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.
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
…
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.
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 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.
“The experimental four-dimensional GCode interpreter is now five-dimensional. Four dimensions are so three weeks ago… It has an extra DDA variable that is the feedrate. ” – blog.reprap.org
Cool. I have no idea what that means*.
I think it’s incredibly interesting how this is being developed COMPLETELY in public. I first came across repraps on the 23rd of March 2008 – just over a year ago – and I remember it well (ish) because I’m one of a massive segment of humanity, who now keeps public diaries (although mine was at least semi-fictional)
Has it come a long way since then?
Yes and no. The original video (from 2007) talked about it as an academic research project with a 3% chance of “success”… I think progress towards being able to create all its own parts has been fairly slow – but as an idea, it has exploded – it’s famous, and it’s gone from being an academic project to something that now probably can’t (or at least won’t) be stopped. It’s taken on a life of its own – and not always in the ways that the core team had planned – but that is the nature of the beast. It’s a success. Arrrgggh.
So that’s the benefit of its development being entirely public I suppose – although the physical replicator is still finding its feet (and it will be years before it does I think), a higher-order replicator: the reprap meme, is growing and dynamic, and providing the energy that is needed to create the physical object.
I think there’s possibly some natty little formula (which probably doesn’t work) in there somewhere: “In the Attention Economy the interest generated by the ongoing Making-Of story, can sometimes provide the energy needed for the creation of the final object”.
Transparency of Process can be a powerful creative catalyst – even though it’s a diametric opposite of 20thC business intuition.
When I worked in the City in London in the 90s, much was made of the notion of “management of expectations” – and secrecy was the norm. The power of Transparency of Process on the other hand (if it’s well done), is to do with “management of surprises” – and openness is the norm. I’m not sure that one’s any easier than the other to be honest… it’s just that you get more energy from the latter.
* actually, I do know what that means. Kindof. I think.
A couple of things I find interesting about this – one the proliferation… they’ve really gone from 1 to hundreds very quickly, even though most of them are bootstrapped… the other is that there seems to be a European locus around the UK and Holland – makes me think of wool smuggling or the East India companies (or that era at least) for some reason.
And the other one of course is that this is a community. All of these people are talking to each other… they wouldn’t be on the map otherwise.
This rather glam looking variant is (it would appear) a bit of a leap forward in that the corner bits are a) massively simplified and genericised and b) when combined with a stepper motor and the right bit of software, allow for the construction to be done semi-automatically, obviating the need for fiddly measuring and so on.
It’s looking like the threaded rods might be a vitamin-part for the foreseeable future mind. I wonder if you could make them by wrapping a bit of string round a dowel or something.
Recently, Forrest Higgs over on the Clanking Replicator Blog was bewailing/bemoaning the fact that the exponential rise in the number of reprappers in the world is not due to them going forth and multiplying, but because they’ve essentially become more-or-less out-of-the-box, consumer items composed entirely of vitamin parts.
And obviously he’s quite right… but then that will happen, because the entire planet and the entire internet are together operating as one giant reprap machine… and if the parts can be more easily sourced from outside the experimental confines of a single machine, then chances are they will be. Everything is memetics… and whatever allows the virus to spread fastest will win. For a time.
So here’s what I think he/they/we should do:
Use repraps to make lego.
Ok, obviously you can’t do that, because the engineering tolerances for lego are about .0001 of a mm, but lego has kindof become a defacto rapid-prototyping tool in its own right. I’ve mentioned it often enough on this blog – everything from art to rubiks cube robots… and there’s a blog post over here, entitled 2008: The Year Lego Took Over the Internet – The Super Meme… which, in most humble of opinions doesn’t really do it justice – it’s not a super-meme, it’s simply one of the oldest and best memospheres that operates on the physical plane. Meccano was another one, but that appears for the moment to be somewhat off-radar.
One of the troubles I have with Reprap at the moment, is that it doesn’t seem to be much good for making anything other than reprap machines. I think the direction it needs to go in is to be able to create the building blocks for ANY sort of machine… similar to what Lego Mindstorms does… in fact combined with Arduinos, I think Reprap should be a direct competitor (or maybe symbiote) to lego mindstorms.
I know that the theory is that it can make anything… including itself (a rapid prototyper) but maybe it should make rapid prototypers that really are rapid… and for that, you kindof need a reduced-instruction-set style set of building blocks that massively lower the learning curve for participation.
So that’s my 2c.
And as a total non sequitur, here’s a video of another modular constructor thing made out of magnets.
Is this basically just an excuse to post this picture of a hamster? No. Rubbish etc.
Ok. Vitamin Parts… lets say you were trying to make a completely self-contained self-replicating system that was capable of reproducing itself (ok, it gets energy, materials and initial programming from its environment, but what do you want? A caveat to the laws of thermodynamics?)… like a reprap machine for example. If you managed to get it to a point where it could 100% self-reproduce, with no outisde help, then it would be said to have “closure”.
At the moment the reprap machines are currently at about 60%? 80%? I don’t know. Here’s a picture of an earlyish one
and you can see there are various bits like wires and motors etc that it can’t make itself, and which have to be supplied by helpful humans.
These are know as vitamin parts.
So if say (and I mean this hypothetically), you wanted to make a self-sustaining hamster biosphere, like this one where it can shred its own paper…
… then the hamster weel would be a vitamin part. Actually the hamster itself is a vitamin part as well, unless you have a suitably large gene-pool etc…
Ok, it’s not really a terribly good example, and perhaps the whole thing was just an excuse to post that first picture, but still. You’ve learned something etc. Stop your moaning.
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