise, which prevents even advanced users from taking part in the creation of bespoke fabrication tools. We present Fabricatable Machines, an open-source toolkit for designing custom fabrication machines. We designed a linear motion module, The Fabricatable Axis, that provides robust automated linear motion. The Fabricatable Axis can be resized, adjusted, and fabricated from different materials. Users can build machines by combining multiple axes. We optimised the design of the axis to be manufactured using a CNC mill, with few externally sourced parts. We observed users creating machines including portable milling machines, 3D printers, and pipe inspection robots using the Fabricatable Machines Toolkit.

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cover image ACM Conferences
TEI '20: Proceedings of the Fourteenth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction
February 2020
978 pages
ISBN:9781450361071
DOI:10.1145/3374920
  • General Chairs:
  • Elise van den Hoven,
  • Lian Loke,
  • Program Chairs:
  • Orit Shaer,
  • Jelle van Dijk,
  • Andrew Kun
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

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Published: 09 February 2020

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Author Tags

  1. cad/cam
  2. cnc
  3. digital fabrication
  4. machine building

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Overall Acceptance Rate 393 of 1,367 submissions, 29%

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  • (2024)Technical Mentality: Principles for HCI Research and PracticeProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642720(1-14)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
  • (2024)DisplayFab: The State of the Art and a Roadmap in the Personal Fabrication of Free-Form Displays Using Active Materials and Additive Manufacturing.Proceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642708(1-24)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
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  • (2023)3D Printers Don’t Fix Themselves: How Maintenance is Part of Digital FabricationProceedings of the 2023 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3563657.3595991(2050-2065)Online publication date: 10-Jul-2023
  • (2022)Demonstrating a Fabricatable Bioreactor Toolkit for Small-Scale Biochemical AutomationProceedings of the 7th Annual ACM Symposium on Computational Fabrication10.1145/3559400.3565582(1-2)Online publication date: 26-Oct-2022
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