btw the image text translates as “Metalab: People, Technology, Magic”, which I think is hilarious.

Posted at 6:58 pm on Jul 19th, 2008 by pascal

I’d settle for an easy way to fab high quality PCBs at home. The etching and drilling by hand method is slow, messy and hard to produce very detailed PCBs with. If only there were an affordable machine to do it, or even just an affordable low-volume manufacturer in the UK. Hong Kong fabs it is I guess…

Posted at 5:33 am on Jul 20th, 2008 by mojo

Knitting machines and cocktail robots are two other fabrication devices that aren’t precisely the same as repraps but do possess similar attributes.

Posted at 10:25 am on Jul 20th, 2008 by jwb

I too have found a lot of inspiration from the currently-existing hobbyist fabricators, but they seem like the wrong direction to go for home rapid prototyping. Why isn’t there a large community project to design a retrofit system for off-the-shelf inkjet printers? Using an Arduino to interpret motor-control signals meant for the pagefeed motor and using that to drive a stepper powerful enough to shift the entire print-arm assembly up and down a flat field should be pretty easy. More work would be needed to convert this flatbed printer to a true rapid prototyper, but the basic idea is there. RepRap, Fab@Home, and Candyfab are all brilliant projects, but the items they produce are all terrible from a user standpoint, with an effective mm^3 resolution, there are very few attractive or complicated objects that can be made that couldn’t be made better at a roughly .127 mm^3 resolution.

Posted at 10:17 pm on Jul 20th, 2008 by Mycroft