Machine Prints 3D Copies Of Itself

TaeKwonDood writes "Automated machines have been around for decades. They have basically been dumb devices that do simple assembly tasks. But RepRap takes that a step further because, instead of assembling pre-fabricated parts, it creates 3-D objects by printing them — squirting molten plastic in layers — and then building them up as the plastic solidifies. It works on coat hooks, door handles and now it can even make working copies ... of itself. The miracle of additive fabrication, coming soon to a robotic overlord near you."

Comments

Re:I...

[Sebastien_Bailard]

Fussing that RepRap is not 'perfectly self-replicating' yet is an extremely common criticism. This pedantic but factually true statement glosses over the fact that it's a machine that cheaply and easily makes its own parts*, using inexpensive feedstock. And it can make other useful things. That's the important stuff, which your criticism fails to address.

*Aside from common stuff from a hardware store and an electronics store.

(Yes, I'm a RepRap developer, and yes, that's a cut-and-paste.)

Star Trek Replicator

[sm62704]

The self-printing machine is another step to Star Trek's "matter replicator". Society will have some sweeping changes when physical property is as easy and cheap (or beer-free) as intellectual "property" (imaginary property) is to replicate.

Someone in an RIAA/MPAA thread said that since physical property was getting cheaper and cheaper to manufacture and took less and less people to make that we need to stake our future to IP. I say this is hogwash - I may be creative, but most people aren't.The record labels are already quaint anachronisms, and the movie studios will soon follow as the cost and necessary technical expertise drop. It no longer takes lots of gruntwork to make an album; the band and a guy running the studio is all you need now. What will those who have no creativity do for a living?

Heaven on earth is on its way and technology is bringing it here. And the greedy rich are fighting its arrival tooth and nail. Their sense of entitlement and feelings that they are better than the rest of us is sickening.

Self-replicating? Not by a long shot

[Alwin Henseler]

from what I gather it's only able to print the plastic connection parts, so I'm not sure how this counts as "self-replicating" It doesn't. I'd say you can call something self-replicating if it can reproduce itself using only the essential raw materials. In this case: plastics, metal(s), energy. Perhaps a lot more ingredients, but at least those.

A good comparison is reproducing an OS in a Linux-From-Scratch style (using only source code, disk space and CPU cycles). *THE* thing you need is a C compiler. But to run that, you need a kernel, and a C library below. Then you need shell scripts to automate it, thus a shell. Most sources include makefiles, therefore you need 'make'. And bigger components use all sorts of preprocessing utilities like awk, lex, sed, grep, and so on. All these programs use a variety of standard utilities for copying/removing files, creating directories, etc. So before you get 'full circle', you need a pretty big set of things to reproduce what you start with (think of a compressed Gentoo stage 1).

Maybe this would be a good idea for an X-Prize kind of challenge: create a factory that makes *any commodity of choice*, and keeps itself working indefinitely using just the raw materials, and energy. That is, repairs/rebuilds machines if they break, does maintenance, etc. Say that the only role of humans would be to hit the 'on' switch, stock up supplies/energy, and to keep roof & walls of the building in place. I suspect that even for the simplest kind of product, the minimum size for such a factory would be *huge* if you include stuff like electronics (create new IC's from raw silicium to replace failed ones).

Perhaps all the required technology to do this already exists, but we're still a long way from putting all those parts together.

Re:Close but...

[smaddox]

The picture makes the child device look like a cheap piece of crap. But, i guess if it works, who cares.

I would galdly pay $300 to build on of these if it could build new plastic caps for the back of remote controls.

There are so many little pieces of plastic that break and make a product useless. If I could replace them after an hours work, I would be sooooo happy.

Re:All it makes is its own brackets

[smellsofbikes]

You bring up an interesting point. Lathes and mills, like compilers, can be self-replicating. In a belt-driven machine shop, working with somewhat crude tolerances, you can make a whole new belt-driven machine shop to the same (or maybe even slightly better) tolerances. But a '30's machine shop couldn't make modern vacuum-degassed, oil-impregnated bronze bearing stock, for instance: they could only make machines that had basically the same materials they themselves were made of.
Our ability to work with bulk materials has always lagged somewhat behind our ability to make specific, custom materials, in other words -- consider what I think is the highest point of materials science, directional solidification casting of turbine blades, where we have figured out how to control not only what goes in, but how the molecules structurally relate to one another in three dimensions. To build a universal 3D printer, we have to learn how to print more than just atom-by-atom: we actually have to figure out how to distort atom-by-atom printing to establish strain within materials -- and that's just to replicate things we're already building.
Anyone interested in further reading on 3d printers could stand to start by reading Saul Griffith's master thesis (pdf) on the subject. I'm building a larger version of the LEGO chocolate printer he discusses/documents in there, and I've gotten a couple of jobs by explaining to crabby old machinists how I managed to cut a new, true lathe spindle on my old lathe with a bent headstock spindle. The idea of self-healing and self-replicating machines has always fascinated me.