Reprap users increasing at Moore's Law type pace!`

I was updating a presentation about Reprap the other day and updated some of the numbers on a slide about how many people were involved with reprap. The numbers in brackets are the numbers as at 1st August 2008 and the others are from 15th May 2009.


Main Blog – 14 (12) contributors
Builders Blog – 70 (47) contributors
Places on Google Maps – approx. 120 (90)
User Forums – 700+ (400+) registered users
User Forums – 52 (44) Geographical groups

So, welcome to all the newbies!

Going on the numbers of registered users we're on track to doubling in a year.

I wonder, does anyone have any of these figures for the last 2 or 3 years that could be made into a graph of some description?

Just for comparison I have put my pin in the map, and am responsible for one of the geographical groups creation (as well as one registered user obviously) but I'm not in any of the other of the above figures, and I am 99% finished my Reprap. It's been slow going as I've been at it for nearky 2 years!

Is there a sigma curve die off in store for our machines too ?

And a technicality,
If I create a machine that is substantially engineered and designed personally, is it a reprap machine, or are only Zach's PCB driven machines repraps ?

I believe if you print off custom parts and build an identical machine, then it is a reprap. If you print off custom parts and build a different machine (say a Darwin), then it is a repstrap.

grael Wrote:
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> Is there a sigma curve die off in store for our
> machines too ?
>
> And a technicality,
> If I create a machine that is substantially
> engineered and designed personally, is it a reprap
> machine, or are only Zach's PCB driven machines
> repraps ?

Its simple.
It's a reprap machine if it can print a substantial portion of its own parts. It's a repstrap if it can be used to make a reprap machine.
There's room for plenty of speciation in the Reprap community.

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Hell, there are no rules here - we're trying to accomplish something.

Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.

Thomas A. Edison

I am feeling a bit sick at the moment so I wasted a bit of time creating a spreadsheet with some updated figures (attached)

EDIT: I created the spreadsheet in OpenOffice and saved it as Excel format. For some reason when downloaded it from here to check it out it had #MACRO error messages in it. I just had to edit the cells, move the cursor forward or back and hit enter on each to get it to show. This may have something to do with the Days() function call, maybe Excel doesn't have it?

Because the first sets of numbers were a quick estimate the calculated doubling times will be a bit off but using the figures I collected for 1st August last year and today (21st October 2009) here are the estimated doubling times (in number of days) for the various blogs and forums:

Number of days to double number of users
1237 Main Blog
285 Builders Blog
163 Places on Google Maps
131 User Forums
907 User Forums Geographical groups

The one that I think is most cool is the number of people registered for the user forums - it went from 400 or so in August last year to 700 or so in May to 1349 today. Thats more than a threefold increase in less than 15 months.

Taking the intermediary doubling times that works out at 266 days using the first two figures and 119 using the last two which gives us a hyper-exponential growth curve. The exact numbers are wrong as I didn't get exact figures but they would have been probably within 5-10% of the actual ones.

Now, can we carry this on and have more than 2700 (1349*2=2698) users registered in the user forums by the 1st of March next year (that is 131 days from now)?

I'll try and remember to check back, do a count up and post the results back.

If the 131 day doubling time *is* approximately correct and *does* continue then some interesting milestones can be seen:
Nov 2010 - 10,000 users
May 2013 - 1 million users
And, everyone in the world signed up by the start of 2018!

I think the adoption rate will slow down before then somehow :-)

In case anyone wanted to double check, for the user forum registered users this time I simple went to send a PM and when it comes up with the drop-down list I just count the number of page-downs between the start and the end of the list (near the end I took note of the top name before hitting the button so I could add the exact number of additional entries at the bottom of the list). The drop down list showed me 20 entries with the bottom entry becoming the top in the next page so each page down was effectively 19 entries. In the last surveys I wasn't as careful and just used a page count of 20 and rounded down to the nearest 100 to make up for it.

For whoever is taking care of the user forums (Sebastien?): How easy would it be to add a count of the number of registered users somewhere? For that matter, how well does the current forum software scale? I think we'll probably find out in the next year or two if this trend keeps up!

Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 10/21/2009 02:18AM by reece.arnott.

Oops. Those spreadsheet calculations are totally wrong.

That will teach me for posting while sick!

The new one is attached with new doubling times; 254 days for the user forums (a little over 8 months). Rounding that up to 9 months doubling time gives:

July 2010 - Double the current number.
Jan 2012 - 10,000 users
April 2017 - 1 million users
Everyone in the world by the start of 2027

That seems a little more realistic.

Sorry about that.

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/21/2009 09:47PM by reece.arnott.