GENOMICON

K. For. Cool.

For a number of reasons.

1) I like Indiegogo. Why?

a) It isn’t US-only.
b) It doesn’t have a “if you don’t reach your goal, you get nothing” model. Kindof a risk for the investors maybe… but it favours conversation between investors and inventors.

2) People get a really cool little reprap for like $500. If I’d known this was going on, I would have bought one. I think. I still might – though I’m really more interested in a laser-cutter.

3) It really fucking worked – they got more than double what they were asking for – and they’re only 1/2 way through the alloted time.

4) Open-Source hardware is looking likely to be A LOT more lucrative than open-source software. Just so long as (dear god) we can keep the greed-head “IP” people out.

5) I’m not sure if this is good or bad: Indiegogo (in this instance) is being used for straight retail, rather than crowd-sourced investment.

So um… does that mean that Nike can “crowd-fund” a new shoe? That kindof fucks the idea of Indiegogo if they can. It’s basically being used as an advertising channel for existing businesses – which is not in the spirit of the thing.

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I wonder if there would be any traction in a bitcoin version of this… could be interesting, given the massive volatility of bitcoins at the moment. If you’d d.onated $100 in bitcoins yesterday, it would be worth $150 today, and by “yesterday” and “today”, I mean yesterday and today. Literally.

Bitcoins crashed over the weekend… lost about 70% of its value… probably because you can’t get money into the system on the weekend… so the only money in Mt Gox (the main exchange) is from people who “had some lying about” or who have just panic-sold. It went from $30 down to about $10… and is now back up to $20. Usually Mt Gox turns over about 1 million $ a day. The rally yesterday saw it turn over 2 million $ – and that’s with people not being able to get money into the system.

It’s seriously volatile. I’ve got a couple of thousand $ in there – which is about 10 times what I originally invested (almost all of which is from Golden Mean Caliper sales)… but for me it’s more of a donation. I just want to see the thing work – as an exchange currency, not as a storage-currency.

Coowull… a 3D-printed triangular robot thing – A Yazzo Polybot Cranberry edition.

Automatically makes you think of repraps – and has an automatic advantage in that it appears to be using modular lego-like connector things, and like, no bolts. The modular connector things offer scope for making other things, though trapped in a 3-sided pyramid configuration.

Trouble is though, I doubt you can get the precision needed to make this thing print it’s own parts. Those flying penguin people did a while back…

but Festo have got a gazillion euros to throw at it, and the machine is made out of precision bits of metal, and not printed plastic.

So anyway, someone somewhere else said that the various revolutions that we’ve had have been driven by different techs coming online… eg:

computers : cheap integrated circuits
communications : cheap lasers
and robotics (in the pipeline) : cheap sensors.

So my guess as an uneducated bystander would be that the reason repraps are trapped in their current form is that they’re flying-blind. They’re printing out entire objects from memory, with their eyes closed, rather than from memory… with the position of the printing head based on “seeing” where it’s at, and recalibrating 1000 times a second. If a (lego) segway… (and that is a sensor-driven craft) can stand on its hind-wheels, then a similar sort of tech can be used to fine-tune the position of a printing head.

So to my mind, something holding repraps back, is that they’re not taking advantage of the primary thing that will drive the robotics revolution. Yet.

Still… that’s one hell of a vitamin part… but that’s the nature of the beast I’m afraid – making hardware problems, software problems. Because software is fast. I mean that’s part of the reason humans are what they are. Our brain expansion makes everything a software problem. Sure we use tools – but… spearing your dinner is a software problem. Tools are a reflection of software getting to a certain level.

So, my guess would be that when repraps stop relying on very-precise engineering to position their printing-heads, and rely instead on… sensors measuring their locations, then we’ll see a kind of Cambrian explosion of forms… and it’s not an entirely ridiculous notion, that the source (drivers, code etc) of these sensors turns out to be cellphones. I mean how many mega pixels do you need to tell that you’ve shifted .01 of a mm?

The brains of future repraps aren’t going to be arduinos, they’re going to be cellphones. Too many birds are killed with that one stone for them not to be… like the need for an external computer to program the thing for example.

New Reprap appeareth

they’re also now able to draw their own circuit-boards

as seen working here

RepRap Mendel with Pololu Electronics from Adrian Bowyer on Vimeo.

Mini-Mendel here

It seems to me that there’s this parallel evolution between Repraps proper, and for-sale variants. What I’d like to see is some serious Superficial-Design thrown into the mix. Does that take money? Maybe… maybe not – but what we’re talking about is “packaging”, and packaging belongs to the scarcity economy. Similar to flowers. Not enough bees to go round, so flowers get flowerier. It’s not so much that you need money to do the design, than that it helps to be in an attention-needing arena to provide the motivation to do it.

I know that’s not what repraps are about – it’s not what they’re “for” – but the future needs to look futuristic for the meme to really fly.

If they need a finance-boost, I think there’s an overlap in the technologies they’re producing here, and low-end DSLR camera accessories – eg: pocket-dollies etc… which currently cost hundreds of quid – for basic sliding bearings and motor-controls etc.

I kindof have a foot in both worlds now – there is a mega-revolution underway – in that the price of movie-capable cameras has rapidly gone from about $200k to $800… and they’re smaller and lighter, and we haven’t quite figured out the ergonomics yet – but right now, the prices being charged for camera accessories are extortionate… the prices are still based on the “precious” end of the market, where everything has to be a $2000 Zeiss. There’s now a mega-market below that and it’s not being catered to.

And there’s an overlap with reprap technology.

The Swedish Gååglebot

which is a roomba rigged with a camera, that cruises round your place indexing your stuff so you can google it later…

… gets together with the new suite of MakerBot enhancements, not least of which is the new scanner… although it’s really just a scanner framework – but I’m guessing it’ll be all it takes to push people into thinking “I could do that”… and they do…

… and together create this little machine that cruises round your house when you’re asleep, duplicating your stuff.

“Cool” you think. “It’s duplicating my stuff”… not 100% what you wanted, but whatever. It seems happy enough. Leave it to it.

After a while, a nagging suspicion is confirmed… it’s seen itself in the mirror. Now there are two of them. Ok. No worries. It’s obvious which direction this one’s going though… 4, 8 etc. It’s going to get out of hand. Cute at first; rapidly turning into a nightmare. Something will have to be done.

So you do it – by the time they get to 16… you cut the power… then quietly scrap all of them… except one. Hide all the mirrors. Can’t have that happening again.

Right. Trash out on the street. Job well done. Dusting hands etc… and walk back into the house to find a duplicate of yourself sitting on one of your sofas, watching your TVs.

Bit of a quantum leap there then.

Further to my vague, nagging suspish, that the main use of repraps is printing other reparaps…

… Julian has started selling sets of parts on ebay – the Uni machines, at cost (£40). This initial one is auctioned, and his home machine(s) will be put to work, auctioning.

The bid price has gone up to £250 in 2 days (it’ll go higher) – which (by my 2-mile-an-hour, pea-brained reckoning) is a profit of around 400% (which isn’t bad)… and it also includes the plea, that you build them and sell your parts on ebay as well.

I think there’s something to be said about having a direct-descendant of the original machine. I mean a Chinese factory could wack these out for less than a dollar each, but where’s the story in that?

Still… buy yourself one on Ebay. Replicate, Replicate, Replicate, Replicate (so now you have 16 of them)… and have them working round the clock, selling the parts on Ebay.

Any why stop there? Breed them with The Machine To Deceive and Slaughter, and get them to sell their children on Ebay themselves.

Ok, this is really just an excuse to use this photo, which has been around for ages…

Edible 3d-printed cogs. Marvelous.

Edible if you’re one of those plastic-cog eating babies, and in my experience pretty much all babies are. It’s incredible what you can get them to eat.

Anyway, some of these have that herring-bone pattern that is hard to make if you’re cutting them, but easier if you’re printing them – and it just so happens that there was a bit on the reprap site recently about using this pattern to replace the metal legs

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Which is interesting because you can fit them together in sections like tent-poles… though obviously being the laziest bastard in the whole wide world, I do sortof wonder whether it might not be possible to achieve a similar sort of thing simply by wrapping string round a piece of bamboo.

You won’t get the precision of course – but if you can use sensors to check your location 10 times a second, then maybe you can supply offsets fast enough for this not to matter.

Not that I know what I’m talking about of course.

Speaking of bamboo… I saw this spindle thing for holding your plastic – the connector parts of which are printed

which morphed into one with threaded bolts, which is cheating a bit

and there’s also a laser-cut variant that looks quite flash

But personally I’d go back to the bamboo one because bamboo is easier to get hold of than plastic. I mean one of the original reprap requirements was that the raw materials should be easily, locally sourced. Seems a bit odd to be taking bits of stick… converting them to plastic, then making bits of stick with them… although I guess this does at least force them into the digital realm.

Anyway, all the spindle stuff comes from The Thingverse blog, which also has a cardboard one, but if it’s all the same to you, I’ll stick with my bamboo. I like bamboo.

Speaking of which, there was a thing over on the DIY drones site recently where they’ve made this cheap-as-chips little… chip, for controlling 8 servos

I think that’s quite neat – it goes verse-chorus-verse. A bit like a We are the World sung by servos… only better than either the original or the recent remake.

So there you go. Reprappery creeping forward, tiny little steps at a time.

…. aaaaaand, here it is:

Mendel, a new generation of Repraps… with numerous advantages of the old, not the least of which is its tool-changing capability.

See? Aren’t you glad you didn’t tool up a factory to bang out copies of the original one etc? They’re obsolete already.

Maybe that’s the killer-app of one-off-fabbing. When technology is evolving so fast that tooling-up for mass-production is not longer cost-effective.

This is the most interesting thing that’s turned up recently:

Nice innit. It’s a small plastic thing. You can never have enough of those.

What it is, is… the peeps who make the little Makerbot things… little laser-cut 3D printers with a bit of the reprap tendency built into them, found themselves a bit hassled for time and are offering to pay people to make parts… with their own makerbots. They’re paying a $1 a go.

Now… I’m not sure if anyone’s done the numbers on this (they must have done, but what are they? what are they?)… on how much of a bite materials/electricity/postage makes out of the profits… or how many can be made an hour etc etc…

… but, in the Web 2.0 world, there’s a list of tickboxes for “signs that your startup will be successful”, and top of the list is “it helps people make money”.

This raises a potentially interesting scenario (if the numbers do work out) of people buying Makerbots JUST to make the parts for other Makerbots. You’d have this potentially rapid proliferation of a technology that serves no other purpose than to self-proliferate… because (god-dang it) I still haven’t seen anything that a reprap’s produced that would stand up against an injection-molded rival, that would cost a fraction of the price.

A reprap bubble in other words.

Now… what really needs to happen is for this to somehow be driven not by $$$ but as currency that looks a little bit like this:

ie: a currency based on abundance-of-production, rather than being lent into existence (at interest) as a scarce resource… that we then fight over etc.

Despite what Gordon Gecko says, This is NOT a zero-sum game. We’ve been cheated.

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Anyway, I’m really interested in the idea of The Reprap model escaping from the confines of a single piece of technology, and getting into a much wider sphere… but I wasn’t expecting this. This is… Motive.

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.