The Printer That Prints Itself - More Slow Progress
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In keeping with the project's ethos, the RepRap team encourages the use of open source 3D modeling software such as Art of Illusion and Blender to create the designs. However, the machine is built to be compatible with the industry-standard STL files produced by most commercial 3D CAD and modeling packages, making it usable in conjunction with virtually all common software. Until now the project group has mainly used RepRap to make simple, everyday items such as various kinds of brackets, mobile phone cases and in-car holders, coat hooks and sandals.
This is partly a reflection of the extrusion technology itself, which lends itself to straightforward rather than elaborately complex shapes, and partly due to the slowness of the current RepRap printing mechanism. A pair of child's sandals, for example, takes up to a full day to make, which might seem more trouble than it is worth until you consider that for the kind of impoverished communities in the developing world who Bowyer envisages using the machine, it might literally mean the difference between having or not having the shoes.
It's also easy to forget that this is precisely where one of the key benefits of the RepRap's self-replicating nature kicks in. Although it might take hundreds of hours to produce the parts for a second RepRap, the third could be made in half the time again with two machines dedicated to the task. Add two more and you have the beginnings of a production line.
To Bowyer, this is the real fascination with the project. He has written a paper entitled Wealth Without Money in which he cites Marx's theories of resource ownership as one inspiration for the project. Another is John von Neumann's Universal Constructor, an early concept of a self-replicating machine dating back to the mid twentieth century, long before computers made such a thing genuinely possible.
According to Bowyer's own theory, which he calls Darwinian Marxism, the RepRap could potentially allow the world's poorest communities and individuals to own their own means of manufacture. Rather than having to buy every thing they need, the RepRap will allow them to download or design it, and "print" it themselves. And because it is self-replicating, RepRap is effectively capable of geometrically increasing production rates.
This, Bowyer says, means it will eventually outstrip the speed of any linear manufacturing processes. He even envisages the RepRap being able to "eat," in the form of recycling its own obsolete or broken objects. The RepRap could easily be capable of printing a shredder that will reduce the plastic of such objects to grains which can be fed back into the system to produce something new. There is theoretically no limit to the number of times that plastic could be recycled in this way.
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