Of course, RepRap itself is also an idea about printing ideas, so it's
recursive. :-)
As you suggest, RepRap will get improved on and eventually obsoleted by
those people who use it -- and that is a good thing.
Sounds like your students are lucky to have you as an advisor. :-) Building
a RepRap does sound like a great engineering class project, and I hope other
educators eventually follow your lead.
--Paul Fernhout
Hi Erik, thanks for deciding to de-lurk and contribute to the
discussions here. There's a few points that I want to make, but
otherwise I think you're spot on. The replication issue with RepRap is
two-fold. First, there is no evidence that an ad hoc design process
can lead to self-replication. What some of us are doing on this list
is doing a computational analysis of the dependency tree of different
manufacturing processes so that we can computationally *validate* and
"prove" that something self-replicates, in the formal sense laid out
by Freitas in KSRM. Secondly, RepRap at its core is a rapid
prototyper, and meanwhile the reprap website and foundations claim
that it was originally meant to do self-replication .. even to the
point of telling the New York Times that the latest beta release can
"mostly self-replicate", which isn't really true, since that is
ignoring the entire issue of the dependencies that the design is
lacking. Anyway, some people think that replication is an *all or
nothing* issue, because if you can replicate 90% of your parts, but
the other 10% require 2000% relative effort, then what's really going
on here? Etc. To see some more on these discussions, check out:
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing/msg/e4c375acce772250
AASM, KSRM, Gingery, Freitas, etc.
> "When the first "late beta" version of RepRap -the "replicating rapid-
> prototyper"- is released in early 2008, critics have a field day. It's
> slow. It's clumsy-looking. It can't actually replicate itself without
> adding a few key commercial parts. But where critics see an ugly
> duckling, design students, DIY hackers, and open source enthusiasts
> see a swan-in-the-making. By the summer, dozens of novel fabber
> projects emerge (some forked from RepRap, but most based on original
No, it's not that it's an ugly duckling, it's a beautiful duckling,
but I don't see this as a "one swan takes all" thing going on here,
but rather the progression of all of the different works that those of
us in the DIY/maker/fabber community are contributing to. One of the
projects that we're pursuing on this list is the formal packaging of
open source hardware and manufacturing systems into some format, much
like a dot deb file, which makes up the 20,000 software packages for
debian; these dependency trees (check out debtree for dotty-generated
graphs) show how things depend on one another for it to all work.
That's what's going on here IMHO, not some super magical bullet. But
yes, it's quite awesome what's happening. :-)
> designs), and by the fall, some have actually produced devices that an
> adventurous home user could play with. Forward-looking strategists at
> mega-retailers and mass manufacturers feel a distinct chill run up
> their collective spine. The open fabber era had begun, and through the
> end of the decade, free and open source software hackers around the
> world turn their attention to hardware… By the time molecular
> manufacturing applications do mature at the nanoscale, Openfabs are a
> ubiquitous fact of global life. It's not surprising, then, that the
> first atomically-precise devices are designed with Openfab-standard
> interconnects for integration into the existing open world standard
> for human-scale production infrastructures". "
Heh. Molecular nanotechnology. I like to think about it too. Though I
don't particularly rely on it in my plans. You know, what if Drexler
and Freitas fail in their computational chemistry software that
they've been working on since 2007 at this point? Not that I'm
worried, they'll figure it out. But anyway. :-)
> Source: Scenario 2 of the Center for Responsible Nanotechnology
> Working Group
CRnano is where I picked up the term "super-empowered hopeful
individuals". Their blog is interesting, from time to time.
> Others say that it can only produce plastic parts, so it's limited.
> Well, not that much. But we're working on metal. And you can print a
> mould or a positive to cast with. A friend of mine cast an aluminium
Yep, there's work on metals, that's right, but that's also kind of
what worries me. It's the "oh, it doesn't do this yet, so let's patch
it with xyz", where xyz relies on some more tools that aren't really
incorporated into it; anyway, the software I've been working on will
help this out, so it's not like anybody needs to worry .. just needs
to be aware.
> + choice: open object repositories / crowdsourcing and co-creation.
> There are website's with 3D printable objects. One of them originated
> from the RepRap project: http://www.thingiverse.com Just like
> Wikipedia has a lot of knowledge for everyone to use, contributed by
> the masses, these web-sites will grow with the commodification of 3D
> printing. Besides this, commercial companies like Shapeways and Ponoko
> increase the amount of content that is out there through their co-
> creation strategy.
Yeah, thingiverse is a good example. There's also opencollector,
instructables, and so many others. Sam Rose (on this list) and some
others are interested in doing a website like that for the packaging
format that I've described to you above, so that's something to look
into. Of course, all designs will be open source and freely
downloadable, we'll probably want to set up a mirroring network or
something. Package management tools (like apt-get, etc.) will be made
as well. This way we don't have to write scrapers for thingiverse
(etc.) ;-).
That's true, there might be some big regrets everyone has after
self-replicating hardware (other than the biological (for that, see
the DIYbio groups)) explodes. With a replication period of one day,
within a month you have 8 billion replication units, which is
estimated to be enough for everyone on the planet to have their own
personal fabricators. What would everyone do with so much technology?
Sometimes, on the transhuman discussion lists, people get all worked
up about it because they think it will be molecular nanotech, so only
companies and the government would have access to the technology [for
some reason], and thus it won't exponentially replicate with a usable
human interface, etc. Personally I think that might be a bit wrong- it
takes only one person to program the machines to fabricate themselves
some jets, wings, or tracks to go roll on over to give themselves away
to other people .. ;-)
Anyway, just a minor distraction in the discussion.
> loop is something that sooths the mind. If the machine depends on a
> human constructing it (which should be really), that's really fine. I
> did most of the construction of my machine in a week. Debugging the
> machine is something that took me quite long, but is exactly the time
> which can be almost eliminated by good defaults, more reliable and a
> more mature design.
Congratulations, by the way. :-)
> Currently I'm more occupied with market trends, forces and social
> transformation than with theory of self replication. I think current
Looking for business opportunities, I presume?
> models that describe diffusion of innovations can be helpful in
> determining what might happen. I'm trying to model it, but while doing
> these things and talking about it, I find that you can actually be in
> the driver-seat exploring, instead of doing analyses or planning your
> route to an unknown destination. An apt quote in this regard is:
> "We can only see a short distance ahead, but we
> can see plenty there that needs to be done."
> A. Turing, 1950.
You're trying to model the diffusion of information ? Have you
considered reading up on long tails and torrent trackers? I see that
you're already on the ball via your blog though-
http://blog.erikdebruijn.nl/index.php?/categories/7-RepRap
So nevermind :-). I also see that you own "replab.org", which is
basically the project that I've somewhat described to you in my
previous email. Maybe we can put the domain to good use soon enough.
:-)
> (Turing and von Neumann are still competing to be my favorite
> scientist)
von Neumann.
>> One of the
>> projects that we're pursuing on this list is the formal packaging of
>> open source hardware and manufacturing systems into some format, much
>> like a dot deb file, which makes up the 20,000 software packages for
>> debian; these dependency trees (check out debtree for dotty-generated
>> graphs) show how things depend on one another for it to all work.
>
> That's exactly what I like about FOSS. A packaging system and a single
> namespace software. However while debian can serve as good inspiration
> and good practices, you shouldn't introduce legacy from the start. A
> CLI might be useful for retrieving software (ideas) but 'things' are
> more graphical.
Could you elaborate more on this 'legacy'? Do you mean about making
stupid restricting decisions? Maybe something else ?
>> something. Package management tools (like apt-get, etc.) will be made
>> as well. This way we don't have to write scrapers for thingiverse
>> (etc.) ;-).
>
> If you need a dedicated server (a Xen guest instance), my company
> could sponsor it. https://www.budgetdedicated.com/concepts
"""
We actively encourage and support an open-source ecosystem. We support
businesses that create revenue around open-source software. We also
encourage adoption of open standards. We supply bandwidth and a server
for the official Wine repository, because we feel it is important to
be able to switch to Linux and still run the few win32 programs you
can't say goodbye to yet. We sponsor the RepRap project with bandwidth
and a server (seeding torrents and hosting ISOs). BudgetDedicated is
comitted to help making the RepRap project a success. We have also
built our own RepRap.
"""
Awesome, thanks for the offer. Also, kudos on running a wine mirror --
or is it the actual official release repository? Double kudos on
serving up the reprap project, could you drop any hints on the
webalizer stats for the server? Surely it's being pulvarized.
Would you be willing to do some commentary on the repositories that we
have passing around here, and the todo list etc.? Maybe we could do
this over IRC when all of the developers are awake to do things the
right way if we wanted to set up the server. I'm presently operating
as a giant SPOF (single point of failure) in some of the development
work because of my slow outgoing connections, etc.
Yes, overall what we've been hashing out is a "dot skdb" format (just
something new). YAML metadata and then an internal format that
includes dot g (which is like STEP except intercompatible and better,
since the tools already exist). An internal instructions/recipe format
too- see some of the discussion on this idea:
> For software I would see the CLI as a big advantange since I can judge
> what I want by reading. For physical objects you should see it,
> multiple view or even a rotatable rendering would be desirable. I'd
That rendering would require downloading the CAD content anyway, so in
the end it will depend on how much bandwidth you have and whether or
not you want to download the entire repository at once.
> argue that it need a much richer interface. A central repository would
> be a very, very helpful. So, you've absolutely got an essential thing
> right there. Through sporadic ad hoc sharing, you will have a lot of
> transactions and not much utility. To get the network effects rolling
> information should be easily accessible.
Yeah, we've talked about "package maintainers" before, since we'll
probably have to have some sort of policy-for-inclusion into the
repositories, i.e. throwing a SLDPRT file into a zip file isn't quite
enough for packaging.
>> >> something. Package management tools (like apt-get, etc.) will be made
>> >> as well. This way we don't have to write scrapers for thingiverse
>> >> (etc.) ;-).
>
> Thingiverse could have an XML api for such things. I can ask Zach who
> made and manages the site.
I'd be willing (and am very eager) to write the code for that, so if
you really know Zach point him in my direction please :-).