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In an exciting development, the Foresight Institute is offering a Kartik M. Gada Humanitarian Innovation Prize for Personal Manufacturing.  It’s actually two prizes, one for $20,00 and one for $80,000 for building a machine for building useful stuff (see previous posting, below).  Cribbed from the website:

There will be two Personal Manufacturing prizes, awarded by a panel of judges. The first ‘interim’ prize of up to $20,000 with an award date of December 31, 2012, and the second ‘grand’ prize of up to $80,000 with an award date of December 31, 2015.

Interim Personal Manufacturing prize

The winner of the PM interim prize will be the inventor who can make a 3-D printer that can demonstrate the following:

• Print at least three different materials, including one that is usefully electrically conductive.
• The ability to print electronic circuit boards.
• Print beds† must be of a material which may be reused with minimal refurbishment for at least 20 print cycles.
• Maintain a total materials and parts cost under $200 and that 90% of the volume of the printer parts be printed. ††
• Demonstrate a build volume of the printer above 300×300x100mm in order to insure that items daily utility can be printed.
• The capacity to print a full set of parts for a complete replica of itself within 10 days unattended save for clearing no more than one printer head jam.
• The ability to print autonomously without a PC attached.
• Uses no more than 60 watts of electrical power.

†Print beds are flat surfaces onto which parts are printed.

††Print beds are not necessarily a permanent part of the printer and are not figured into either the cost or the volume requirements of a printer.

Given the open-source nature of the RepRap community, the winning entry for the interim prize will have its technology published for the RepRap community to use, and the winning entry for the grand prize will also be published for open use.

Grand Personal Manufacturing Prize

After the entries submitted for the Interim prize are available publicly, the open-source dynamic of the RepRap community will proceed from there.

The current generation of RepRap technology takes up to three weeks to print a full set of parts. 90% of this time is consumed in supporting tasks like positioning and reloading the printer, and replacing print plates, etc. Only 10% of the time is used for actual printing. The Grand Prize would seek to make the technology more rapidly scalable by increasing the productivity of the replication process. As a bonus, the Grand Prize may additionally be helpful in recycling material waste (such as plastics) into material suitable for RepRap use. Plastics such as HDPE and Polypropylene, of which millions of tons exist as waste matter, may be suitable candidates, and recycling of such waste material would be viewed favorably by the judging panel.

There are three parameters that will be used to judge the efforts of the teams participating in the competition.

• That the cost of the material used for printing does not exceed $4/kilogram.
• The capacity to print a full set of parts for a complete replica of itself within 7 days, including the time for reloading, and clearing of printer head jams.
• Maintain a total materials and parts cost under $200 and that 90% of the volume of the printer parts be printed.

The committee envisions a variety of technologies which might be deployed to achieve this end including :

• Software to drive and manage banks of RepRap printers
• Hardware and software systems to automatically unload printed parts from RepRap printers
• Hardware and software systems to sort, clean and package or assemble printed parts
• Innovations in plastics recycling, and development of a suitable grinder and extruder

The nature of the competition and the requirements for participants are as follows :

• While teams participating in the competition for the Grand Prize will register at the beginning of the competition, it is not expected that the membership of said teams will necessarily remain static thereafter. Any teams can merge with each other if so desired.
• Participating teams are expected to regularly publish and make available their technology on an ongoing basis. All technology developed by participating teams becomes open source under a BSD license. Therefore, the winning team will have to have published at least some of their innovations more than 12 months before the deadline.

It is expected that participating teams will borrow each others’ better innovations during the development process. The committee reserves the right to apportion the Grand Prize amongst teams should such borrowed technology comprise a major portion of the winning entry.

I can’t tell you how happy I am to know that other smart folks around the world are FOCUSING on this technology.  Things will start to break very seriously, very soon.

This is just awesome in concept and wretched in execution, unless you are seriously well off.  I have been in love with the idea of printing and assembling anything from just the plans and plastic feedstock…but the devil is truly in the details with this technology.

All the pieces seem to be available, here and now, for this bit of science fiction: control electronics have come very far down in price, stepper motors are a bulk purchase item, 3D plotting software is now FREE and 3D scanning technology is likewise declining in cost.  And the people who are interested in putting this together for the masses have gotten very far in their desire to produce not just a machine to make machines, but a machine which can make other machines, and a copy of itself.

The trouble is, most of this technology is amazingly difficult to implement for anyone with even a pretty good handyman’s abilities, and a degree in chemistry, and lots of computer experience. The cost is daunting and the time required to just assemble the beast is nearly unavailable to a family man with teenagers.  It’s enough to make a guy throw in the towel.

Unless he’s me. 

I have been looking into this for some time, and learned a lot. 

· I learned that H-P is going to be selling Stratasys’ 3D printer for $15,000. 

· I learned that the RepRap-based MakerBot is $950 before shipping and just the component electronics (for the cheap do-it-yourselfer like me) is ~$450.

· I learned that many people on the Net discuss making things from these bots and that not as many people report successes as challenges (perversely, this intrigues me). 

· I learned that plastic feedstock for these projects is pricey, and that NOBODY is looking into ways to get it from recycling.  The only plastic I could find a simple method for reusing is Styrofoam, using acetone (that was actually kind of cool.  Look at the video).

RepRap actually makes a bunch of different bots, and possibly some version of their machine could meet my need.  The trouble is, the electronics cost is still crippling, even if the assembling of the platform is pretty easy (see the McWire, below).

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Nice, huh?  I find the juxtaposition of the futuristic Lucite platform against the Luddite plumber’s pipe support almost poetic.  Unfortunately, this still has the same costs of electronic control as the latest incarnation, the Mendel (Darwin was the next step after McWire but is already old hat.  They aren’t even working on it anymore):

And let’s not even talk about the difficulty of extruding the plastic; lots of trial and error seems to be called for.  I suppose that’s what a professional system like Stratasys’ draws down the big bucks for; they presumably have taken care of that.  I bet they still charge through the nose for feedstock, though.

So, what is left for me to work on?  I am rather seriously considering making a Mendel, ordering the assembled electronics to make sure I don’t solder something wrong and paying whatever they ask for it.  I would (probably) make one and start experimenting with different deposition heads for it, trying each of the traditional ones in turn (light plastic, heavy plastic, frosting) and then truly experimental ones like a CO2 laser for cutting plywood (must be fun to make a gas laser, I should look into that) or sintering ceramic-metal mixes.  Think of the possibilities:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Then there’s 3D scanning of the objects to copy (is this even legal?  Can I make a copy of the back of my phone if I lose it?  Could I sell it if I did?).  The imported images need serious cleanup and work of other kinds.  Will this technology ever be practical for hobbyists?  Probably not yet, like the 3D printers themselves.  And I haven’t forgotten the problems with feedstock.  Nobody is even looking into that.  Still.

Cory Doctorow has published a book called Makers which kind of follows this thought to its logical conclusion, wherein people are bootlegging designs at home a lot, and the copyright police come down on them pretty heavily, just like the half-million dollar award to the RIAA over some stupid kid who shared thirty songs (judge just reduced it to a mere $60,000. Never let it be said that justice was disproportionately on the side of the very rich).  Sadly, this tech still looks like science fiction to me.

It doesn’t mean I won’t give it a try.