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http://forums.reprap.org/read.php?1,4474,6338#msg-6338

This is very interesting. Unfortunately, it is going to be closed-source and patented.

Does anyone know any open-source projects to do object reconstruction from video or still photographs? I'm asking because my group is building a 3D printer.
http://www.reprap.org/
(Self-link pimpage, etc. etc.)
and I think it would be cool and useful to be able to capture a 3D model from photos or video of a sculpted maquette, pet cat, broken part, human, or so on.

(I just stumbled across this by googling "gpl object reconstruction", which may be relavant):
https://ezra.dev.java.net/

People may be interested in
http://splinescan.co.uk/
which is a gpl laser scanner hardware (pen laser, prism*, webcam, and turntable) + software project to do 3D object scanning.

I'll follow comment responses to this thread, but I also welcome emails:
penguin at supermeta dot ihatespamtoo dot com

I think this one counts as "playing around"
http://www.instructables.com/id/3D-chocolate-printer-made-from-LEGO/

The RepRap guys have played around with the IDEA (and lots of other material ideas)
http://reprap.org/bin/view/Main/MaterialsScience

And Fab@Home has been used with chocolate - shame it's the most expensive by far.
http://3dprinterusers.blogspot.com/2007/05/more-than-chocolate-cornells-fabhome.html

"If we ever get to the point where less than 20% or so of the population is required to work in order to support the rest of the population then people really wouldn't have to work anymore because let's be honest, not everyone works just because they want money, there are lots of people who would continue working because they were passionate about their jobs. What we need to do is get rid of the boring mundane jobs that no one wants."

Insightful, but we reached that point decades ago.

See:
"The Abolition of Work" by Bob Black, 1985
http://www.whywork.org/rethinking/whywork/abolition.html
"I don't suggest that most work is salvageable in this way. But then most work isn't worth trying to save. Only a small and diminishing fraction of work serves any useful purpose independent of the defense and reproduction of the work-system and its political and legal appendages. Twenty years ago, Paul and Percival Goodman estimated that just five percent of the work then being done -- presumably the figure, if accurate, is lower now -- would satisfy our minimal needs for food, clothing and shelter. Theirs was only an educated guess but the main point is quite clear: directly or indirectly, most work serves the unproductive purposes of commerce or social control. Right off the bat we can liberate tens of millions of salesmen, soldiers, managers, cops, stockbrokers, clergymen, bankers, lawyers, teachers, landlords, security guards, ad-men and everyone who works for them. There is a snowball effect since every time you idle some bigshot you liberate his flunkies and underlings also. Thus the economy implodes."

And:
"The Triple Revolution: Cybernation, Weaponry, Human Rights" sent to President Lyndon B. Johnson in March 1964
http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/FSCfiles/C_CC2a_TripleRevolution.htm

Of course, we actually had such a life as hunter/gatherers (ignoring some of the downsides there). Essentially, when there was a small human population relative to the size fo the planet., food was abundant relative to the number of people, so it was very easy to acquire.
http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm

And here is the great tragedy of the Americas:
http://www.marcinequenzer.com/creation.htm#The%20Field%20of%20Plenty
"The Field of Plenty is always full of abundance. The gratitude we show as Children of Earth allows the ideas within the Field of Plenty to manifest on the Good Red Road so we may enjoy these fruits in a physical manner. When the cornucopia was brought to the Pilgrims, the Iroquois People sought to assist these Boat People in destroying their fear of scarcity. The Native understanding is that there is always enough for everyone when abundance is shared and when gratitude is given back to the Original Source. The trick was to explain the concept of the Field of Plenty with few mutually understood words or signs. The misunderstanding that sprang from this lack of common language robbed those who came to Turtle Island of a beautiful teaching. Our "land of the free, home of the brave" has fallen into taking much more than is given back in gratitude by its citizens. Turtle Island has provided for the needs of millions who came from lands that were ruled by the greedy. In our present state of abundance, many of our inhabitants have forgotten that Thanksgiving is a daily way of living, not a holiday that comes once a year."

Thankfully via the GPL and some inspiration (RepRap), those abundant days may come again:
http://reprap.org/
"RepRap is short for Replicating Rapid-prototyper. It is the practical self-copying 3D printer

http://www.dimensionprinting.com/printers/printing-faq.shtml

Says the dimension printer does not use stereolithography. It uses Fused Deposition Modeling which is similar to the fab at home approach and exactly what reprap is useing.

That said FDM is a valid and good approach. Stereolithography is another.

And at least according to the reprap website, the additional parts should only run about $500 or so dollars. They seem to have the instructions for a completed first version up on their website. I'd say that it's definitely worth checking out. http://reprap.org/bin/view/Main/RepRapOneDarwin

Here's another similar project I heard about... in open source fashion, people that build these machines are supposed to print parts to help others build their own. http://reprap.org/bin/view/Main/WebHome

Thank you - this is indeed old news. However I love the extra exposure for the Fab@Home project - it's awesome. Also check out RepRap - http://reprap.org/bin/view/Main/WebHome

Early 3d fabs for medical use used this method. They would, for example, recreate a broken skull from x-rays and let the doctor practice putting his hands in it before surgery.

I've been thinking of sinking the money into getting parts for a Rep-Rap. These look nice though.

Erm, Rep Rap
I know, it won't fab everything but the few remaining bits are easy to get.

Then you ought to check out the RepRap project see:

http://reprap.org/

An open design from a project at the University of Bath. It has OSS control software and is specifically designed to be self replicating, using only 400 of materials.

A RepRap machine costs less than $500 in parts, though it does require a lot more assembly work.

I was a teenager back in the early microcomputer days and built one of first kit machines, an IMSAI 8080. It was great fun and more educational than any number of college course I took thereafter.

Those days are long gone now. But could something similar return? I think that the next tech revolution has already started, and it's the hacker's auto fabrication machine ("fabber").

Example: http://reprap.org/bin/view/Main/WebHome

Right now these aren't much more than 3-D printers that squeeze out plastic goop under computer control. But if the rate of progress of this field is anything like that seen with microcomputers, then small scale manufacturing will be totally changed in a few years. Who will be the Woz (and the Jobs and the Gates) of this new endeavor? Maybe they're already out there, but we just haven't heard of them yet.

I have met old professional writers who literally hate the Internet and wish it never existed. They seem particularly worried about amateurs writing stuff. But that's their opinion and you know what they say about opinions. They aren't amateurs, they don't love writing, they just profit from it. I would very much prefer a novel or scientific paper written by amateurs rather than professionals. Why? Because, even if the amateurs's creation contains a few mistakes or omissions here and there, I know that it was nurtured with love, while the professionals's creation is as cold as money (not that money is necessarily bad, but it IS cold). It works with software, it works with encyclopedias, it works with news, it works with hardware, it works with fabbers, it works with science, and certainly it also works with writing. Professional writers can yell as much as they want, but Internet writing is here to stay. They are the old generation and together with all centralised models of production (RIAA, MPAA, Microsoft...) will have to either evolve or die, while the Internet enables communities of amateurs, the cooperative generation, to produce high-quality content in an open fashion for the love of it.

I am planning on starting a company of that sort next year in my country. I will let you know how it goes, if you want.

Have a look at RepRap.

Still at the baby steps stage, but there's been an immense amount of progress in recent months.

(rapid prototyping has been around for a while, of course... what's different about this is the ability to do it on the cheap)

Everyone's situation is unique. Some general references:
"Honest Business" by Michael Phillips
http://www.amazon.com/Honest-Business-Shambhala-Pocket-Editions/dp/1570621799
and:
"The Seven Laws of Money" by Michael Phillips
http://www.amazon.com/Seven-Money-Shambhala-Pocket-Classics/dp/1570622779
"The Seven Laws of Money" by Michael Phillips (Author), Salli Rasberry
http://www.amazon.com/Seven-Laws-Money-Michael-Phillips/dp/0931425417
(I think the first is a slimmed down and improved version of the second...)

One key idea in that "The Seven Laws of Money" book is a corollary to the first law:
http://www.chebucto.ns.ca/Commerce/RATNA/june2.html
The first law is: "Do it! Money will come when you are doing the right thing."
but the corollary is "The world does not owe you a living".

One way to make budget ends meet is to reduce expenses. Lower expenses means more flexibility.
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=voluntary+simplicity

From my own experience, trying to run a business is a whole set of skills which are completely different from doing engineering. They are not necessarily incompatible, but they are rare in the same person and require changing mental paradigms (successful business owners need to be focused on immediate markets, cash flow, return on investment, ownership, and so on). Personally, I know I'd have been a lot better off in life (as well as the projects I and my wife worked on would have been more successful as communities) if I had treated them as a serious hobby, not as a business (or, alternatively thought of them as a very long term business where the investment would span decades and so I could expect no immediate return on capital investment). For one thing, we could more easily have collaborated with others. Take 3D printing, for example -- try to build a business in it and you are all alone and fighting against the established vendors. Do it as a serious hobby, and you could work closely with, say, the RepRap project. http://reprap.org/

Still, there is nothing wrong with right livelihood. Many people work full time doing stuff like solar panel installations or working in university research labs.

Also, my limited understanding of the Australian culture was it was common for people to save up money and take a six month trip, and then go back to work after that. Why not six months spent helping, say, the RepRap project?

Anyway, I'm not saying what is right for you. I can't. I can just say to try to think differently about the situation. Ultimately we are talking about a future where there is little correlation between work and income because computers and automation (and 3D printing) make so much that the problem is more getting rid of stuff than making it. Almost no current business model makes sense after such fundamental change of economic climate, a return to an (once hunter/gathere) assumption of prosperity for all instead of an (agricultural) assumption of scarcity for all. This is a tidal wave of change which some think the forces that be (e.g. RIAA, Disney, others) have been actively holding back for decades. People were describing this change even more than forty years ago:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Triple_Revolution
http://www.educationanddemocracy.org/F

"And since we were non-profit..."

So what does that prove? Lots of "non profits" use predatory practices or exist to serve self-dealing boards or employees; many for-profits have laudable business practices and goals (Google to an extent).

Why not have half as many jobs doing truly free work as twice as many whose intellectual labor ends up bound in chains? Doesn't it matter to you that you likely can't ever touch stuff you worked on there anymore -- given that public dollars (your taxes) were consumed to make it?

Maybe a "subsidy" publishing model made sense in the dead tree age, when it cost lots to make results available via printed media and was hard to collaborate in a fine-grained way, but in the internet age, anything can be copied cheaply and documents can be developed by multiple authors simultaneously. Why create artificial scarcity? And why prop up an economy based on artificial scarcity which is likely largely going away as, say, 3D printers become more common?
    http://www.reprap.org/
From there: "The promise of advanced fabrication technology that can copy itself is a truly remarkable concept with far reaching implications."
        - Sir James Dyson, 17 April 2007.
"[RepRap] has been called the invention that will bring down global capitalism, start a second industrial revolution and save the environment..."
        - James Randerson on the front page of The Guardian on November 25, 2006.
"Money is a sign of poverty."
        - Iain M. Banks, 1987.

nothing new here I've seen this before
http://reprap.org/bin/view/Main/LaserEtchTool
http://www.felesmagus.com/pages/lasers-howto.html
the above has more detail including a circuit diagram

AoI Works fine on Linux, Windows and Macs to my certain knowledge. The lead developer uses a Mac. I've been using it mostly on Linux for many years professionally, and its latest incarnation of the user interface is just so much easier to use - and teach new users with - than Blender. It is capable of producing massive renders, tens of thousands of pixels across or simply running off a quick animation preview.

Also, AoI produces and validates true 3D shapes. This is important, as shapes which merely look like they're 3D but in reality have a few klein bottles hidden within the mesh are impossible to print out on a 3D printer.

Finally, the AoI community is extremely helpful and responsive. For these reasons, we use AoI in the RepRap Project to build objects for our Open Source 3D printer.

Vik :v)

Well, we've got the reprap -- note what they say about the extruder on the front page. So who's going to be first up against the wall?

Rep-Rap The open-source rapid prototyping system.

Don't print the circuitry on the packaging, print it on the 3D object you just printed out. http://reprap.org/

No reason to keep this circuitry planar either. Print any shape you like with the circuitry embedded in it.

Vik :v)

And of course, there's the open source RepRap project to make a very low cost 3D printer.
http://reprap.org/

Such a 3D printer is being worked on, but they do not seem to have a way to actually make electronics with a 3D printer yet.

All that's needed is mass production of the technology and development of newer better liquid setting materials.

Or a single implementation of a technology that can reproduce itself from off-the-shelf components.
These people seem to be making progress in that direction. As long as your application can be made to work with a plastic (polycaprolactone) that melts at 60-70 degrees C.

Maybe you could excited about the RepRap project at the University of Bath in the UK which is pretty much what you asked for... http://www.reprap.org/

The RepRap can print metal tracks on the objects it fabs and it looks to be very similar to this device, I see no reason this couldn't be adapted to do the same.

No, but a RepRap can: http://reprap.org/

Vik :v)

The Fab@Home machine can't produce itself. If you want one of those, got to http://reprap.org/

Vik :v)

The RepRap folks have already started using their machines to print parts for their machines. Their aim is a Von Neumann universal constructor.

At least with some designs I have seen, it would be a fairly simple operation to replace the plastic extruder head with a milling tool head. Also, there has been some work done on incorporating conductors into the plastic to form a machine which can build circuits. Semiconductors, not so much. But connection circuits, even low-tolerance capacitors and inductors could be made.

How could the article not mention the free 3D-printer project RepRap?

It's all under the gpl, and you can see what we're up to here:
http://reprap.org/
http://reprapdoc.voodoo.co.nz/bin/view/Main/WebHom e
http://reprap.blogspot.com/
http://reprappers.blogspot.com/
http://objects.reprap.org/

If you want to make your own 3D printer, or borrow one of our loaner machines (once we have some), please come check us out.

It's all under the gpl, and you can see what we're up to here:
http://reprap.org/
http://reprapdoc.voodoo.co.nz/bin/view/Main/WebHom e
http://reprap.blogspot.com/
http://reprappers.blogspot.com/
http://objects.reprap.org/

If you want to make your own 3D printer, or borrow one of our loaner machines (once we have some), please come check us out.

Sounds like he's just discovered what Langdon Winner has been saying since the 1970s, and others since before then. Slashdot frequently sees posts like "a razor blade can be used for good or evil" implying technology is value neutral -- but it isn't. Technology embodies our values, especially when looked at as a system including favorite economic stories at the time -- including a decision to invest in, say, designing nuclear weapons design or marketing larger SUVs instead of say, curing river blindness or designing electric cars -- decisions driven by values.

Contrast, say, Disney's investments in controlling media with DRM versus the RepRap project to make a free 3D printer. Winner goes further in his book _Autonomous Technology_ and suggests large bureaucracies "reverse adapt", changing their environment to perpetuate themselves, including the legal environment. So, if you can't make or share your own media or 3D models, then you are dependent on Disney or whoever. Consider the kind of technology to sustain the values described here: CLAWS: Creating Livable Alternatives to Wage Slavery and how it might differ from the politics and policies and technologies and infrastructure of today. Or from this essay The Abolition of Work: "Clearly these ideology-mongers have serious differences over how to divvy up the spoils of power. Just as clearly, none of them have any objection to power as such and all of them want to keep us working. ... Only a small and diminishing fraction of work serves any useful purpose independent of the defense and reproduction of the work-system and its political and legal appendages. Twenty years ago, Paul and Percival Goodman estimated that just five percent of the work then being done -- presumably the figure, if accurate, is lower now -- would satisfy our minimal needs for food, clothing and shelter. Theirs was only an educated guess but the main point is quite clear: directly or indirectly, most work serves the unproductive purposes of commerce or social control."

Ah, but humans have spent the last 100,000+ years of their lives living in "affluence" in terms of lots of free time and an abundance of food. It is only the last few thousands years of agricultural empires and industrialism that have been the anomaly. See:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Original_affluent_soc iety
http://www.primitivism.com/original-affluent.htm
So, I see no reason humans can not adapt to a post-scarcity society brought on by stuff like:
http://reprap.org/
or:
http://www.zcorp.com/products/printersdetail.asp?I D=2

These guys are working on something like this now. It's a first step, but it is a step nonetheless.

You fools!
Your creations will be the end of us all!

from the site: A universal constructor is a machine that can replicate itself and - in addition - make other industrial products. Such a machine would have a number of interesting characteristics, such as being subject to Darwinian evolution, increasing in number exponentially, and being extremely low-cost.

As part of a team engaged in a disruptive Open Source hardware project (http://reprap.org/ I have to say that the guy is almost right. Yes, advances come from large teams, but they need a small, dense and enthusiastic core to start the ball rolling.

What is essential for a project to spread, other than being useful to the users, it the ability to replicate it on demand. With software, this is pretty easy. With hardware it is currently more difficult, but we're fixing that.

What astounds me is the inability of the commercial world and economists in particular to recognise that there are ways of creating disruptive technologies without being limited by the need to make a profit. I can see a two-teir world developing before my eyes, with the commercial sector deriding anything that is not profitable on the grounds that it'll never spread. Software is so far the only exception to this pseudo-rule, but within 2 years the same will start to apply to hardware as multi-material 3D printers become available for under $1,000.

Vik :v)

Software, movies, and music are just information. Private industry groups have been working very hard to get the legislative and law enforcement help they need to corner their markets.

nanofactories and their larger-than-molecular-scale recursive fabs (any machine that can make things and copies of itself) will help people make much more dangerous //physical stuff//. Blades, bombs, guns, springs, mines, etc. Even if it can't make chemical explosives, there's a lot you can do with simple, malleable mechanical devices. Human grass-roots ingenuity is always surprising: just ask any hacker.

This problem won't just be opposed by entrenched manufacturing interests - it will be a national security issue. The war on terror fucknuts are going to have a field day scaring us out of our freedoms with this one. It will either force us to ban fabs with heavy penalties, creating a pretty dim draconian future, or actually retake control of our governments.

You'd better get started now. Projects like http://reprap.org/ are likely to produce primitive self-replicating fabricators by the end of the decade.

I've been wating for an improvement in this technology since the Private Eye HUD device patents were bought out and shut down. That device was great: Clear, crisp, easy to view and it had "Hercules" resolution - 720x384, not QVGA.

I have been waiting about 15 years, and I've reached the conclusion that we'll only get a decent HUD when sufficient technology is in the hands of Open Source developers. So I'm working on the Open Source RepRap fabricator http://reprap.org/ and we'll see who builds an affordable one first; geeks, or corporates.

Vik :v)

It's a field in which the Open Source community are already active, and as with the software industry it's hard to get something in print before it gets out of date. As reported earlier on Slashdot, the RepRap Team (and I'm one of 'em) are going for the materials deposition route as per http://reprap.org/

We believe that this is the easiest to implement of the designs listed by Professor Gershenfeld, in a way that will be capable of producing the majority of its own parts. Open Source, shareable hardware. The sooner we get MkI out, the quicker others will be able to develop it - and the harder it is for anti-social types to patent what we're going to be doing.

We've devised a way to deposit a low melting point but durable plastic called Polymorph - it's recyclable - and have also deposited a low-temperature solder as an electrical conductor.

While the project may appear a simple affair, it really does need to be. It's about more than just re-inventing the glue gun; the RepRap will be capable of fabricating itself, and so the simpler the design the less work we have to do. Sometimes, simple is hard.

Vik :v)

http://reprap.org/

A universal constructor is a machine that can replicate itself and - in addition - make other industrial products. Such a machine would have a number of interesting characteristics, such as being subject to Darwinian evolution, increasing in number exponentially, and being extremely low-cost.

A rapid prototyper is a machine that can manufacture objects directly (usually, though not necessarily, in plastic) under the control of a computer.

The project described in these pages is working towards creating a universal constructor by using rapid prototyping, and then giving the results away free under the GNU General Public Licence to allow other investigators to work on the same idea. We are trying to prove the hypothesis: Rapid prototyping and direct writing technologies are sufficiently versatile to allow them to be used to make a von Neumann Universal Constructor.

http://reprap.org/

This would make a better type of bot wars, building their weapons with available materials and blasting each other with them heh

http://reprap.org/

This would make a better type of bot wars, building their weapons with available materials and blasting each other with them heh

http://reprap.org/

This would make a better type of bot wars, building their weapons with available materials and blasting each other with them heh

The here is the googled website: http://reprap.org/ I have always thought replicating machines would be cool (it's possible as can be seen from the "two-legged existence theorem"). Using a 3D printer sounds like the way to go about this today. However, I would think that whatever it is you are crafting with a machine has to necessarily be at a lower mechanical tolerance to the machine itself, so over several generations, the precision falls catastrophically. Some form of recovery or repair is needed (as in DNA). I have always thought we were a long way off from this sorta thing ... ... The practical solution outlined or implied here seems workable in contrast - use your machine to make various parts, and have a human assemble them together. It was mentioned in http://www.blog.speculist.com/archives/000293.html that additional off the shelf spare parts might be needed. This certainly provides a practical trade-off for an almost self-replicating machine. Nice! Hmm "We'll be watching your future career with great interest." (Senator Palpatine)

There's more detail here or here.

http://reprap.org/

the blog is cool too

http://reprap.blogspot.com/

This would make a better type of bot wars, building their weapons with available materials and blasting each other with them heh