Comments on: HOPE 2008: Community Fabrication

By: Mycroft

Mycroft — Mon, 21 Jul 2008 05:17:10 +0000

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.

By: jwb

jwb — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 17:25:16 +0000

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

By: mojo

mojo — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 12:33:48 +0000

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…

By: pascal

pascal — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 01:58:08 +0000

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