The Lego Reprap Convergeance

Recently, Forrest Higgs over on the Clanking Replicator Blog was bewailing/bemoaning the fact that the exponential rise in the number of reprappers in the world is not due to them going forth and multiplying, but because they’ve essentially become more-or-less out-of-the-box, consumer items composed entirely of vitamin parts.

And obviously he’s quite right… but then that will happen, because the entire planet and the entire internet are together operating as one giant reprap machine… and if the parts can be more easily sourced from outside the experimental confines of a single machine, then chances are they will be. Everything is memetics… and whatever allows the virus to spread fastest will win. For a time.

So here’s what I think he/they/we should do:

Use repraps to make lego.

Ok, obviously you can’t do that, because the engineering tolerances for lego are about .0001 of a mm, but lego has kindof become a defacto rapid-prototyping tool in its own right. I’ve mentioned it often enough on this blog – everything from art to rubiks cube robots… and there’s a blog post over here, entitled 2008: The Year Lego Took Over the Internet – The Super Meme… which, in most humble of opinions doesn’t really do it justice – it’s not a super-meme, it’s simply one of the oldest and best memospheres that operates on the physical plane. Meccano was another one, but that appears for the moment to be somewhat off-radar.

One of the troubles I have with Reprap at the moment, is that it doesn’t seem to be much good for making anything other than reprap machines. I think the direction it needs to go in is to be able to create the building blocks for ANY sort of machine… similar to what Lego Mindstorms does… in fact combined with Arduinos, I think Reprap should be a direct competitor (or maybe symbiote) to lego mindstorms.

I know that the theory is that it can make anything… including itself (a rapid prototyper) but maybe it should make rapid prototypers that really are rapid… and for that, you kindof need a reduced-instruction-set style set of building blocks that massively lower the learning curve for participation.

So that’s my 2c.

And as a total non sequitur, here’s a video of another modular constructor thing made out of magnets.

or

and something else altogether.