there's also a slab of lab-grown rat brain in a petri dish, that has been taught to fly an f22 flight simulator... - what rights do you give to a lab-grown animal brain in a homing missile? my other thought on the printing of organs, is that with the same technology you could also print a steak... morality-free synthetic meat... yumby deadgenome - Tissue Engineering
West coast of Scotland till I finish helping my mum move house, then back to Bristolby deadgenome - United Kingdom RepRap User Group
So, when can I get my third arm to help improve my ski-boxing...by deadgenome - Tissue Engineering
Patents are only to do with commercial exploitation AFAIK, so it is completely legal to make any patented item yourself for your own use. You can even disseminate such items as long as you do not sell them. The interesting thing with a RepRap is that you could even go as far as making print files for patented items so that people with a RepRap (or any other similar technology) can print these iby deadgenome - General
After looking about a bit more, although I can find a few people, including an opencores developer who think there should be special licences for hardware, the only people who I can find who have gone out of their way to actually create one and use it is TAPR.. Their reasoning seems to be that they think that extra clauses are required to deal with patent issues. Most people seem to think thatby deadgenome - General
For total over-engineering, why not go the whole hog and build on multiple laser scanners that are permanently on the toolhead and that can scan objects within the print area and also keep an eye on the position of the toolhead and the table at all times. This is hardly elegant in engineering terms but would be a fantastic addition for the paranoid and would have the added feature of making yourby deadgenome - General
you could also have only one load/unload home for heads, but also have a belt with different heads on it, so the belt presents the reprap with either a new head, or an empty space on the belt on which to unload the current head, this woud mean that it would be relatively simple to have 'n' heads, rather than changing the reprap design too much every time you want to increase the number of heads.by deadgenome - Plastic Extruder Working Group
hmmm... I recognise FTDI, they are Future Technology Devices International & I think they are based in Scotland... I got given one of their DLP-2232M-G modules a while back by a mate of mine, tho I've never got the damn thing to even detect when I plug it in... unless I've been doing something really stupid, or there's some wiring that's needed to get the usb power to the right place on the tby deadgenome - RepLab Working Group
I don't have enough legal knowledge to even start to answer this question myself, however it has come to my attention that some open source hardware projects do not consider the GPL to provide enough protection when it comes to open sourcing physical objects. The main alternative I have been able to find is the Tucson Amateur Packet Radio Open Hardware Licence, although I am sure that there mustby deadgenome - General
Been thinking about The Guy's electrospinning printer idea & have been wondering if using continuous inkjet technology ( apparently patented in 1867 by Lord Kelvin, according to Wikipedia anyway - ) in the same way might work. So instead of firing a constant stream of liquid, you are firing loads of individual drops at a very high rate towards a pretty much infinite range of points along a lby deadgenome - General
Someone who went to my uni was developing the idea of printing circuits onto paper with ink loaded with powdered silver & then using epoxy loaded with silver to attach components to the paper. From what I recall, he got a radio working on a sheet of A4.. I'm also pretty sure that the uni nabbed the rights off him, so this technique does have I.P. issues, but it might be fun to experiment withby deadgenome - Mechanics
Cheers for your input Viktor... I was thinking of the gas as being very, very close to atmospheric pressure... but I take your point. Another possible variation on the theme could be having the middle being foamed plastic, that might provide enough structure to prevent collapse, or it might just be introducing unneeded complexity into the extruder, though I'm assuming that reducing the distortioby deadgenome - General
I just thought of a wierd idea... what if the extruder printed a hollow tube, rather than a solid thread and could manage the gas pressure within that tube... This should stop, or at least seriously reduce shrinkage. The print should be able to be run a lot quicker. The extruder could spray CMYK mixed pigment inside the tube during the print for colouring if the material used is transparent.by deadgenome - General
I just sat down and watched 26 episodes of this... I'm now shaking and my brain hurts but for some reason I want more...by deadgenome - General
this is a nice, cheap scanner technology that seems to produce some good results...by deadgenome - Plastic Extruder Working Group
just found a fun page on making a homegrown CO2 laser - - & was idly wondering if it would be possible to rep-rap plasma tubes for them, I've seen handblown glass CO2 lasers before and they work really well. If that bit gets solved, then the only other thing required is the swimming pool full of sharks...by deadgenome - Laser Cutter Working Group
I know that floppy drive steppers compared to the recommended commercial ones have less torque by several orders of magnitude... but I have so far already successfully used one to power a simple motion control rig for filming model shots. So I feel that, with appropriate gearing, they should be up to the task of powering a rep-rap, albeit a fairly slow one. Also, the boards already attached toby deadgenome - Mechanics