Coming soon: a complete RepRap kit

BitsFromBytes.com is an on-line store based in the UK which will be offering a complete set of parts for the RepRap for UK£299, or somewhere around US$600 given current exchange rates. They will offer both hardware and software.

I wish I could claim to be so ambitious that I would take a more active approach than simply ordering all the parts in a kit. But I'm as lazy and tired as the next guy, so a kit is really the only practical way I'm likely to do this. And the price is just about right. Months ago, Adrian Bowyer was talking about $400 as a target price for the long term, after lots of self-replicating machines had brought the price of parts down to a minimum. To get so close to the long-term price so quickly is fantastic.

With this kind of head start, the scenario where RepRaps bootstrap themselves to microeconomic ubiquity looks very plausible.

RepRap is now half-way to replication

Vik Olliver has made good progress (1, 2, 3) on the goal of self-replication for the RepRap, having now been able to use a RepRap to fabricate half the RepRap's parts.

It's interesting that you can see the size of the volume pixels Vik is working with. These pieces were printed with polylactic acid, I believe.

Unrelated but cool: Kovio is a non-hobbyist company working on a process to inexpensively print working transistors. Early applications will include smart cards, later you'll see wall-sized displays.


Also unrelated but also cool: Fernando Muñiz has been working with UV-cured resins. This will work a bit like the CandyFab, except the uncured resin is still a liquid so under-support structures are still required. Interesting, I'm not sure if it's better or worse than the FDM approach used by RepRap, Fab@Home, and Tommelise. Also, I don't have any idea how environmentally benign these resins are; it's hard to imagine they're as green as polylactic acid.

Tommelise project

Tommelise is Forrest Higg's attempt to build his own RepRap-like gadget before RepRap itself is ready for wide distribution. He has spoken at an O'Reilly conference about the RepRap project and he has some fascinating ideas about architecture and how fabbers might relate to it. The recent (early Feb 2008) postings in his Tommelise blog describe his success in connecting stepper motor axles to threaded rods, something I had been wondering about myself.

In the Tommelise FAQ, Higgs mentions Linux and Java (which have been adopted by the RepRap project) as presenting a steep learning curve to people without a software background, citing Microsoft Windows and Visual Basic as more user-friendly alternatives. My own early experiences with Linux required enormous patience. Higgs writes Tommelise has been created for people who aren't particularly clever and may be living in modest circumstances. Any open-source "fabber revolution" (1, 2, 3) will be an empty exercise if it fails to serve such people. Then again, if a genuinely open-source revolution is to occur, we'll eventually need to wean ourselves from Microsoft and make our own tools equally user-friendly.

Brilliant RepRap video (thanks to Emeka Okafor)

I am deeply indebted to Emeka Okafor, author of the Timbuktu Chronicles blog and director for the TEDGlobal 2007 conference in Tanzania, for stumbling across this brilliant Poptech video of Professor Adrian Bowyer, the inventor of the RepRap fabber. I would also like to thank Mr. Okafor for giving attribution to my nanotechnology blog, and call attention to his postings on technologies that can help Africa and other developing regions. There is an Emeka Okafor who plays basketball, I'm not sure if it's the same guy.



Bowyer talks about the economics behind the project, particularly its ability to empower communities that are now economically depressed. There is some yummy game-theory stuff in the paper linked here that does not get mentioned in the video, check it out. He also talks about using polylactic acid (wikipedia) as a printing material for the RepRap. This is significant because you can make PLA from starchy vegetables like potatoes and corn, and when you're finished using your PLA object, you can compost it to help grow next year's crop of starchy vegetables. You can have a closed-loop local manufacturing economy that doesn't require trucks or trains or ships to move products around. In fact there are several materials under consideration, and thought has been given to printing a single product from multiple materials. The Fab@Home folks also have an impressive list of materials that can be fabbed, including chocolate.

I got curious about PLA and did a little googling. In a RepRap forum there is a discussion of just how easy it is to turn starchy vegetables into PLA. From the sound of it, it is non-trivial and demands that the person attempting it be quite knowledgeable. One person compares "home PLA production today to home biodesiel production 20 years ago, when it was arcane, a little dangerous, and rare, but theoretically possible" and notes that for many people it will simply not be economical compared to mail-ordering some PLA. I found a place that sells utensils, plates, and cups made from PLA. NatureWorks appears to be a source for PLA in ready-to-work form.