First reprapped circuit | Hacker News Reader

First reprapped circuit

blog.reprap.org

64 pointsph0rque8 comments

Am I the only one who's clueless as to what this is about?

Reprap (http://reprap.org/bin/view/Main/WebHome) is an open-source 3D printer that can print out most of the parts of itself. The things that can't be printed out include "trivial" things like the metal rods and the flat platform, and "non-trivial" things like motors and electronics.

This is a step towards printing out the electronics. I believe there were efforts in printing out motor components as well, although no results so far, as far as I know.

The overreaching goal, of course, is to be able to have your Reprap prototyping machine make a copy of itself. This is a great step in that direction.

It's a step forward for RepRap...but to be cruel, this is like your disabled child learning to use a spoon at age 6.

I love the project a lot; I was friends with one of the founders ~15 years ago, until we got separated by geography. He had an amazing hack/DIY ethic then, and clearly still does - I'm very impressed with what he's achieved.

But as you can see from the RepRap homepage, funding comes from donations, t-shirts and kit sales. Ideologically pure DIY is laudable but we've all seen software projects that were a triumph of individual achievement and a true labor of love, but where v1.0 finally landed with an interface that was >5 years out of date.

The problem at bottom is that RepRap can't do things on a very fine scale, and you can't build a new RepRap from an existing one - you can make bits, but not the motors or the extruder, which are exactly the (relatively) expensive and hard-to-source parts in shortest supply in places like Africa.

Given the increasing quality and affordability of commercial RP and 3d printing machines, it might make a lot more sense to raise a few hundred k or a few million in capital, buy the good commercial stuff, and skip several generations, just as the OLPC was (presumably) designed on the most up-to-date computers available, rather than being bootstrapped on 8086 machines for reasons of ideological purity.

Reprap is a great venture, but it's never going to get there by itself, and the founders are never going to dirty themselves asking for a big check in exchange for any kind of commercial license. It's held back by it's 'techno-Amish' origins.

Or in short, their lack of interest in scaling up limits the hardware's ability to scale down. I talk too much.

Are you aware of MakerBot (http://makerbot.com/)? This is exactly the thing they're doing: they've launched a company whose first product is based on reprap.

I am now :-)

and I think their emphasis on low cost and general utility (as opposed to self-reproducibility) will net them more users and $. I've also been following the Desktop Factory, who promise 3 desktop printing for $5k: http://www.desktopfactory.com/ Still vaporware commercially speaking, but ti doesn't hurt that they look a Real Company.

I hope I don't sound too down on the RepRap or on you for posting it. I've got a classic case of the 'introverted total DIY = unfinished project' myself.

Pouring molten solder into a mold seems kind of crude; solder is rather blobby even with flux.

I'd have thought that using printer technology would be easier. You could print conductive areas and semiconductors and resistors directly onto an insulator. You could make 3D objects as papercraft.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com