Anyone seen Fab@home before?

Is this old news?

[fabathome.org]

and current projects made from it
[fabathome.org]

It looks like another cartesian coordinate bot, but this one works with a plunger based system. Using soft materials that can cure like epoxy... or food materials like frosting, soft cheese, jam, and chocolate.

Definately lower resolution than reprap, and no goal of self replication... but looks like a good place to start to repstrap.

Fab@Home is doing some good basic work in materials, like their 'making a mold/interior void and filling it with epoxy'. I think they've done a good job of engaging academics. My one critique would "Tisk. Not self-replicating!", but there's a lot of neat stuff in the gallery.

They did a good job in picking off=the=shelf components that just work, like stepper motor controllers, etc.

I'd say the two projects are dimly aware of each other, but tend not to swap DNA much.

Eventually, it will be like two puddles merging in a rainfall, I imagine. But by that point, journalists will probably call everything 'Makerbots' maybe.

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As a derail:

RepRap does a good job of not staying on top of academic-type research in 3D printing, e.g.
[emeraldinsight.com]

[scholar.google.ca]

Should we start a journal club forum thread? Or less formally, anyone see some good articles we should talk about?

As a response to the last comment:'RepRap does a good job of not staying on top of academic-type research in 3D printing' I (slightly) disagree.

I'm trying to keep on top of my small sub-specialty and find that the majority of interesting projects/papers that I find, I either find out about from the Reprap forums, or I hear about them on the forums a week or two after I see them somewhere else.

Normally the links are to the popular press rehash which makes it more understandable for the non-specialist. I would expect that if there were no such rehash it wouldn't appear in the forums for the general readership but that doesn't mean the (half dozen?) academics we have beavering away in the background miss it, it just means that it is another piece of dense academic prose.

On that subject, the newly minted Dr Ed Sells PhD thesis is my inspiration for how I want to write a *readable* thesis.