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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."
... for one, welcomes our new self-replicating copy machine overlods.
While I appreciate the commercial benefit of this technology, the geek in me is a little more interested in the advancement toward the robot invasion. And by "interested" I meant "excited."
I have the heart of a child. I keep it in a jar
Haven't I heard this before?
This is take piracy to a whole new level. What fun.
FTA (emphasis mine): The materials, plus the minority of parts that the machine cannot print, cost about £300. It also does not actually assemble the parts it creates. So close and yet so far.
=Smidge=
I have some old Natalie Portman's pics to print out!
Dawkins Revisited: A person is shit's way of making more shit -- Steve Barnett, anthropologist.
Won't everyone just buy one, make it clone itself and then send it back for a full refund?
All the times I've owned something and one annoying plastic part breaks ruining the product. With this baby it'd be so easy for companies to send replacement parts at a fraction of the cost I bet.
If I still had my old Dell laptop I'd print the latch that broke off a few years ago.
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
and stories about itself on /. Didn't we have an
article/discussion a few days ago, and figured out
the only thing this 'self-replicating printer machine'
does is make copies of its case?
Can it sniff out nearby objects/people, ingest them, shred/melt them down to create new raw materials for buildling copies of itself? Thought not. We're safe... for now...
'Recently, Chris DiBona, Open Source Programs Manage at Google Inc, encouraged people to: "Think of RepRap as a China on your desktop."'
I am assuming that they used another method to make the very first one or else philosophers are going to rake it in for years over where the first one came from.
Lord Vader our troops are almost ready but I gotta run to staples to get some more of that plastic injection stuff for the printer.
you haven't thought your cunning plan all the way through
you forgot the part about who plugs you into the wall
who's in control now biatches!
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Printcrime
Copy this story.
(originally published in Nature Magazine, January 2006)
Cory Doctorow
The coppers smashed my father's printer when I was eight. I remember the hot, cling-film-in-a-microwave smell of it, and Da's look of ferocious concentration as he filled it with fresh goop, and the warm, fresh-baked feel of the objects that came out of it.
The coppers came through the door with truncheons swinging, one of them reciting the terms of the warrant through a bullhorn. One of Da's customers had shopped him. The ipolice paid in high-grade pharmaceuticals -- performance enhancers, memory supplements, metabolic boosters. The kind of things that cost a fortune over the counter; the kind of things you could print at home, if you didn't mind the risk of having your kitchen filled with a sudden crush of big, beefy bodies, hard truncheons whistling through the air, smashing anyone and anything that got in the way.
They destroyed grandma's trunk, the one she'd brought from the old country. They smashed our little refrigerator and the purifier unit over the window. My tweetybird escaped death by hiding in a corner of his cage as a big, booted foot crushed most of it into a sad tangle of printer-wire.
Da. What they did to him. When he was done, he looked like he'd been brawling with an entire rugby side. They brought him out the door and let the newsies get a good look at him as they tossed him in the car. All the while a spokesman told the world that my Da's organized-crime bootlegging operation had been responsible for at least 20 million in contraband, and that my Da, the desperate villain, had resisted arrest.
I saw it all from my phone, in the remains of the sitting room, watching it on the screen and wondering how, just how anyone could look at our little flat and our terrible, manky estate and mistake it for the home of an organized crime kingpin. They took the printer away, of course, and displayed it like a trophy for the newsies. Its little shrine in the kitchenette seemed horribly empty. When I roused myself and picked up the flat and rescued my poor peeping tweetybird, I put a blender there. It was made out of printed parts, so it would only last a month before I'd need to print new bearings and other moving parts. Back then, I could take apart and reassemble anything that could be printed.
By the time I turned 18, they were ready to let Da out of prison. I'd visited him three times -- on my tenth birthday, on his fiftieth, and when Ma died. It had been two years since I'd last seen him and he was in bad shape. A prison fight had left him with a limp, and he looked over his shoulder so often it was like he had a tic. I was embarrassed when the minicab dropped us off in front of the estate, and tried to keep my distance from this ruined, limping skeleton as we went inside and up the stairs.
"Lanie," he said, as he sat me down. "You're a smart girl, I know that. You wouldn't know where your old Da could get a printer and some goop?"
I squeezed my hands into fists so tight my fingernails cut into my palms. I closed my eyes. "You've been in prison for ten years, Da. Ten. Years. You're going to risk another ten years to print out more blenders and pharma, more laptops and designer hats?"
He grinned. "I'm not stupid, Lanie. I've learned my lesson. There's no hat or laptop that's worth going to jail for. I'm not going to print none of that rubbish, never again." He had a cup of tea, and he drank it now like it was whisky, a sip and then a long, satisfied exhalation. He closed his eyes and leaned back in his chair.
"Come here, Lanie, let me whisper in your ear. Let me tell you the thing that I decided while I spent ten years in lockup. Come here and listen to your stupid Da."
I felt a guilty pang about ticking him off. He was off his rocker, that much was clear. God knew what he went through in prison. "What, Da?" I said, leaning in close.
"Lanie, I'm going to print more printers. Lots more printers. One for everyone
"Knock, knock"
"Who's there?"
"Candygram"
"You're not a self-replicating cybernetic organism?"
"No, ma'am"
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
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.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
No one mentions the amount of work you have to do with a razor to make it look right.
You could say the same thing about womens' legs.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
Professor Farnsworth: It can do other things, why shouldn't it!
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.
Hmm, I thought the singularity would be more impressive than this. I bet Singularity 2.0 will be awesome.
Basically, you have to agree on a starting environment and what "self-reproducing" means. Computer viruses might be argued to be better quines than a program that simply prints itself and requires a human (or another program) to take the output and run it again.
Similarly, one might demand that a true self-reproducing machine be able to reproduce itself in the middle of the desert with only the sand as raw material and sunlight for energy. But most people would accept something in between that and the machine described in TA.
Self-reproducing lifeforms have similar issues. It is possible for a very simple "lifeform" with only 54 base pairs to be self-reproducing, but only if it parasitic. On the other hand, the simplest known lifeform that can reproduce independently is the Mycoplasma genitalium bacteria with 582970 base pairs. This probably isn't the simplest one that can theoretically exist - it is hard to imagine the right combination out of 4^582970 appearing at random in the pre-life organic soup - but whatever simpler thing existed before it is a mystery.
A video of Adrian Bowyer's RepRap can be found at ofpblog.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Cutting a metal cylinder is easy with a saw. Gluing into the plastic housing is easy with a clamp. Wrapping wire for a engine is easy, as is buying one online for a few bucks.
The point is we have an easy way to make plastic parts that otherwise would have to be special ordered. This would complete any garage as a prototype fab. It would be amazing for lab work in which I always want a piece of plastic of a certain shape, but end up having to wait a week to get it made out of much more expensive metal in the machine shop.
You see... When a man and a woman like eachother... Well... Go ask your mom upstairs, you've been in the basement too long my friend...
What sort of molten plastic does it use? Does it start in a liquid state and then dry when it's exposed to the air? Or does it melt solid plastic and then reshape it? I had thought that molten plastic would result in some nasty, maybe toxic vapours. Anyone here know for sure?
Okay... get some perspective here. The materials alone cost £400... which, giving that number a bit more meaning, works out to something over $750 USD. That's not exactly pocket change for a good percentage of people... and they somehow figure that people will just be willing to casually give them away? Sure, it's not out of reach of the average person's budget for the person who wants one, but it still strikes me as being well beyond the typical person's threshold of disposability.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
It doesn't make a "copy of itself". It doesn't make the plastic output device. It doesn't make the servomotors, the cables, the metal rods, or the control computer. All it actually makes, in fact, are the brackets used to assemble the other parts. The easy parts.
A manual Bridgeport milling machine, on the other hand, used to be considered "self-replicating". If you have a milling machine, a small foundry, a supply of good quality steel scrap, sand, and fuel, and a skilled machinist, you can eventually make another milling machine and all the foundry equipment. Factories that made Bridgeport milling machines (the design was widely copied) did in fact make them using Bridgeport milling machines. A good 1930s machine shop really can replicate itself with only a supply of good people and raw materials.
This machine is more hype than substance. It's just a mediocre stereolithography machine. If you want to use a good one, and you're in Silicon Valley, sign up with TechShop in Menlo Park. They have one, and it's not used much.
I submit that without the capacity to manufacture a working integrated circuit, the claim that the device can replicate itself should be considered a deliberate act of fraud.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
I remember the contest... and somebody turned in a zero byte length source file. Really! Nothing at all as the source.
A standard C compiler (like GCC) will produce precisely an exact copy of the source code when the object code is executed at run-time.
The one thing that kept the contest from getting flooded with additional variations of this software was the requirement to be original and that nobody could use a previously published algorithm. This does make you think, however.