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A 3D Lego Fabricator Made of Lego
eldavojohn writes "Making a Lego printer is pretty cool if you've never seen The LegoMakerBot. The creator has instructions on his site on how to make (out of Lego bricks) a machine that 'prints' Lego models — much like a 3D fabrication machine — after you model them in MLCad. The sped up video is nothing short of impressive."
Next step? Lego C&C machine.
Do you mean it's something short of impressive?
Wow, sent an e-mail as suggested when clicking on "use classic" banner, and got a fast response that addressed my msg
The builder made a colossal mistake. He included a design readable by the machine to build itself. This is how Skynet REALLY got started!
We are doomed!
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
I'm sorry but I disagree that the sped up video is nothing short of impressive.
Even at 16x, I quickly lost interest.
So, if you played it at 4x or 2x, you would slowly lose interest.
At that rate, you should play it backwards. It would instantly be your favorite footage!
Can it print itself? There's a model picture of itself at the end.
On a macro scale, with blocks that are built for children, we have something like this. Wow.
Look, I know that on a molecular level you have to deal with all sorts of physics that would not apply in what we see here but dammit I am hopeful that we are getting closer to having nano-bots. Of all the tech that I think we can do this is the stuff I think we could see in a lifetime.
Time travel...we don't have the energy yet to close the loops or so Hawking says. FTL travel...the physics that I know seem to say it's in the same league as time travel. The energy we currently view as high is not even in the same league as what we would need to have these types of tech. And as such there is very little research into such ideas.
And that is fine. We do need to have a stable planet such that we can actually progress. And as such the research into what we can do on our scale is very valid. Lets make some nano-bots that clean out our arterial walls and such. Do it. Go.
Really, I know what I'm doing...Ohhhh, look at the shiny buttons!
I doubt that a fabrication machine will ever be able to create parts w/ the precision which Lego demands in their molds (tolerances are just 2 micro-meters, molds are discarded when they wear out, they use _tons_ of pressure to force the ABS plastic into every bit of the molds).
That said, so long as the bricks don't infringe on any Lego trademarks (this varies by one's legal locality, see the article on the recent EU case http://arstechnica.com/old/content/2008/11/lego-loses-eu-trademark-on-bricks-prepares-for-clone-wars.ars ), one would be able to make them (w/in the tolerances of one's fabrication machine).
For an example of what it's like trying to use bricks which are _not_ manufactured to Lego tolerances, just pick up a Mega Bloks set (they're cheap) --- they sort of fit, but not w/ the precision of Lego bricks and they don't stay together as well.
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow.
Actually, this reminds me of the classic AI simulation program "Blocks World", which *was* written in Lisp.
Basically, it modeled a group of stacked blocks, and you could tell it, "put the red block on the blue block." If there were a yellow block on top of the red block, it would figure out that in order to meet its goal of picking up the red block, it had to remove the yellow one first.
What was especially cool is it could explain itself. You could ask "Why did you move the yellow block?" and it would say "To get at the red block." If you asked "Why did you move the red block" it would say "Because you told me."
That doesn't seem like much today, but thirty years ago it was the next thing to wizardry. Once you figured out how the program worked, you really understood why recursion is such a big deal in AI programs. Each individual inductive step was simple, but the results were impressive.
To actually get the lego machine to fabricate parts is no big deal; that's just running through a predefined set of motions. What would be cool is if, like Blocks World, you told it what you wanted, and it took care of the details for you.
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