Geoff Manaugh (as well as Worldchanging and basically everyone else in that line) has a post on a project at the RSA to think about the architectural consequences of RepRaps and other forms of decentralised industry. Like a lot of Manaugh’s stuff, it’s interesting…but it breaks off before confronting some of the more concrete impacts.…
Read More More reprapping futures, including BurmaDan Lockton would probably be interested in this… The robot is this Bristol Robotics Lab project; both people in the thread at Jamie Zawinski’s I saw it in, and everyone I’ve shown it to, immediately think it looks like a cat. In fact, in a sense, they do recognise it as a cat – it’s…
Read More we’re building robotic creatures – we decided to start with the ratIll-coordinated links. Great news in RepRapping – South Korean scientists have succeeded in getting bacteria to make polylactic acid. PLA is the RepRap project’s favourite feedstock because it’s a reasonably tractable, general purpose plastic that can be synthesised from starch. The synthesis is not exactly simple, which is why outsourcing the job to germs is…
Read More links, the light alternative to writingRepRap made circuits.
Read More coolCool; an application that uses rules you give it to generate weird and three-dimensional graphics. (Via Sterling, who else.) This comes to mind, though; what if it could generate STL computer-aided design files? They are the kind that the RepRap’s host software eats, I think. And making them in hardware, you have to admit, is…
Read More will you stop fiddling with that thing?Here is Hewlett Packard Labs’ Cloudprint, a service that allows you to print your documents to a server in their network and receive a shortcode (which can be distributed to any number of people at the same time). Then, when you need the docs, you send the code from your mobile phone and specify a…
Read More Materialise that, will you?What to do when your RepRap is finished? Run off a few shot glasses, of course, so as to celebrate properly.
Read More A tradition is bornThe Bath University RepRap project (to build a rapid-prototyping tool that can make copies of itself) is coming on with all due speed, and I especially like their latest test part, a natty Linux penguin. Which is fitting for a project that’s all open-source. Back when they got started, Phil Hunt of Cabalamat Journal posed…
Read More The Hunt question