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... That's only the first generation machine. Keep in mind that the first IBM PC's introduced at the beginning of the 1980's cost about $4,000 in the dollars of that day. I'm currently working on an open source second generation machine that I estimate will have a parts cost of about $250. You can track my progress at...
http://3dreplicators.com/
If I can get sort out a problem with lead screw length of Chinese source for linear stepper motors I should be able to drop that cost to about $100 for parts. I'm pretty sure that I can do that.
I may be creative, but most people aren't. It's impossible to say until "most" people have access to the tools necessary to express any native creativity that they might have. I'm really looking forward to the impact that affordable 3D printers will have on kids. So much of the really innovative things that you see done with the web are done by the very young. Imagine what things will be like when just about anybody can make physical things instead of just images of imaginary things.
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. Though I'm not sure that Heaven on Earth is where we are headed it is definitely the End of Days for much of our extant socio/economic institutions. Old wealth always fights hard to keep it's perogatives at the expense of everyone else. One only has to look at this year's farm bill and the utterly ridiculous extensions to the copyright laws that our bought and paid for Congress and White House have made into law in the last 10-15 years to know that.
how much time is necessary for the self-replication? Vik Olivier, a core development team member living in New Zealand, printed upthe first full set of Darwin parts in his spare time in about a month. Chris Palmer in the UK, another core development team member, reported this morning that he has printed out about 60% by mass of a full parts set in 72 hours of actual printer operation.
what are the skills needed for the assembly? You can buy a fully assembled Darwin 3D printer sans the control boards from bitsandbytes.com in the UK. The control boards can be purchased from the Reprap foundation (rrrf.org) in the US. The chips and other bits that go on the boards can be got from places like mouser.com among others. The foundation is planning to offer full parts kits for the boards before too long, I'm told. It is only a matter of time, imo, before some robotics shop or six start offering fully assembled and tested control boards as well.
The idea of RepRap is to reproduce MOST of itself, not ALL of itself. The RepRap project website makes this distinction very clear. What appears to be crudity in the output of the Zaphod RepRap prototype is, in fact, Vik debugging the PC/RepRap machine software/firmware ensemble, not an intrinsic problem with either Zaphod or the concept. Vik has produced some gears with Zaphod largely because I wrote some scripts for the open source Art of Illusion 3D modeling system which allow users to design more efficient involute profile gears than the ones Vik used in Zaphod.
There are several RepRap prototypes being worked on. Whereas Vik produced the plastic pieces for Zaphod out of ABS on the University of Bath's Stratasys 3D printer, I took another route, being familiar with woodworking, and made my bootstrap RepRap out of milled poplar lumber (http://www.3DReplicators.com). Simon, with another skill set, made his out of braised copper tubing. Other RepRap builders are taking other approaches.
The point is that none of those bootstrap machines are seen as an end product in itself. Rather, they are intended to get their builders the capability of producing 3D parts made of polymers and other materials as quickly and as cheaply as possible.
Expect that the designs coming out of RepRap team members once they have a bootstrap machine to be very different that what you see now. The RepRap Darwin machine (http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger/2032/1030/16 00/962369/Dawrin%203a.jpg), for example, uses steel rod for most of it's structure. While that seems counterintuitive, in fact what it achieves is to greatly reduce the mass and machine time of the parts that have to be made to replicate a Darwin. Steel rod is readily available in most of the world.
What this means is that the evolutionary process is already underway for RepRap machines. Expect a lot of speciation as RepRaps evolve that flourish in very different technical environments and face very different fabrication challenges.
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The idea of RepRap is to reproduce MOST of itself, not ALL of itself. The RepRap project website makes this distinction very clear. What appears to be crudity in the output of the Zaphod RepRap prototype is, in fact, Vik debugging the PC/RepRap machine software/firmware ensemble, not an intrinsic problem with either Zaphod or the concept. Vik has produced some gears with Zaphod largely because I wrote some scripts for the open source Art of Illusion 3D modeling system which allow users to design more efficient involute profile gears than the ones Vik used in Zaphod. There are several RepRap prototypes being worked on. Whereas Vik produced the plastic pieces for Zaphod out of ABS on the University of Bath's Stratasys 3D printer, I took another route, being familiar with woodworking, and made my bootstrap RepRap out of milled poplar lumber (http://www.3DReplicators.com). Simon, with another skill set, made his out of braised copper tubing. Other RepRap builders are taking other approaches. The point is that none of those bootstrap machines are seen as an end product in itself. Rather, they are intended to get their builders the capability of producing 3D parts made of polymers and other materials as quickly and as cheaply as possible. Expect that the designs coming out of RepRap team members once they have a bootstrap machine to be very different that what you see now. The RepRap Darwin machine (http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger/2032/1030/16 00/962369/Dawrin%203a.jpg), for example, uses steel rod for most of it's structure. While that seems counterintuitive, in fact what it achieves is to greatly reduce the mass and machine time of the parts that have to be made to replicate a Darwin. Steel rod is readily available in most of the world.
What this means is that the evolutionary process is already underway for RepRap machines. Expect a lot of speciation as RepRaps evolve that flourish in very different technical environments and face very different fabrication challenges.