On the Outside

So obviously as soon as I wrote that, I get this stuck in my head

Which has absolutely nothing to do with what I’m about to write, but… I suspect it might actually be quite a good song in a funny sort of way.

Still, never mind about that. This is about printers

Being a repstrap variant – $1500 and closing…

So.

They year is 1996, email has been invented and the web is just starting to go mainstream. In those days I wore a tie…

… and one day, I had the job of installing a brand new Apple colour-printer. Nobody had ever seen one before. I took it out of its box (it was about 80cm cubed… lifted it up onto a desk, plugged it in… and it didn’t go.

It turns out that simply taking it out of the box without being a certified apple engineer voided the warranty. It had little resevoirs of ink inside it, and if the whole thing tilted, they spilled and fucked up the whole thing. It was a great big opaque box, and I broke it.

So anyway. Assuming (and I think it’s fairly safe to assume) that 3D printers are at a similar stage of evolution as colour printers 15 years ago… I think it’s quite interesting that all the tech is on the outside. There are the expensoid machines of course, and nobody knows about those… but the ones that are really catching people’s imaginations are… transparent.

And I’m not sure that this isn’t entirely down to the vision of the original reprap guy… although in some ways I guess open-source versions of everything are more or less inevitable. It’s interesting to see something that has transparency as one of its core founding principles right from the outset.

Something you really notice when you go from Windows to Ubuntu – how constrained and ugly the windows software universe is. Everything carries a veiled threat (aka a EULA)… there’s money everywhere, cramping and pinching. With linux it feels like your computer is less of a walled garden – and something that belongs out there on the web. The barriers are down. This is where the future is – it just feels better. If we manage to pull off the same thing with hardware it will be way cool. We just need to find a way of fucking off the Finance/Insurance/Real-Estate industries… and we’ll be able to look after ourselves.

Mind you – I bought some of these off the web a couple of days ago…

… to make a little camera dolly. $7.50 a pair… $7.50 NZ… which makes them $2.70 USD each.

It turns out that when you spin them, coloured LEDs light up inside them… so there’s no just these cool rubbery nylon wheels, with bearings, but a little generator circuit and 3 LEDs.

How the fuck do you make that for $2.70?

I mean it’s all very well going on about the potential power of 3D printers and whatnot – but… are these wheels ALL built with slave-labour? Can’t see it. It could just be that a revolution in roboticised manufacturing – at the high-to-middle end, completely eclipses the DIY thing.