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3D Printers To Build Houses
gbjbaanb writes to point out an article in the Sunday Times describing two separate programs where robots are being developed to build houses. The Los Angeles project is farther along than the one in the UK, but the article provides more details on the techniques employed in the latter. Liquid concrete and gypsum will be sprayed from nozzles in a manner analogous to an inkjet printer. From the article: "The first prototype — a watertight shell of a two-story house built in 24 hours without a single builder on site — will be erected in California before April. The robots are rigged to a metal frame, enabling them to shuttle in three dimensions and assemble the structure of the house layer by layer. The sole foreman on site operates a computer programmed with the designer's plans... Inspired by the inkjet printer, the technology goes far beyond the techniques already used for prefabricated homes. 'This will remove all the limitations of traditional building,' said [an architect involved with the UK project]. 'Anything you can dream you can build.'"
As soon as HP hears about this, we'll have $15,000 Housejet cartridges.
"Anything you can dream you can build."
That seems overly optimistic. I think there are a few laws of physics that would disagree.
Qualitas edurus commercium, nullus penitus net rimor, nullus deus beneficium
"No Sir, it's not a printing error, it's an architectural feature."
How many people can read hex if only you and dead people can read hex?
What happens if you print a test page? Does it build a giant HP logo?
brandelf: invalid ELF type 'KEEBLER'
How are the Maf*a et al going to hide their bodies now if the concrete side of things is automated? Actually, thinking about it things could go the other way for them. Concrete shoes sir? What style? Any particular heel?
I want a list of atrocities done in your name - Recoil
"The Federal Reserve is a fraudulent system."--Lew Rockwell
End The FED. -
It will probably be cheaper to buy new robots that come with cartridges.
Well, you could buy the really, really big concrete-refill syringes instead, but you usually get gypsum all over your hands. It's best just to trade them in at a concrete-cartridge recycling centre.
Meta will eat itself
and $5000 refills which never work?
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
I can just imagine the business model now... sell the robot for $49.95 and the 'ink' cartridges for $49950 (good for a volume of 5m^3). House plans will be loaded via usb stick, but they can only be designed with licensed software ($100000/user), and only then by architects who have attended the $50000 training course, which must be attended every two years.
Within hours of release someone will have reverse engineered the 'ink' cartridge slot to take generic branded concrete bags, and the private keys for signing the plans will follow a few days later. The manufacturers will release a statement saying that using generic branded 'ink' cartridges will void the warranty and may not give you the quality you want. On closer inspection, the quality statement is possibly true, but only marginally and nobody cares. As for warranty, it is cheaper to go and buy a new unit than to put up with the downtime caused by waiting for a repair.
Long and drawn out legal proceedings will begin, firstly against the hackers who released the original hack for the concrete bags, and then against the hackers who released the signing keys, but it will be ruled that you have to identify and locate the defendant first before you can prosecute them. After a succession of grandmothers and 8 year old girls are brought before the judge as being the original culprits, the case is thrown out, eventually.
Then they'll start bringing charges against the users who are using the 3rd party products, but that never works, and they haven't actually made enough money yet to be able to 'influence' any congressmen to get on their side.
And so on.
"If you ask a bricklayer to lay bricks in anything other than a straight line, you'll run into problems," said Soar. "But if you ask the robot to make a squiggly line it really doesn't care." I'm sure there are many a brickmason who can run bricks in many formations besides a straight line. I'm positive on this fact because the brickmasons who did my foundation was anything but straight.
There are no loopholes. It's either legal or it's not.
They said that it could be built. They didn't mention if the built structure had to still hold together once the scaffold is removed...
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Good to see they've been working on this for awhile, for a moment I thought we'd been stealing technology from the aliens again.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
Plumbing is no problem; they just hook this baby up to the Internets. After all, plumbing is just fancy tubing, and the Internet is a series of tubes...
"This doesn't replace my idea to construct a house made out of giant legos does it"
... they are called "Bricks".
That idea has already been done
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brick
There are 10 kinds of people in the world... those who understand binary and those who don't.
With the new developments vastly increasing the ease of reproduction of buildings, and the sudden upsurge in building piracy costing the industry over $10bn per year, it is necessary to implement strong rights management in order to prevent people from illegally producing buildings without paying a license fee to the architectural design firm. To provide fair compensation to the children of architects, new laws are being introduced that require all buildings to be made from approved construction materials that implement the StaysUpForSure protocol, which allows software monitoring and control of every component, in the "Fair House Prices for Children Act".
The "Walls" house operating software (included with every new house purchase) scans all components of the house, several times a second, to check for unauthorised modifications or attempted duplication. It contacts the central licensing servers once a day to ensure that this design of house is licensed for construction at this location, validated against its built-in GPS receiver. If the GPS receiver cannot receive a signal, or the licensing server does not report that the building is approved at the current location, or the component validator detects unauthorised modifications, then the software will signal all the construction materials to shut down, causing the house to collapse and protecting you from the dangers of building piracy.
Building insurance companies welcomed the move, saying: "Before now, when a house fell down, we had to spend money on careful investigations to identify whether the house was constructed from properly licensed blueprints - but now we can be sure that any collapsed house is the result of building piracy, which voids the insurance policy".
hmm, in a normal printer, I'd use a small needle. In this case, I'd use a small explosive.