maybe the real story IS atoms - not bits

I spend the greater part of my time figuring out how particular variants of software or various genres of business procedures will make a difference to the way we live.

But here's the little secret: now and then, when all this becomes too 'intangible' I find enormous satisfaction with the world of atoms. I make stuff. I pound mixtures of flour, salt and water to make sourdough baguettes. I play the fiddle. I convert one of the bathrooms into a film developing darkroom where I extract fuzzy images from pinhole cameras.

(like this, for example.   A pinhole photo of the Berkeley California marina.) 

There's a very strong part of me that remains convinced that *this* real world -- not the world of software algorithms -- is where most people find their greatest pleasures. To that end, I've been closely following the efforts to bring 'personal fabrication' to 'the masses.' A while back I wrote about the FAB book and since then, one of my regular online searches has to do with efforts to commercialize these ideas. 

One of the big drawbacks to FABs being as ubiquitous as, say, Starbucks, is that the machinery to perform desktop manufacturing is expensive and frustratingly delicate.

According to some researchers at Bath University, maybe that's changing. (see http://REPrap.org )

 

A recent Guardian article tells the story. 

Put your feet up, Santa, the Christmas machine has arrived

James Randerson, science correspondent
Saturday November 25, 2006

Guardian

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It has been called the invention that will bring down global capitalism, start a second industrial revolution and save the environment - and it might just put Santa out of a job too.

The "self-replicating rapid prototyper", or RepRap for short, is a machine that literally prints 3D objects from a digital design. Its creators hope that in the future it will be a must-have mod con for every home. Instead of queueing for this year's equivalent of Buzz Lightyear, Robosapiens or TMX Elmo, parents will simply download the sought-after design off the internet and print it out.

BathUniversity"If people can make anything for themselves what's the point in going to the shops?" said Adrian Bowyer at  Bath University who started the project.  who started the project.

The Santa machine works like a printer, except that rather than shooting ink out of a moving nozzle it squirts molten plastic in layers. These build up to make 3D shapes. To date the machine has made a belt buckle, a scale architectural model and even one of its own components. Dr Bowyer said that soon it would be able to make items using other materials. "In principle it could make almost any item that people want," he said.

So-called rapid prototyping machines that manufacture objects from digital designs have been around since the 1980s, although they still cost upwards of £20,000 and mostly have specialised industrial applications.

The difference with RepRap, which is the size of a fridge, is that the ideas behind it are not owned by anyone. Dr Bowyer's vision is a machine that can be made, adapted and improved by its users. "I did not want an individual, company or country to make money from this," he said.

If Dr Bowyer's vision is realised there could be profound implications for the global economy. Instead of large companies manufacturing large numbers of consumer goods and distributing them to shops, consumers would buy or share designs on the internet, manufacturing items on their own replication machines.

"At this time of year, toy companies lose thousands by not being able to get toys to the market or having toys they can't sell... This way the product would always be available and you would be able to reuse materials afterwards perhaps in another product," said Professor David Wimpenny of De Montfort University, Leicester. "It would revolutionise Christmas."

Michael Hart, founder of Project Gutenberg, an online repository of more than 100,000 e-books, predicts that if RepRap takes off, vested interests in industry will fight the technology tooth and nail.

"In 30 years replicators are going to be able to make things out of all sorts of stuff," he said. "Somewhere along this line the intellectual property people are going to come in and say 'No we don't want you all printing out Ferraris and we don't want you printing out pizzas'."

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2006

Comments

[Forrest Higgs]

If you are interested in the RepRap concept you might want to look in occasionally at an outgrowth of the RepRap project at...

http://www.3DReplicators.com

...which describes a bootstrap 3D printer named Tommelise (Thumbelina) which evolved just after the RepRap prototype Zaphod printed a piece of itself in Vienna in September. Knowing that the basic concept of RepRap was going to work let me undertake more risky development work like going for a single board microcontroller and doing positioning with cheap gearmotors attached to cheap shaft encoders instead of more expensive and power hogging stepper motors.

Tommelise is also an open source technology project loosely associated with the mainstream RepRap development stream. Dr. Bowyer at RepRap has indicated that several of Tommelise's innovations might well be used in RepRap 2.0.