Pop!Tech Notes: Adrian Bowyer and RepRap
Speaker: Adrian Bowyer, RepRap project. (My comments in parentheses.)
Right after chipping flakes off flint and setting fire to little piles of wood, humans invented breeding. We've been making molecular genetic changes almost since the start of civilization.
Chickens: "Can't run; Can't fly; taste good. Usually a recipe for evolutionary disaster." Because of their symbiotic relationship with us, they're the most successful bird species ever.
Which leads to: RepRap, a self-replicating rapid prototyper. "The REPlicating RAPid Prototyper," capable of fabbing, or three-dimensional printing. "A computer-controlled glue gun." (You guys know all about rapid prototyping, right?)
(I actually saw a RepRap presentation at DorkBot NYC a few months ago. I wonder how much farther they've gotten.)
RepRap can't make every last part of itself, but outside parts have to be very simple and cheap to obtain and available all over the world to anybody—a few nuts and bolts, as well as metal rods.
60% of the current RepRap parts can be made by a RepRap itself.
(It's odd to talk about a plastic extruder machine going to poor countries will previously hearing about all the plastic waste we create here.)
RepRap is open source. You can't sell a RepRap, Bowyer explains—you'd only need to sell one! It won't evolve out of random selection, but deliberate decisions by users, passed back into the project that others can use to upgrade their own RepRap. The total cost for the very first machine is $400. (Commercial machines are $30k and up.)
The original polymer was biodegradable, but the new material will be "poly-lactic acid," which can be made from vegetable starch. (They're one step ahead of me!) It will allow manufacturing to come to the poorest communities that will be capable of growing their own renewable polymer crops. (Freaking awesome.)
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I work for Spark, CBC Radio's tech/trends show. We interviewed Adrian for our October 24 episode, and you can listen to the full interview online now:
http://www.cbc.ca/spark/blog/2007/10/interview_with_adrian_bowyer_3.html
"You can't sell a RepRap, Bowyer explains—you'd only need to sell one!"
Some plan, some program must tell the RepRap what to do. I see a future with the RRPIAA (RepRap Programmers Industry Association of America) is suing individuals for unlicensed sharing of plan programs.
hey!
tis awesome to see RepRap on BoingBoing. I'm heavily involved in the project, and have also been an avid boingboing reader for years now.
anywho, just wanted to clarify a few things:
what adrian means by not being able to sell them is that its not possible to monopolize it: the design is open and free and if you overcharge for it, someone else can print one off and sell it for much cheaper.
the project is fully open source (GPL) so any changes you make must be given back, but you can build and sell as many as you want, for as much as you want.
there's nothing that says you can't sell them, just that you have to be ethical about it or the market will force you to be =)
also, there is a non-profit foundation (RepRap Research Foundation) that sells some of the raw materials as darn low prices to help researchers get hard to find parts: http://www.rrrf.org
(disclaimer: i run the foundation. however, we're about as far away from the RIAA as you could possibly get.)
cool, huh?