“3D printing,” “digital fabrication,” “person fabrication,” “Napster fabing:” Call it what you want, but the idea of creating a cheap and easy-to-use system for the “desktop” manufacturing of three dimensional objects, has been a hot R&D area in the last few years. This technology has taken another step forward with the recent announcement of the “Self-Replicating Rapid Prototyper,” or “RepRap,” a 3D fabricator that not only prints in plastics, but can also print electrical circuits into the structural material.
The brainchild of Dr. Adrian Bowyer, a senior lecturer in mechanical engineering at the University of Bath in the UK, the continued development of RepRap will be made open source, with the design details available online. Bowyer sees a world in the near future where such desktop fabs could sell for a few hundred bucks and could even have a recycling feature so that when something broke, you would just feed it back into the machine and fab a new one. Cool!
[Thanks, Alberto!]