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Comment by ph0rque | Hacker News Reader

...even as we speak, web entrepreneurs are teaming up with doctors to build better hospitals, with scientists to build better drugs, with lawyers to build better firms, with manufacturers to build better factories, with teachers to build better schools.

I'd love to help/partner with e.g. a mechanical engineer who wants to build Factory2.0.

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Wouldn't you also want to have a factory? Having recently run one, I would suggest you just contact one near you. We had an XP machine running the plasma cutter, a Windows CE powered welding robot and a Intel powered (MS-DOS I think) CNC milling machine and a bunch of other homebrewed things. I would dream of the ability to link them all together easily and do better production planning. If you are in a higher wage country, technology is your main defense against lower wage competition. I am very confident that almost any factory around would welcome being a test subject for Factory 2.0 (and they often have mechanical engineers on staff)

Is there a niche for a mechanical engineer who can also program decently in this space? I recently graduated as a mechanical engineer, and have a passion for programming, so I've been looking for ways to combine the two,. But honestly, I haven't found much outside of robotics.

Oh, hell, yes! I'm in the same boat. I can't say the work is always interesting, but people who can cross that line are invaluable.

Looks like you're in New Jersey. Try some of the solar startups-- they're open to new tech, and they need to scale up rapidly. Petra Solar? Komax in York, PA?

Well with MTConnect - the latest factories will have the ability to be networked like this, but we're a long way from this.

It's pretty hard to get the manufacturing industry to change their ways - we fight this everyday. However, I think this is what the article is talking about with these un-sexy physical industries.

I'd love to be of service at CloudFab.com ;-) We do digital manufacturing as an API service. What are your interests?

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