Skip to main content

RepRap

Viktor Olliver is telling us about his Replicating Rapid Prototyper, a discussion which involves weapons, drug paraphernalia & kittens.

Well... he is from KiwiLand, where they have odd things like Kia, Moa, & so on.

This includes making its own parts, so of course a RepRap can build more RepRaps... which presents a problem for competitors, because the more of them you have, the more of them you can have.

Oh, yes, & there are aspects to this little gadget like the ability to help in making the drugs to which the paraphernalia apply: making them for your personal use does not involve paying any royalties or the like. Or in other words, drugs you make for yourself are essentially free. The... implications... are kind of interesting.

It took about 18 months to develop from scratch to the point where it was able to self-make parts, & 24 months to ramp up to building an extruder which could extrude another extruder, so at the current rate of improvement, & noting that the basic device is at the point where others have cloned it, the concept is rapidly approaching critical mass.

If you have seen what steady, significant leaplets & boundlings people are already making with something as high-tech as an OLPC, the future of the less subtle, less delicate RepRap is going to be interesting even in a philosophical sense.

<digression>

On a completely unrelated topic, if you’ve been trying to ring me today, I stuck the ’phone on its charger when I woke up this morning... & it’s still there.

</digression>

Comments

Anonymous said…
The moa is very hard to spot in NZ, you need to search in out-of-the-way places. It's similar to finding the Tasmanian tiger. I lived there for years and never saw one.

The other could be kea, a parrot, not kia as in kia ora?
31 January, 2008 18:04
Leon RJ Brooks said…
Yah, kea. Smallish, black parrot with a devastating bite. Likes consuming door-seals or the like from cars.

Not as much fun as a galah.
01 February, 2008 22:12
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

An Open and Shut response to Darl McBride

Hi, Darl. I see you’re being dishonest again . It’d be really nice if you could shoot straight for a change, but I think Kerry’s Dad will be selling snowplows in Hell first. Three years ago, when I first joined The SCO Group, we focused the company on the area that was most profitable and provided the most benefit to customers, investors, resellers, developers and employees: UNIX No, you focused the company on suing people, which was most profitable to lawyers and provided some golden parachutes for your buddies. People thought we were crazy. They were right. But since SCO owns the UNIX operating system The SCO Group does not own UNIX® in any sense of the word. The Open Group owns the UNIX trademark, definition and other rights , The SCO Group does not. The SCO Group doesn’t even own the UnixWare® or OpenServer® code, the rights to those are held by Novell and TSG use them only by permission and under certain conditions — which they have violate...
5 comments
Read more

5x7 text dot-matrix in five minutes...

This is a fairly primitive toy I threw together today for a specific purpose, published in case it’s any use to others... feed it a list of words as command arguments, which it will then display as a 5x7 ASCII dotmatrix with ‘#’ as a dot & ‘_’ as a blank. /* * display text using a 5x7 bitmap font in ASCII letters */ static unsigned char font [] [5] = { { 0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00,0x00 }, // 0x20 32 { 0x00,0x00,0x6f,0x00,0x00 }, // ! 0x21 33 { 0x00,0x07,0x00,0x07,0x00 }, // " 0x22 34 { 0x14,0x7f,0x14,0x7f,0x14 }, // # 0x23 35 { 0x00,0x07,0x04,0x1e,0x00 }, // $ 0x24 36 { 0x23,0x13,0x08,0x64,0x62 }, // % 0x25 37 { 0x36,0x49,0x56,0x20,0x50 }, // & 0x26 38 { 0x00,0x00,0x07,0x00,0x00 }, // ' 0x27 39 { 0x00,0x1c,0x22,0x41,0x00 }, // ( 0x28 40 { 0x00,0x41,0x22,0x1c,0x00 }, // ) 0x29 41 { 0x14,0x08,0x3e,0x08,0x14 }, // * 0x2a 42 { 0x08,0x08,0x3e,0x08,0x08 }, ...
5 comments
Read more

Citizens Augmenting Government Waste

So here we have Microsoft-funded “ Citizens Against Government Waste ” (CAGW) heavily criticising Massachusetts’s switch to an internationally accepted and open document standard (not open source, open standard — but I seem to remember a large monopolist who frequently confuses the two when it suits them). I remember CAGW, they were the organisation who had dead people writing in to support Microsoft in court a few years ago — thanks to sbergman27 for the link — is this “the dead hand of CAGW” at work again? Let’s follow the money and find out. Who stands to lose the most money and control if Massachusetts switches to an unencumbered document format? Big surprise, it’s CAGW sponsor Microsoft, through their dominant MS-Office suite. Why did CAGW list Microsoft’s suite last, after two other much-less-dominant examples which are waning anyway? If you’re inclined to wallow in additional irony, consider that at leas...
Post a Comment
Read more