Re: [ox-en] more on RepRap
- From: Stefan Merten <smerten oekonux.de>
- Date: Tue, 27 Sep 2005 17:26:04 +0200
Hi Karel and all!
6 days ago Karel Kulhavy wrote:
On Wed, Jun 08, 2005 at 08:38:14AM [PHONE NUMBER REMOVED], magius wrote:
http://www.blog.speculist.com/archives/000293.html
http://www.blog.speculist.com/archives/000262.html
I have seen the pictures.
Hmm I want to see how the machine replicates is DC motor and
PVC-insulated wires. Does it include furnace that melts copper at 950
degC, draw it into wires and chemical factory to manufacture PVC
insulation?
Funny plastic gadget replicator alone is pretty useless.
At the moment I'm offline and so can not say what this particular
device is able to produce. However, I have been on the EuroMold some
years ago which is a big fair with lots of technology which
effectively materializes digital data into something. These things are
available in the market place and people pay for it so there are at
least some uses for it. In particular in the modeling scene there is a
lot of use for them. And there are also ways of usage where the
materialized digital data is used for forms for Spritzguss-machinery
(don't know what Spritzguss is in English) which then can be used to
produce goods from other material than what is available by
materializers.
What we need is
a universal machine
- machine that is capable to produce any machine (including itself).
I think from an Oekonux perspective the most interesting thing in such
machines is that they are universal on a material level. What
specializes them to produce a certain good is software alone. This
shifts the main effort for producing a good away from constructing and
building a special machine to have the necessary software available.
This moves the main effort from the material level to the immaterial
level and Free Software shows what this means under conditions of a
planet-spanning digital copy facility.
Imho we have to try a way to fund Dr. Bowyer RepRap: ideas?
Hmm I would be delighted if someone funded me so I could work fulltime
on free technology and add a project of universal CNC machine to list of
Twibright Labs projects:
Well, I think I saw something like that some years ago so you don't
need to invent it. Again this machinery is so universal that all you
need to produce a particular good is the software - which is hard to
develop sometimes.
This also applies to industrial robots which are universal for a wide
range of material operations. They only need to be programmed right.
I think if we think of universal machinery which shifts the important
part of production to developing the right software for it and thus
leverages processes similar to Free Software we need to think of a
range of machines which is universal for a certain area of material
operations. I think this follows from the fact that matter is far more
diverse than digital data and unless we invent Star Trek like
machinery which builds things up from atoms we need to envision a
machine park more than a single machine. Well, there are even
developments for atom movers out there, however ;-) .
Mit Freien Grüßen
Stefan
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