A talk at the Sloan School of Management, MIT on RepRap and the democratization of Fabrication Technology and emergence of open hardware communities.
Innovation Lab meeting organized by Professor von Hippel.
33. Open Source Ecology Crowdfunded experiment www.openfarmtech.org Torch table - $1500 (average donation $ 100-150) Workshop building - $4000 Individual donations - such as $5000 commitment to induction furnace. $ 700 monthly from 'true fan' subscriptions. ,
34. Open Source Ecology Committed to developing and sharing designs and techniques. Energy systems -> generators, solar concentrators, DIY biodiesel Housing -> brick press Flexible fabrication -> open source backhoe, RepRap, CNC plasma cutter Permaculture (sustainable farming) -> open source tractor ,
41. User innovation pathways time # of users perceiving need Users starting to innovate here Manufacturers can produce more cheaply here Free sharing or user manufacturing Users in communities can innovate more cheaply here Users and user communities bridge periods of technical and market risk in which manufacturers would not start investing!
48. More info Main project: www.RepRap.org Companies: www.Makerbot.com www.BitsFromBytes.com Other projects: www.makerbeam.com , www.Thingiverse.com Videos: www.youtube.com/erikdb Twitter: http://twitter.com/ErikDeBruijn My Company: www.BudgetDedicated.com
I will jump back and forth between talking about general effects and what I see happening in the RepRap community. I will argue that resources, such as flexible fabrication devices will become fairly common and much more capable. Therefore some important dynamics visible in the RepRap community can be generalized.
I will only go over the technology in short, as much as I like to talk about this. The focus for this talk is on the community, its emergence, dynamics and performance and the peculiar hardware aspect that is thrown in with open source.
I will talk about incentives to innovate and diffusion of the innovations in relation to hardware.
It usually is a blend of art, science or contains things that are just useful to print instead of going to the store.
Modular or integrated?
White: from a Dimension, 1200 SST. Beige: from my RepRap Darwin with home-made microstepping XY-motion and microstepper based extrusion. The Statasys part is more constant across it's surfaces. The Stratasys machine has heavier axes and you can see an dampening oscillation across surfaces where one axis decelerates (just after taking a corner). The corners of the RepRapped object are slightly sharper.
When it's dependent on financial resources, how do we get this money together?
In a nutshell: permaculture is sustainable farming
In a nutshell: permaculture is sustainable farming
If you could make a wish, what would you wish for? I would wish to forever get what I wished. Everyone would agree that having a machine that can make almost anything you can think of... this would be the ultimate gadget. Or perhaps, it will become an indispensable resource just as computers are now! Apple thought so too...
NO, I'm just kidding.
Helping out in very special ways...
User to user assistance Improve documentation Do experimental stuff AND They know what it's like to be on the waiting list.