This is an amazing device: The RepRap (short for "Replicating Rapid-prototyper"), an open-source printer developed at the University of Bath. It was built using Linux, and all of the project's software and hardware components fall under the GNU General Public License. It's cheap to use, and can even replicate most of its own parts. Most of this article is an interview with the technical lead, plus there are links on the first page to videos and sample parts and objects made with the RepRap.
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Smegzor
17 weeks 4 days 14 hours 44 min ago
These are neat
A member of the local users group is building one of these.
Crazy and neat at the same time :)
motters
17 weeks 3 days 22 hours 28 min ago
Free hardware
I've been following the development of reprap for the last few years. This stuff isn't ready for prime time yet, but there has been steady progress. Once these machines can make most of their own parts that's when the fun will begin, because it will cost someone with an existing machine almost nothing to make a kit for someone else to build the same machine. It's a similar idea to free software, but applied to hardware.
bogdanbiv
17 weeks 2 days 4 hours 28 min ago
Amazing idea
Oh, yeah amazing idea! This is something I hoped for years to appear.
I am no hacker, but I would like to sponsor one to get one of these. I'll see what I can do about it.
Hope they do take into account hardware patents, though.
I wouldn't like it if someone would buy a "self replicating kit" and patent it to end its' copyleft principle.
hoeken
16 weeks 4 days 19 hours 29 min ago
hi
yo, member of the team here.
we dont worry about patents too much. we publish all our work online and we're fairly confident that it will serve as prior art should any issues arise.
if you want to help support the cause, the non-profit RepRap Research Foundation is in its early stages and could really use the support: http://www.rrrf.org
viva free software/hardware!
General Fabb
16 weeks 14 hours 18 min 23 sec ago
For More Info
If you're interested in 3D printing tech, you might want to take a look at our 3D fab blog at http://fabbaloo.com