2009 Replicating Style
Saturday, January 02, 2010
You've probably all heard about RepRap project, 2009 was an explosive year for replication technologies: a lot mre people participated to share their idea in open-source projects, and the knowledge
October 2008: Thingiverse
It probably had a lot of publicity with Bre talk at the 25C3 the next month, and it has matured a lot during 2009. I've rediscored it this morning, watch another Bre talk at the 26C3, and it's a fantatic place, similar to instructables.com, where you've got an inventory system, and depending of the tools you've got in this inventory, you can replicate various types of projects.
It's a great place where to share your objects, a kind of libary of things.
December 2008: 25C3 - Rapid Prototype Your Life
A starting point for a lot of hackers to meetup and share information about how to build a RepRap. I'm not sure I remember well the conference, but it surely help to consider the various projects that were available at the time.
March 2009: MakerBot Industries
Zach has been working for years on the RepRap project. He created the RepRap Research Fundation in April 2007, it was for a moment the only place where to buy the parts to build your RepRap. This year, they began to sell the complete kit to build your own printer: using the laser cutter they've got at the NYC Resistor, and using Zach extreme-knowledge on the electronic part, they were able to build up a small and inexpensive printer, the CupCake.
March 2009: RepRap Source
First RepRap shop for electronic parts to open in Europe, we can thanks its creator to join bitsfrombytes effort to help to replicate even more RepRap printing machines:
June 2009: Metalab Makerbot Zoo
Metalab might be the biggest content inventors in replication community, and it's a great place to follow on reprap.soup.io with the last details about how to improve your own printer, and what can be done with it. They bought 2 Cupcake CNC last June:
June 2009: HSF at /tmp/lab
A workshop occured during last HackerSpace Festival at the /tmp/lab in Paris, and Alexandre Korber proposed a /tmp/usine workshop, to replicate the first repstrap he had built just a week before.
After this weekend, 2 new hackerspaces in France, Tetalab and La Suite Logique, had the basic harware to complete a first print.
August 2009: Hacking At Random - (Un)limited Design Contest
A small building was used during the HAR to host a full size fablab: laser cutters, professional printing machines, a 3D laser scanner, a few RepRaps, and all you need to build an object from scratch.
Plus others tents with camping-style replication laboratories:
A conference took place with Adrian Bowyer, Neil Gershenfeld and Ronen Kadushin to present a contest that took place during the festival, allowing people to use all these tools to create something for this contest.
November 2009: NASA Electron beam freeform fabrication (EBF³)
This is the deluxe-version of any prototyping version ever seen: "produce unitized structures from high reflectance aerospace alloys such as aluminium and titanium". It stays for aerospace industry, but the process seems so well advanced that it could be from a science-fiction story.
Unfortunatly, by the size of the hardware, there'll be few years before it becomes an everyone-dream.
December 2009: Kinko's for Kidneys: 3D Printing Your Own Body Parts
Another science-fiction story, dream by the medical engineers.
Even if the is ready-made for Hollywood, the project behind seems serious enough to ask ourselves a lot of questions: printing organs? extending human body with manufactured material?
Here it goes, I hope it'll be a successful experiment for few centimeters objects, then we'll have another interesting body-hack community.
December 2009: 26C3 - Peanut Butter and Plastic: Industrial Revolution
Another year, another great talk of what could be done in the replication process, and what could be the next step by following the open-source community that helped build all that.
Alex Girard