Sanitation: No, you don’t print sewers, you don’t print holes to shit in. But RepRap can print plumbing fittings, and these cost a lot more than pipe.

Health care: RepRap already prints water filters and simple laboratory equipment. It can print devices to make antiseptic and water purification chemicals from salt. It can print and operate small analytical machines for diagnosing illness and we hope to be able to get it to synthesise pharmaceuticals. It provides a whole new way of open sourcing healthcare.

Electric light: We can print micro wind turbines, and I could probably fabricate a wet rechargable battery from common materials – RepRap’d parts can be redesigned to cope with whatever scrap materials are available. In a few years we’ll probably be able to manage enough chemistry to do solar cells and OLEDs.

You underestimate people in slums. They are creative – they have to be. They improvise, and find new ways to do things. They don’t look at a freebie and go “oh, what a pile of crap” they look at it as a resource and focus on what they can do with it rather than what they can’t. You should try the same thing once in a while.

But repeating this mantra of “revolution” about your tool, you are doing a bad service to this technology. You know it’s not the true.

What can I do with your academic proof-of-concept? Print plastic cups, cloth hangers? People here can buy these things in the streets for cents. And the life of these people just don’t change for that.

Face it: reprap is just a toy. You won’t change the world printing plastic crap. Sorry about that.

So? Let’s be fraking real eh? TANSTAAFL is one unalterable invariant. The related seeming invariant is some human natures.

“When you only have a hammer- everything resembles a nail.” But do we have to be unhackerlike and swallow that hoary old meme unchallenged?

I openly challenge the posters on this thread to a different sort of challenge. Can any of us do better than the RepRap while staying in it’s parameters overall? It’s ironic that the mass of comments on a device arguably called a “Constructor” are tending to be derogatory

Thanks
http://www.iyogi.co.uk

As for the emotionally unbalance posters, with anger management issues, that decided to try to turn this discussion into a, rambling, referendum against socialized medicine, please remind me what that has to do with Reprap or, even, Hack-a-Day in general? Even if many of the people involved with the Reprap project tend to express what you feel is a “Liberal” viewpoint, nothing I’ve ever seen on the Reprap site, or in any of the news pieces on the project, ever references socialized medicine in any way. Perhaps you need to re-asses your obsession with the issue, and willingness to impose your aggression against it in inappropriate forums, and seek professional help do deal with it.

the main audience is really the sort of person who reads hackaday, I’m astounded you people don’t see this as an exciting possible addition to your current set of tools.

Could it be that this person is concentrating on quality, not mechanical utility? Remember the RepRap has to be able to make its own bits, which requires a certain degree of strength in its output and remarkably little actual accuracy. So it stands a chance of working no matter how cack-handed the builder is!

Vik :v)

Fortunately one guy has the right idea..
http://homemade3dprinter.blogspot.com/

from the shipping containers worth of junk that we privileged fat consumers ship off to their lands for disassembly, duh.

printing the parts needed to turn a junk HP plotter into a functioning RepRap: possible. this *is* called ‘hack’-aday, you know…