$50 machine to help end poverty

I'm working on a machine that once it is in high production it'll sell for about $50 I think. At first we'll probably sell them for $100 to $200 though and lower the price over time, as we can.

My objective is to bring tools to the poor, to help eliminate poverty. This is only part of a much greater plan to virtually eliminate poverty in the world.

The machine will be open source, but it'll always be cheaper to buy them than make your own, and people are lazy, they'd rather buy one. This means we have the potential to make money on this.

It will use servo motors, which are much cheaper, higher accuracy and much lower power consumption than stepper motors. Low power consumption means the parts produced with be much cheaper, since electricity is a major expense in plastic parts. That is especially important in very poor countries.

I'm in the process of starting an open source company. It will eventually produce income and pay for labor, but first we need to produce income.

If you want people to be able to get machines made for them by their friends, it is first necessary for them to have friends who have such machines. So a $50 3D printer would get the idea out there extremely fast.

This project can take many years off of the time needed to get these machines to the whole world.

Tony

Hi Tony,

I also believe that open-source engineering has a great potential to help developing countries. Have you looked into the multimachine? (Definitely a different direction than you're talking about, but an interesting project with a similar goal).
[opensourcemachine.org]

Aside from servos, how are you planning to make your design cheaper than the Reprap? Also, don't servos have limited travel?

Jacob

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/09/2009 06:11AM by jbayless.

A 3D printer that sells for less than most inkjet printers would be a MAJOR breakthrough in ending poverty. $50 is about how much the raw ABS to print out a Darwin costs! Where can I read more about this project? I have a small CNC mill, lathe, wire welder and other tools that might help.

Cool, how far away from production is it and where do you get the filament(ink)?

Opps, a little misunderstanding about the servos. When I say "servo", I mean closed loop electronics with DC motors and accurate position sensing circuitry. Not those "servos" they use for remote control vehicles. And, yes, I've seen the multimachine, thanks. The motors in this case are in the $1 to $3 price range.

I've got a molder friend who's willing to invest the tooling needed, which is probably around $50,000 or so worth of tooling. He'll then sell us molded plastic parts. That takes most of the cost out.

That and creative thinking and good design.

I imagine it'll take about 6 months to get it into production, less if I get some help with it.

For now, it'll use the same sort of plastic extrusion as the RepRap. Other people are working on that stuff.

Tony

If you can hook it up to the $10 computer, then you'll have something.

It'll have a computer built in. No keyboard or display, but it could still be used by people who don't have a computer of their own, if they have access to a computer somewhere. That is, if it gets programmed to work that way, which I imagine it probably will eventually. It'll have USB, so we should be able to program it to access a flash drive or a memory card. Put a G-code program on it, and it'd be able to read it and run the program, if programmed to do so.

There'll also be the possibility of expansion. Plugging in a display and keyboard. Also, the potential to hook it up to the Internet. That I'd like to see too. Then, a person could access a publicly available machine via Internet.

If I could find some super cheap and simple circuit to allow it to hook up to a TV, I'd like to include that. Then all it'd need is programming to allow it to use a USB keyboard, and it'd be a usable computer.

As for hooking it up to a $10 computer, the Indian government is working on a $10 computer. I'm sure that'd be able to hook up to it.

Tony

Oh another idea tony?
what about your "faster change"... quit with it yet?
Did you finished the internet controlable machine? I'd love to see that working.

'sid

It's sort of a sub project of the bigger project. Just want to get something out there quicker. A lot of the electronics and programming will be the same. This project will also be open source, and it'll have a USB port, so anyone who wants to can make a program to allow it to be controlled via Internet as well.

Some people think control via Internet won't work, 'cause of the delay, but the delay doesn't matter much if you operate it with G-codes. You simply put a probe on it which touches the work piece to pick up location, run a program which touches off on all 4 sides and the top, and then you have location in memory. You do not need to be in the same country in order to do that. We don't control these machines with a joystick, we control them with G-codes.

The main reason for the change, is manufacturing cost is within reach. Once the robotic arm is complete, sales from it will likely produce enough income to pay for the manufacturing cost of the other.

For those who haven't heard of the other project, it'll have positioning resolution of about 0.0001 inches. It'll be rigid enough (in theory) to do accurate milling in steel with small cutters, like 1/8 inch and below end mills, and 5/8 fly cutter which I'm hoping will be able to cut 3 inch deep straight walls (not sure if it can handle the amount of stress that'll put on it, but I'll try to design it so it can). That pretty much allows it to produce just about anything. More than you can imagine.

Here's how the evolution of my thinking went. It started with the machine that can cut steel. It always bothered me that I had no good manufacturing plan or funds. So then it changed to a computer/electronics lab (which would end up being the main computer for the other project). That also bothered me that I lack the funds to produce it, 'cause things like LCD displays cost money. Finally, it I came up with the robotic arm idea, which my friend is willing to manufacture the plastic parts, and the rest is not expensive, and we can produce initially in small quantities without to much difficulty.

Tony

What type of steel? High carbon or low carbon steel?

Should be able to cut even hardened tool steel, but we won't know for sure till it is made. Hard steel cuts pretty easy if you got sharp cutters. To keep the cutters sharp, you need speed.

I once cut hard steel with a boring bar that was .025 diameter and about .250 long, and it cut without any deflection. There can't be hardly any cutting force on a cutter like that.

People think carbide cutters need high spindle RPM to cut. That isn't true. It may help a little, but the most important factor is chip load. The amount you move the cutter per cut, or on a lathe per revolution. The thickness of the chip at the point of the cut. If you can't move the machine fast enough to get the right amount of chip load, you have to slow the spindle RPM down.

Other than that, if the machine isn't rigid enough you use less depth of cut per pass. So it should be able to cut it, it is just a question of how fast. Since it is a CNC, how much time it takes isn't real important, as long as the cost of cutters isn't to high.

So, we'll just have to see when it is done. I think it should cut fine though, even in hardened tool steel.

Tony

Um... as I know from personal experience, end mills aren't exactly cheap and milling steel with them reduces their service life to inches of cut before they go dull on you.

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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

Even high speed steel cutters last more than a few inches. You must be doing something wrong if you only get a few inches.

Carbide cutters typically last about a half an hour or so, depending on all sorts of factors. When cutting hardened tool steel, a good grade of carbide will last a long time and a bad grade will last only a few minutes.

As for price, 1/8 inch diameter and smaller carbide cutters are quite cheap, maybe a few bucks. There's also split blanks, which you sharpen over and over again.

No matter what, cutting steel will cost a little money. That doesn't mean we don't cut steel. Sometimes you just got to do it. We need a machine that is versatile, able to do pretty much anything we might want to do.

Tony

Ant Wrote:
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> Even high speed steel cutters last more than a few
> inches. You must be doing something wrong if you
> only get a few inches.
>
My use of "few" was pejorative. Give the people an idea of how many cubic inches of steel you typically are able to mill away before your 1/8th inch end mill is finished, hey? :-)

Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/13/2009 01:30PM by Forrest Higgs.

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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

You use a fly cutter for taking off cubic inches of material. I mentioned a 5/8 inch fly cutter can cut a straight wall down about 3 inches. You just cut maybe 0.050 deep per pass, and keep stepping downward. When the cutter gets dull, you resharpen it and keep going.

End mills are for finishing, creating complex 3D shapes and stuff.

Tony

LOL! Isn't dipping and diving fun!

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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

that's a tall order trying to solve poverty...maybe try to solve laziness first.

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Are you saying people are poor because they are lazy?

The problem with that theory, is whole countries are poor. There are a lot of hard workers in those countries. In fact, often survival in poor countries is pretty difficult and requires a lot of hard work.

Another problem with that theory, is that Poverty goes from generation to generation, almost 100 % of the time. Laziness on the other hand is not even remotely genetic.

Some people see that a few people get rich by hard work, and they make the assumption that hard work makes people rich and laziness makes people poor. They seem to not see all the people who work extremely hard and are very poor. They are simply not looking at the whole picture.

I heard a saying on Hart to Hart, which pretty much sums it up. It goes something like "It's impossible to turn $5 into a million dollars, but turning a million dollars into five million dollars is inevitable."

In other words, if you don't have money, you can't make money. It is really that simple.

We can change that equation by making the things which ordinarily require money available to the poor. If the poor have high tech tools, they can make money.

That's only a small part of the solution though. No point explaining more, 'cause its just to much information.

Tony

Um... instead of "lazy" why don't we just say that many, many people are more interested in working hard at things that don't earn them a financial reward, like Reprap for instance.

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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

We can easily make a profit selling them at $50 each in high quantity. Lowering the price increases the quantity of sales, which often means more profit. I would expect to make a lot more money at $50 selling price than at $200. Not that money is what interests me, money is only a means to accomplish my plans.

As to how this helps end poverty... Imagine a poor person who comes up with an idea for a new invention. That person has no money to produce the invention and no tools to make it. Now imagine how much better off that person will be if he or she has a 3D printer.

This machine will also be capable as an industrial robot, which means it can do pick and place, simple assembly, packing, and whatever else a person can think up for it to do.

The next machine we'll make will also be super cheap, and will be capable of making things in production. You'll be able to mass produce things in your apartment.

In fact, in the next few years poor people be able to do just about anything and money will no longer be needed to produce products and sell them. It may be more difficult to sell things, since people can produce them at home, but that's even better.

Tony

Ant Wrote:
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>
> As to how this helps end poverty... Imagine a poor
> person who comes up with an idea for a new
> invention. That person has no money to produce the
> invention and no tools to make it. Now imagine how
> much better off that person will be if he or she
> has a 3D printer.
>
Probably the more relevant thought experiment entails imagining how many people of any sort, rich or poor, come up with an invention. Without a doubt an affordable, personal 3D printer will greatly aid them into developing their idea into something that they can either use or show others. What percentage of the population actually has such ideas?

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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

Widen the scope to include ideas that are just ways of improving things, not necessary making money. Maybe saving money or saving time. If you do that, I'd say 100% of the people. 'Course, not that many people would have the computer skills to use the thing.

Even so, if there's a person making money near you, it often benefits you.

Here's how it works. When people buy things from other countries, money leaves the country. As money leaves the country, the wages go down, and continue to go down until enough people leave the country to go to work in other countries to bring enough money back into the country to compensate for all the money that left the country from people buying things from other countries.

Get a few people in those countries to create new product ideas and start selling those products to other countries, and money will flow into those countries and reduce the need for people to go to work in other countries. That brings up the wages in that country.

Tony

Rather than "lazy", how about "undiciplined"?

You'll notice that most of the "poor" countries are not the ones in which people are unwilling to work hard, but are the ones who work hard in the wrong areas. Being a good farmer won't help much if you allow politicians to be rampantly corrupt, if you ban contraceptives for religious/cultural reasons, and if you fail to create and enforce sensible quality control laws.

Look at China (and I admit that I have a "thing" about China). Money is pouring into the country, something like two billion dollars a week, and their economy is growing, even during the recession. However, living conditions for a large part of the country are appalling, particularly for the poorer people from the Western half of the country. Why? Because politicians are usually not held accountable for corruption, companies are not responsible for quality & safety standards, and the law does not apply evenly to all ethnic groups.

A lot of people look at America now and say "It's easy to call other countries 'lazy' since you're currently on top," but all you need to do is compare America now to America 100 years ago to see what we have done in just a few generations. I'm curious what Mexico, China, Peru, Afganistan, and India will be like by the time I die. I'll be very surprised if they're very different from their current conditions.

Joe

You can easily carry that through to the US. Ten years ago about half the students in computer science were women. Now, virtually no women are studying computer science. They pretty much migrated into law from CS.

Ask yourself, do lawyers do anything productive or do they just get in everybody's way on behalf of people with money to hire them?

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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

A friend of mine told me that a long time ago when people had a problem, they'd fix it themselves. If there was a fire, they'd all grab buckets and put it out.

Now if there's a problem, we blame someone else and expect someone else to fix it. Now if there's a fire, people call the fire department. If something is wrong with the economy, blame the President and the politicians.

We need to go back to doing things ourselves. That's another cool thing about this project. If everyone has a 3D printer, that'll help encourage people to do things themselves.

Tony

Hi All
Very new to this, being an engineer myself, and living in Cape Town, South Africa I am in the process of either building the RepRap or Mendell, using striped components from Ink Jet Printers as these are litteraly dumped. As the African poorer communities could do with this type of technology to build objects, I believe that keeping the cost down is key to the projects success.

Ant Wrote:
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> A friend of mine told me that a long time ago when
> people had a problem, they'd fix it themselves. If
> there was a fire, they'd all grab buckets and put
> it out.
>
> Now if there's a problem, we blame someone else
> and expect someone else to fix it. Now if there's
> a fire, people call the fire department. If
> something is wrong with the economy, blame the
> President and the politicians.
>
> We need to go back to doing things ourselves.
> That's another cool thing about this project. If
> everyone has a 3D printer, that'll help encourage
> people to do things themselves.
>
> Tony

Well, I admire your sentiment... but could you have given some worse examples?

Sorry.... I really do think that you are trying to make a good point. But I can't overstate how much calling collective fire protection bad is wrong, just... wrong.

Theres nothing wrong with wanting other people to fix things... This forum is all about asking other people to help you fix your problems.

I have a question. Are you going to do all the development "in house" or do you have a website where you are developing this stuff?

I'm interested in the robotic arm idea because I have a similar goal and the pick-and-place stuff is prime.

I think someone needs to build a website that has better tools for these sorts of projects because its not easy to collaborate and make contributions at the moment talking over a forum. I'm also not a fan of wikis as the sole tool for project management. If no one else has one, I'll give a crack at it here in another two weeks.

I'm pretty much doing it myself, at the moment. I expect to finish the PC board today I wouldn't mind help, but it'd have to be more than casual interest, and the goals have to be compatible.

For example, someone who wants to make a 3D printer for themselves is of no use to me, 'cause I spend thousands of hours minimizing the cost. I pinch every penny, 'cause the poor don't have money to burn. Also, if I can spend a few cents less, I can put those few cents into developing CAD/CAM software or something.

I could probably get an investor, but an investor would also suck money out of the project. On the other hand, if I wait till the project is on the market and proving itself, that it works and it sells, then it is very low risk. At that point I could seek investors and they'd not get so much money from their investing.

Speaking of websites, I got some ideas on how to make one. Lots of ideas. Much of which would require special software though, but it might be possible to get some functionality with existing software and higher maintenance.

I picture a site which has not only projects, but also allows people to invest in projects and get paid for their investments. It would also pay people for time investment, in various ways. That may not interest some people, but the poor need ways to produce income. 3D printers are especially nice for making prototypes, so just think of all those extremely poor inventors out there, and all the amazing stuff they could do if they had the resources and the knowledge.

People use the excuse that the poor are poor, 'cause they don't want to work. Yet, if they do want to work, they'll need tools and software, most of which cost many thousands of dollars. They say "get a job", but what if there are no jobs?

Why is it that a person needs to go out and get a job? Why not allow them to work for themselves? It is almost impossible at the moment in poor countries, but we can change that. We can make it possible for them to do that.

Take Electronics CAD software for example. It is fairly simple software. In fact, I've seen some pretty nice some pretty nice Electronics CAD software many years ago that worked on 8 bit processor operating at 8 Mhz, and it almost seems nicer than the CAD software they have today. There's no reason we can't make really nice freeware Electronics CAD software, that is as good or better than the stuff that costs thousands of dollars.

There's what, 8 billion people in the world? Of that, maybe 2 billion are mildly productive. That leaves a workforce of about 6 billion people which could be harnessed to solve all these problems.

We just need to develop a few things to allow us to harness that workforce. Like a super cheap computer, for example. We could easily produce a computer for $10 that could be used for work. I've heard the Indian Government is working on one for $10.

Tony

I like where you're going with this, and look forward to seeing working prototypes, diagrams etc.

Do you have a site where you're aggregating your work? The servos you're proposing in particular intrigue me.

A suggestion if I may: a machine designed for the other six billion should use the computer they're most likely to have access to. Include an RCA stereo jack, and make the GCode programmable through mp3 encoding.

People would be able to download a part as a ringtone and play it into the machine, which would then print or mill as required.