GENOMICON

When I worked in IT support for E&Y in London in 1996… we received this package one day on it’s own specially built little wooden pallet. A COLOUR PRINTER!

From Apple. I unwrapped it, hefted it up onto a desk (it was about 80cm cubed, 20kg), plugged it in, and it didn’t go.

It didn’t go and it didn’t go and it didn’t go and it didn’t go.

Eventually we rang the hardware guru guy (who was so cool he wore a bow-tie (proper ties dangle in the wires etc)) and he told us that we’d voided the warranty just by taking it out of the box (only certified engineers were allowed to do this) and the reason it didn’t work was that there was a little tray of inks inside, and if they were tilted, they’d spill. He saved the day. He always did. It went.

That was my first colour printer – it cost something insane like 80 thousand quid, and the only thing it was ever used for was printing test-prints… little WWII british airplane insignias (the size of pennies) like the mods used to wear. I’ve probably still got them somewhere.

So…

Today we (humans) just printed a glass ring. A tiny step for mankind etc.

From the same source… apparently full colour 3D printing is now commercially available.

It’s creeping closer… I’ve always been a little skeptical – there is such a gulf between what is imagined and what is currently doable… but it is getting closer.

Apparently the $750 makerbots – the hobbyist level reprap style printers from… Makerbot are bringing in just under $120,000 a month which is… a lot. Is it? Seems like a lot, but then again, it’s only 5 a day and it’s not hard to imagine them going way above that… and the funny thing is, that I haven’t seen these things print anything remotely useful. The best has been salt shakers… which were kind of neat, but I’m also not sure that they aren’t way off the kitschometer as well.

Still, back to the colour printer at the beginning – that’s kindof where we’re at now I think. It took about 5 years to go from the 80,000 pound monolyth, to a flakey little box in my living room that cost less than its ink cartridges.

2015 then.

I have foggy memories of once saying (ie: about 3 weeks ago) that a missing-link tech-wise, was the ability to 3D-print shiny objects… to the same level of quality as injection moulding.

Looks like this lot can:

And not only that, they’ve figured out a way of making composite materials by combining two different materials at a pixel by pixel level. It may actually now be possible to print something as simple, as complex and as useful as… a toothbrush say. You couldn’t before.

There’s a variety of materials described here.

This is achieved by printing 16 micron thick (or thin, depending on your POV) layers, and can, apparently, produce fairly impressive objects

No prices for these things seem to be mentioned anywhere… and this generally means that the prices are so extreme… that they’re actually quite dangerous to say out loud… lest the gods be offended etc. Even writing them down is risky.

And as I supposed earlier, at a large (ie: consumer) scale, 3D printing doesn’t solve a manufacturing problem, it solves a distribution problem. And that means poor people. And that means having a machine who’s pricing structure doesn’t offend the laws of thermodynamics.

A nice rundown of a go-to-whoa reprap printing.

A nice overview of what’s involved, how long it takes, the cock-up ratio etc etc. Still a way to go methinks – a daunting number of vitamin parts… but I think it’s fair to say that Adrian Bower’s forebodings that “91.923% of academic research projects fail” can be laid to rest. It’s underway. It’s happening.

I drew that. Nice innit. I might get it printed on a t-shirt.

It comes from Myoats, which is a site where people can make their own designs using a flash-driven mono-tonal kaleidoscope machine. People can then comment, vote on their favourites, yadda yadda, yawn. No one ever votes for mine – they just gang together and vote for their mate’s ones, and then everyone just votes for the one that’s already popular. Idiots.

Mind you, some of these are fairly impressive.

But they’re not as good as mine. They all look like wolf t-shirts.

So anyway, another software memosphere, and lets face it, if you’re building a new app, and it’s not a memosphere, then you’re doomed.

What’s interesting about this though – it’s an aesthetic algorithm (though strangely, most of the favorites above have escaped its constraints). It only allows colour palettes that work… it anti-aliases nicely, it does symmetry nicely… it basically hand-holds, allowing people to produce something that looks pretty good without them having to spend years learning their craft.

And that I think is the killer app in the coming Mass Customisation revolution – the killer apps of the hardware revolution will be (ironically) software – allowing people to create things that look great, without them having to be classically trained designers. This is what Microsoft did in the last century – they basically put a printing press on the desk of every secretary in the world and gave her/him/it the ability to use it without knowing anything about it.

The money to be made in any revolution isn’t in the physical “products” of the revolution, but massifying the tools that the revolution uses. Bringing it to the people.

Right now CAD is too difficult. I’ve been playing with Inkscape recently. It’s great. It’s too difficult. What will happen, is that something like Spore, will turn up which allow people to easily create designs that look good, and which can then be plugged into some sort of manufacturing process – whether it’s a send-off thing like Ponoko, or a desktop machine.

Through this end of the telescope, the words of wisdom above seem so bleedin obvious, that there’s hardly any point saying them. Still… as far as I’m aware, the software and processes I’m talking about do not yet exist.

I’m definitely some sort of genius. Just like everyone else.

So anyway, after reading this thing from Thingverse, enthusing about the number of things in a hardware shop that could be rep-rapped… I was thinking how few of our 3D manufactured objects are actually unique enough (at this stage) to warrant it.

And looking around, I couldn’t see any – I could not see one single thing that was unique.

Then I realised I was missing the biggest thing in the room… the room. The house.

I’m quite interested in this because I think the way we (as a culture) are organising housing is seriously stupid. Why is it that it takes the average non-already-rich person most of their adult life to get a place to live? Who benefits? Banks? Fuck them. As far as I can see, the way land/housing organised is THE thing that traps us into class-systems.

We’ve got this weird situation where everything is mass-produced with powerful drivers forcing down the prices… except the one thing that we waste 1/2 our lives paying for.

So I’m interested in cheap, but cool alternatives – and there have been a load of these recently, eg:

Which I think is beautiful – although the million dollar views that it’s designed to have don’t hurt. I wonder how much it costs? I’ve gotten to be a little cynical about hotels etc that are “designed”… at least partly on account of their looking like they’re made for and by web-designers, but the prices are more than the fucking Ritz – even the capsule hotels at Gatwick in London look like they’re cheap but they use that classic sales-person weasel-pitch “from £n.99″ but they’re charging in 4 hour units, so they’re much the same price as a local hotel.

What’s needed is not (only) new design, it’s a whole new business model so people aren’t being systematically, systemically screwed.

There are a load of quite cool and possibly over-produced examples here

Something that does spring to mind as a possibility – boats. I lived on one recently and I don’t know if New Zealand is like everywhere else in the world, but the regulations and costs that turn housing into such a quagmire don’t exist for boats. There isn’t even the MOT/WOF things that cars have.

Whatever. Idly speculating. Whatever new economic system is evolving, we’ve got to sort housing so it serves us and not vice-versa.

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Still, forget about that and check this out:

(via)

Which is a 3D printed thing the size of a… well, house, almost.

This is a favourite subject of mine – designs or ideas from one medium jumping into another.

In this case someone has made a wooden tumbler lock – based on the mechanics (one supposes) of a metal one… and someone else has used this to first digitise it, then print out a 3D plastic one.

This one is coming from opposite directions – and is probably indicative of a wider pattern.

From one end we have high-tech solving problems we don’t actually have, but which looks cool and will probably lead on to the solution of problems we do have…

And from the other hand we have open-sourced low-tech solving problems we DO have, the technologies for which have been around for decades, but have been made unavailable to the people that need them the most – because under the aegis of “The Market”, poor people don’t matter.

Maybe one day these two will meet in the middle. I think they will – In fact I think the killer apps of the 21st century will be exactly that – high-tech that has become cheap and ubiquitous, combined with open-source ethics, solving real problems – as opposed to eye-candy for geeks.

So. That said, this is pretty cool:

Kindof like a giant reprap that grows plants. This pattern of a 2-axis thing hovering over a 3 dimensional space that it lowers in and out of to “do stuff”. This one is cool because it has multiple tools – and multiple tools is a key part of the evolution of reprappery. In fact really, there should be a standard 3D platform like this with tool “plugins” that can be developed by other people – not necessarily wanting to build an entire system from scratch. A bit like WordPress or Firefox – or any other plugin platform.

There’s more at Lady Ada’s site – Lady Ada being a tower of strength in the open-source hardware world. Top blog as well. Her site has a lot more photos and links and whatnot.

I don’t know if this answers a specific need though – maybe if you want to buy out at the bottom and can’t be arsed gardening… but there’s a lot of people out there who like gardening. I live on a hill covered in old people, and they seem to like gardening a lot – what they need is a way to do it without having to bend over all the time, not some robot to make them redundant.

I get a feeling a better solution to the problem that robot gardeners are ostensibly fixing, is some sort of social reorganisation so that people who like doing this stuff are valued a little more than they currently are. Do we need robots or do we need jobs? Who are “we” anyway?

Coming from the other direction is a new plugin for the Open-Source Tractor Project that allows two people to plant 200 hazelnut bushes in an hour. A post-hole driller. Ever tried doing this by hand? Ever tried using a petrol-powered hand-held driller? This is a massive, massive back-saver.

from openfarmtech.org

A low-tech solution to an actual problem. This tractor costs around 5,000 – about 1/10th of the price of a new proprietary tractor – and it may look clunky, but it’s rock solid. It’s lean and mean design rather than feature-rich bloatware. Again It could well turn into a plugin platform – but then I think everything should be a plugin platform.

I mean, really I am a plugin platform… but nothing plugs in at the moment, so all these enhancements like clothes or laptops or cameras or phones or knives or chainsaws with flame-throwers attached are all separate entities – there’s no direct brain-to-device interface… but there will be, oh yes, there will be.

This just turned up from Cory Doctorow on the Twitters

And I know absolutely nothing about it, other than the comment underneath, which says

“The color was done by the same printer, at the same time. According to Hugh, the printer alternates between volumetric passes and color passes, using two different heads.

They come from a Canadian museum, presumably the ROM. The 3D printer was developed with Canada Research Council money. That’s all I know!”

If this is the case then they’ve just knocked out a fairly massive chunk of post-printing work. Z-Corp do colour printing but the colours don’t look as deep as this. Another step forward I’d say – if it is what I think it is.

I think the multi-head thing is fairly crucial. For 3D fabbing to really work, the machines need to be able to handle a variety of tools.

I think this is a fantastic idea

3D printed joints that turn old pens into lego-esque constructor kits… there are all sorts – from ball and socket, to side-by-side wall building to geodesic dome building.

I think eventually these would be better mass-produced via some sort of injection moulding, but as a basic concept they’re spot on – especially as old pens are tubes, which offers scope for mechanisation, wiring etc.

This is not an entirely new idea – I had a set of connectors for drinking straws a bit like this when I was a kid – and Look and Learn Magazine had “build things out of old pens” competitions back in the 70s. This particular project takes this to a whole new level though… and as so many people are now making robot, it potentially has a much wider relevance.

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As an aside, the site that this comes from is also a classic case of a breach of Emergent Morality #3 – which is concerned with naming and addressing content. They’ve wrapped everything up in a flash file which means that the people who love the idea enough to evangelise about it (and work on their behalf for free) are effectively hobbled. I actually had to sit there and take screen grabs of the flash animation to create the image above. I couldn’t be bothered re-typing their text for them. This is still effectively neutered. You can’t search it, and it’s difficult to cite.

But the image above is a now a linkable resource. I’ve spent about 1/2 an hour working for them for free to increase the visibility of their project – and allow others who also think this is an inspiring project to propagate the idea.

This is illegal, and according to the old-economy morality, evil.

But the entire old-economy is itself evil, and I think this idea is brilliant, so I’m doing what I know is morally right. I’m sharing it.

This is what we do.

This is what we like.

“A University of Washington engineering professor has come up with a new goop for his 3D printer that costs 1/30 – 1/50 of the authorized goop, using a mix of clay, sugar and nutritional supplements, then open sourced their formula. Basically, these guys are the inkjet cartridge refillers of the 3D era”

I went on about this before, but got distracted by the historical angle so missed the price/open-source angle.

Something that we seriously need to avoid is a situation where (as is the case with 2D printers), the printer is basically just a conduit for selling chronically over-priced and proprietary consumables.

This particular development, as well as knocking the bottom of of proprietary pricing and being open-sourced, has the added advantage that being made out of sugar and maltose, you can eat your mistakes… though there is a bit of ceramic in there as well, so nutritionally it’s the same as also eating the plates.