Monday, July 9, 2012

What if you could make anything you wanted?

In the 20th century, getting your child a toy car meant a trip to a shopping mall. In the 21st century, it can mean going to your computer, downloading a file and creating the toy on your 3-D printer.



Only that is not quite revolutionary enough for Massimo Banzi, who spoke at the TED Global conference in Edinburgh, Scotland, in late June. As Banzi pointed out, the 3-D printer a friend of his used to build a toy car was itself an open-source device -- one that could be produced by anyone from freely available plans.

The open-source maker movement offers an immense range of possibilities for creativity -- and in some ways, Banzi has been at the center of it. He is part of a team of five people behind "Arduino," a pocket-sized open-source circuit board with a microprocessor that has been used as the brains of thousands of custom devices.

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