Self-replicating, open source 3D printers
The RepRap (Replicating Rapid-prototyper) printer can replicate and update itself. It can print its own parts, including updates. The 3D printer works by building components up in layers of plastic, mainly polylactic acid (PLA), which is a bio-degradable polymer made from lactic acid
3D printer tech already exists, y’see - these guys want to make it available to anyone around the world, infinitely copyable (though I wonder where the natural resources will come from?)
It wants to make the machine available to anybody — including small communities in the developing world, as well as people in the developed world, says Olliver. Accordingly, the RepRap machine is distributed, at no cost, under the GNU (General Public Licence).
In the true spirit of open-source, it’s envisaged as perpetual beta
RepRap’s open-source project aims to keep on improving the machine. “So it can do what people want it to do”, says Olliver. Improvements will go back to users and, in this way, the machine as a whole evolves, he says. The idea of evolution is important, he adds. The device Olliver is creating now will probably bear very little resemblance to the device that will appear on everybody’s desks in the future, he says.
They’re making impressive steps forward. Mixing materials is the next frontier:
New features include, for example, heads that can be changed for different kinds of plastic. A head that deposits low melting-point metal is in development, he says. The metal melts at a lower temperature than that at which plastic melts, which means the metal can be put inside plastic, says Olliver. “That means, in theory, we could build structures like motors.”
RepRap also allows people to build circuits in 3D, as well as various shapes, with the result that objects, such as a cell phone, don’t have to be flat, he says.
Being able to design objects and print out prototypes anywhere around the world means you can email your friends/coworkers physical objects! But I’m more excited in its more revolutionary role, just hinted at by one of this amazing international group of engineers:
When Computerworld talked to him, Olliver had just printed out a small part to fix his blender.
Not only will this make it much easier for us to repair our devices (key to sustainable, eco living), but it changes the world we live in - it makes it a read/write world - one in which you learn how to build, to repair, to truly own your objects and appliances. It’s the world of the hobbyist, the do-it-all; it’s the death of professional segregation, exclusion, and knowledge silos. With this and the read-write, open, collaborative, sharing web (Wikipedia etc), it’s Ivan Illich’s wet dream, and he can rest content in his grave.
Related:
- The Fred Wilson effect (a.k.a: social networking dividend of an open, public conversation)
- Last week made my head spin. As I continue with my biochemistry degree, I spectate the new media sphere as it twists and turns; I occasionally pass comment on it, either on this blog, on twitter, or in some other forum, for example, the comments sections of other sites. I happened to leave a couple of comments on Fred Wilson's blog, a high profile venture capitalist based in New York primarily investing in young US-based dotcoms. The comments, innocuous though I thought they were, must have caught his eye. He highlighted one, then the other, on his blog - both to give them some exposure because they echoed his own view or provided some new insight, and the second time round, to provide a case study in how social networking is evolving as we find new ways of having adult, mature conversations, in the open where anyone can learn from and join in. Twitter and blog comments are just two venues for open conversation, and open conversation and open social networking is headed somewhere BIG (the topic for a future blog post). The purpose of this post is to continue Fred's case study with hard data. Here are three graphs...
- Is Google using your brain as you browse?
- I just stumbled across a research paper published by a Google employee and a Microsoft employee entitled "A Case for Usage Tracking to Relate Digital Objects". I have no idea who Elin Rønby Pedersen is but she's published both on this and on Google's much vaunted foray into organising your health data. The paper highlights an interesting idea, potentially just as important to Future Google as Pagerank has been to Google so far. It's not groundbreaking - you see it on, for example, Amazon. But it's worth thinking about, applied to the whole web. The idea is that related objects - and I use the term extremely loosely here - can be identified because you looked at them during a session of Internet browsing; you started with one, and your later browsing takes you to related objects - blog posts or news articles on the same or related subject; similar videos; etc. Your brain does the hard work of deciding what objects you're looking for; average that with other similar datasets and Google has a pretty damn good idea of what objects on the web are related, no matter what format the object has (could be visual, textual, a flash...
- The semantic elephant in the room - Google will settle the "top down vs. bottom up" debate for us
- Here is a useful primer into what some people (perhaps not the best advised) are calling Web3.0. The fundamental principle of semantifying data is that information becomes more easily found and understood by computers. Mix that with AI and you've got some very, very powerful, useful tools for information gathering, processing and decision making! So why is Google - the information lynchpin of the Internet, and thus, of modern society - not THE focus of attention in all this hubris about Web3.0? This is a company with around five THOUSAND(1) computer scientists devoted to improving their search engine (~35,000 man hours a day). SURELY they're building some amazing semantic IP that will help cement their dominance. A big debate in the semantic field at the moment is whether the best approach is 'top-down' or 'bottom-up' Bottom-up: when information is created, it is annotated by machine-readable tags. Technologies like RDF, OWL and microformats (to a basic extent, XML) do this. Bottom-up semantics got a big boost this week when Yahoo announced it was adding RDF descriptors to its pages Top-down: when a Google machine finds a document on the web, it reads it and understands the information. That's very, very advanced...
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