One of the objects most representative of this movement is the Arduino. “Arduino is an open-source electronics prototyping platform based on flexible, easy-to-use hardware and software.” (Arduino website) The ease of use and low barrier to entry (i.e. low cost) of this platform has allowed many who want to experiment, learn, create, recreate, re-purpose, inject, or otherwise enter the world of electronics to do so. The range of projects based on this platform is probably already larger than what is sold on the shelves of Best Buy or the catalogs of Amazons on-line electronics’s store. Electronic garden controls, helicopters, game controllers, electronic textiles, a multitude of useful, and gleefully useless robots, represent a small list what is being built on this platform. These objects are being designed and built by an amazing array of people, from Electrical Engineers to artist and PhDs to middle school students. The Arduino’s accessibility is helping to pry open the area of knowledge around electronics.

The question I was asked to address in this writing though is how might the Arduino affect the world of manufacturing. On a purely development cycle level the cheapness and ease of use of the Arduino allows for fast prototyping which will lower costs. Lower development costs can move innovation outside the well financed and well guarded labs of electronics’ giants. This in itself can allow for greater diversity of electronics to be designed and built by greater diversity of sources for a greater diversity of purposes. But what will have an even greater impact on manufacturing is the personalization of electronics that the Arduino, and the maker movement in general are bringing about. The amazing diversity of projects already based on the Arduino platform are bringing electronics into many new and unexpected aspects of human life. The personalization of electronics through individual tinkering or tradesman like development shops is embedding electronics into everything imaginable. From bicyclist gloves with embedded turn signal LEDS, to belts which use a compass and a tactile interface to inform its wearer of north direction new ideas and more useful implementation of old ideas are being created everyday. The final assembly of electronics is moving into the consumer makers hands for more individually useful or whimsical purposes. In this way the Arduino is a wedge in the ivory University/Corporate walls that will alter the structure of manufacturing. By giving access to the internals of what were black boxes before the Arduino is changing how a generation thinks about and interacts with electronics.

The Arduino, along with the maker movement, has a chance to greatly personalize the technologies which the electronics and other consumer products giants have helped create. This personalization will require a larger group of people to be stepped in the knowledge of designing, fabricating, manipulating etc the materials and ideas that have been the preview of engineers. It will also require a remapping of who designs, fabricates and assembles things. IT seems that large capital companies will still have a major role to play in this hypothetical economy, making the components and tools that are used in final products. But final assembly of many products may move much closer to the final user of items, if not to the home of the final user themselves.

The Arduino and maker community in general , a highly educated and hungry group, represent a new phase of electronic and information age people. They they have made technology an integral parts of their lives yet don’t rely on the gate keepers of electronics to come up with how they will interact ideas. The infinite possibility of what electronics and information can do is being opened up by millions in their home workshops, hacker spaces, class rooms, and grudgingly in some forward looking commercial labs and their training grounds universities. The technologies used by makers have been created by massive capital and control regiemes which stand to lose a grip on these technologies through the vast amount of tinkering that is going on. If product design and final manufacturing are becoming something that can be done at home by a great many people large consumer electronics corporations may find it hard to be the cutting edge of electronics. Their massive structures will not allow them adapt quick enough as smaller maker collectives, networks, or even some brilliant individuals will bring out more useful products or ways of using technology. Large capital will be able to incorporate improve and reduce cost but will not be able to be the forefront. Think of having millions of Wozniaks and Jobs in their garages with even more resources trying to solve an even greater array of problems but, hopefully, with a democratic ethic! I am excited.

Today, the National Science and Technology Council  is releasing a new “National Strategic Plan for Advanced Manufacturing. ”  The strategic plan was requested by Congress in the America COMPETES Reauthorization Act of 2010 , and it builds on the Report to the President on Ensuring American Leadership in Advanced Manufacturing , which was released by the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology in June 2011.

Manufacturing has long been a central feature of the US economy and a generator of innovative solutions to national challenges. But in large part as a result of its own creative prowess, manufacturing itself is changing rapidly. The assembly line that Henry Ford invented has gone the way of the Model T, and many of the materials and methods used in manufacturing today did not exist a decade ago.  But as the President noted in his remarks  at the Boeing plant in Everett, Washington, last week, “America is a place where we can always do something to create new jobs, and new opportunities, and new manufacturing….”  That is what the National Strategic Plan for Advanced Manufacturing is all about.

Created through a collaborative interagency process that was chaired by representatives from the Departments of Commerce, Defense, and Energy, the plan documents the fundamental importance of advanced manufacturing to the economic strength and national security of the United States.  It reveals opportunities to improve Federal policy in order to accelerate development of this vital sector, and points to challenges that will have to be addressed to maintain the sector’s health over the long term.
The strategic plan sets forth five objectives for Federal policy:

·         Accelerating investment, especially by small- and medium-sized manufacturers;

·        Making the education and training system more responsive to the demand for skills;

·        Optimizing Federal advanced manufacturing R&D investments by taking a portfolio perspective;

·         Increasing total public and private investments in advanced manufacturing R&D; and

·         Fostering national and regional partnerships among all stakeholders in advanced manufacturing.


This last objective is especially important.  Advanced manufacturing needs to be a team sport.  The United States will not succeed unless its big and small firms, research universities and community colleges, labor unions and professional associations, and Federal, state, and local agencies all work together.
This new advanced manufacturing plan, together with the ongoing work of the Advanced Manufacturing Partnership , provides a solid foundation on which to erect a Federal policy that will enable the United States to—as Commerce Secretary John Bryson has put it—“build it here, and sell it everywhere .”

Posted by David Hart on February 22, 2012 at 03:32 PM EST
<http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2012/02/22/advanced-manufacturing-cornerstone-economy-built-last>
<http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2012/02/22/advanced-manufacturing-cornerstone-economy-built-last>
<http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2012/02/22/advanced-manufacturing-cornerstone-economy-built-last>
<http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2012/02/22/advanced-manufacturing-cornerstone-economy-built-last> 

Jagriti envisions a just society free from economic, social and gender inequalities. The education program incorporates rationality, secularism and gender equality.Click on the photo to see a video.

For background on the Micromanufacturing report on the WTEC website. Click here. Or also here.

Ehmann, K.F., D. Bourell, M.L. Culpepper, T.J. Hodgson, Th.R. Kurfess, M. Madou, K. Rajurkar, and R. DeVor. 2007.Micromanufacturing: International research and development. Springer, New York, NY.

This international technology assessment study has focused on the emerging global trend toward the miniaturization of manufacturing processes, equipment and systems for microscale components and products, i.e., “Small Equipment for Small Parts.” It encompasses the creation of miniaturized units or hybrid processes integrated with metrology, material handling and assembly to create microfactories capable of producing microprecision products in a fully automated manner at low cost.

The study has investigated both the state-of-the-art as well as emerging technologies from the scientific, technological, and commercialization perspectives across key industrial sectors in the USA, Asia and Europe including medical, electronics, aerospace, and consumer products. This study does NOT include the lithographic-based processes common to the microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) community. While the US gets high marks for nanotechnology R&D, emphasis in the US on micromanufacturing R&D is lagging behind the rest of the world, particularly in technology transfer and ongoing development. This will undoubtedly have serious long-term implications.

Birds paradise, the Salton Sea.

The Salton Sea makes you think about: despair, humility, weird..

The Salton Sea has eyes.

Culture after this one, .. independence…INTO the WILD (Best movie I saw in a long time, some of it filmed right here, on the shores of the Salton Sea) ! So I decided to invest. See below my new Salton Sea property.

Marc Madou's retirement investment

Before driving back to Irvine we stopped in the Anza-Borrego desert.

Anza-Borrego Desert

One of the many animals in Joshua Tree National Park

We are lazy gardeners and got some ideas about chollas and ocotillos for our garden at home.

Cactus Garden in Joshua Tree; Chollas

Ocotillos in Joshua Park

The following day we went to the Salton Sea and the Anza Borrego Desert. See my next post in the on the road category.

Jonathan’s CD work at UCI: http://www.thesiegrists.com/Jons_Personal_Web_Site/Work.html. Pay close attention to the design of the fluidics on the CD in the image on this website.

Now follow all the links (in english, german, spanish and Chinese) that Robin Gorkin, another former UCI student, found  with the same image  but attributed to Diagnostics Radisens:

http://www.scientias.nl/een-lab-op-een-chip-voor-in-de-ruimte/50260

http://popular-science.net/a-miniature-centrifugal-monitors-the-health-of-astronauts.html

http://www.siliconrepublic.com/start-ups/item/21997-radisens-diagnostics-to-get

http://www.onorbit.com/node/4066

http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Shenzhou_8_brings_German_SIMBOX_experiments_safely_back_to_Earth_999.html

http://www.asturiasmundial.com/noticia/11937/un-microanalizador-monitorizara-salud-de-astronautas/

http://www.muyinteresante.com.mx/salud/364560/analisis-sanguineo-inmediato

http://www.mumbaimirror.com/index.aspx?page=article&sectid=7&contentid=201111162011111609403286eb5a460d

http://big5.news365.com.cn:82/gate/big5/xinmin.news365.com.cn/xz/201112/t20111230_184652.html