Daily Cup of Tech

Just imagine. It’s Christmas day and all of the toys have been unwrapped. You are ecstatic because you finally found your son that perfect gift and he couldn’t be happier! Suddenly, you are paid a Christmas visit by Murphy and your son’s new favorite toy breaks! What do you do? Christmas is about to be ruined!

If you are a faithful and dedicated DCoT reader, you break out your homemade fabber! Within a few minutes, you “print” a new part, fix the toy, and save Christmas!

This is a concept that I have been enamored with for quite some time. I love the idea of being able to go to the internet, download a file, and then “print” the object right from my computer! This type of technology has been around for almost ten years but it has always been cost prohibitive with systems starting at $15,000 (and that is considered to be cheap!).

In comes Fab@Home. Their idea is to create an open source fabber (or fabrication system) that will allow you to create several different objects from various materials. From their website:

The goal of this project is to offer an open-source, low-cost, personal SFF system kit, which we call “Fab@Home”. The aim of this project is to put SFF technology into the hands of those same curious, inventive, and entrepreneurial citizens. In addition, through this Wiki web site we hope to inspire users of Fab@Home to exchange their ideas for applications and their improvements to the hardware and software with us and each other. Several machines are already in use.

According to Fab@Home, you should be able to build their fabber for about US$2200. They also have a number of objects that you can download and then create.

Another project along these same lines is RepRap. RepRap is not as far along as Fab@Home but it appears to have more potential. The concept behind RepRap is to be able to create a device that can then be used to recreate itself (Can you say “Replicators“?). From the RepRap website:

RepRap is short for Replicating Rapid-prototyper. It is a practical self-copying 3D printer.

RepRap will make plastic, ceramic, or metal parts, and is itself made from plastic parts, so it will be able to make copies of itself. It is basically a three-axis robot with a glue gun. If it was making a plastic cone, it would lay down a quickly-hardening 0.5mm filament of plastic, drawing a filled disc. It would then raise the plastic extrusion head and draw the next layer (a smaller filled disc) on top of the first, repeating the process until it completed the cone. Conductors can be intermixed with the plastic to form circuits - in 3D even!

This process is called fused deposition modeling; machines that do this are called 3D printers, rapid prototypers, or fabbers. They are very useful. Unfortunately they are also very expensive - $20,000 US or more - and existing models don’t self-replicate. The RepRap build cost will be less than $400 US for the bought-in materials, all of which have been selected to be as widely available everywhere in the world as possible. Complete instructions and plans are published free on this website so, if you want to make one yourself, you can. Also, the RepRap software contains nothing that can’t work on all computer platforms for free.

We hope to announce self-replication in 2008.

I can’t get over the coolness factor if these two projects. Imagine being able to build absolutely anything that you want for yourself! It’s a geeks dream!

If I find some time, I’m going to see if I can work on the Fab@Home project (even though I like the RepRap system better). If I move forward with this, I’ll be sure to keep everyone posted.

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