RepRap: Blog

If you're planning on going to the Bay Area Maker Faire with RepRap, please check in if
you have not already done so.

Right now it looks as though we'll have
14-16 people and 5- 6 machines.

-Sebastien

Labels: Maker Faire

Many people (including me) are interested in the legal implications of the widespread take-up of home reprapping.

Now, IANAL, but I have a chum, Simon Bradshaw, who is. He, Patrick Haufe and I have written a paper on home 3D printing and the law. The paper is based on Simon's LLM dissertation. It has just been published by the journal ScriptEd.

You can read it here.

Adrian will be giving a talk to the British Computer Society on RepRap in Cardiff on 13 May. It's free for anyone to attend. Get details here.

Your correspondent on holiday in Ironbridge in Shropshire. This is where Abraham Darby first managed to smelt iron with coke (rather than charcoal), an invention that has as much claim as any to have started the Industrial Revolution.

Though, in reality, that revolution started more or less simultaneously in many places in England, you really get a sense of the historical significance of it here. In particular you can see how, in what is now a sleepy small town, the late eighteenth century must have felt just like Silicon Valley did in the 1980s.

In the reconstructed village set sixty years or so later at Blists Hill just up the road, they have a number of working stationary steam engines - my third favourite machines after tall ships and (of course) RepRap.

Definitely worth a visit.

Labels: industrial revolution

We've just had a request from the Fab@Home people to blog the fact that they have redone their website and are launching their version 2. Happy to - details are here.

Labels: Fab at home

Acting on a suggestion from Vik, I have found that PLA can be extruded onto copper clad board and, if it is hot enough, it sticks very well. I have to flex the board to remove it. 55°C is too cold but 130°C works well. I haven't tried anything in between yet.

Assuming PLA will resist PCB etchant, this could be a way of making PCB's without a laser printer, albeit quite low resolution. With 0.3mm filament squashed to 0.24mm a single line would be 0.36mm wide, which is 14 thou.

It also seems like a good bed material for making PLA objects on.



More details here: hydraraptor.blogspot.com/2010/04/cu-pla

Labels: copper, heated bed, pcb, pla

Hello all!

A number of people have started to help out with the RepRap wiki.

Many do so just by keeping an eye on: Recent Changes
and then just chipping in and
fixing stuff.

I believe the wiki may have just gone critical a few days ago and we've only now started to notice.

We also have a pretty healthy and, happily, largely self-moderating forum here: http://forums.reprap.org/

And we are thinking of hosting an efficient and ethical marketplace. http://reprap.org/wiki/Tender although it may be more trouble than it is worth.

We currently have an highly inefficient, but satisfyingly ethical marketplace in the form of our For Sale Forums.

So, if you you are interested in helping out RepRap, please contribute in the way you see best, and if you are interested in becoming a RepRap forum administrator, I think that is great, but please consult this helpful Training Simulator (More Information)

Also, please note, a number of you are choosing to make RepRap a lifestyle choice by selling RepRaps and RepRap parts, and are thinking of going "pro". We think this is wonderful, and indeed one of the points of the RepRap project, but please note that you're participating in a dynamic and evolving marketplace with a number of traps for the unwary. (Further Reading).

Please don't forget: we're a Wiki!

You are welcome to log in and click "edit" whenever you see a typo. We encourage you to create a new page when you see something 'missing', or just because it is fun!