Your friendly local guru has patched a way between Processing and STL files, blazing a trail for all sorts of generative objects, I’ll bet.  His height field demo creates little word plaques, but in theory this could be any image (he recommends trying terrain data!), and further, with Processing as a jumping off point, lots of generative structures could be possible.

If Processing can be used to readily code and read STL files, it could serve as a pretty potent language for viewing, mixing, and generating print files.  We’re definitely in the age when the tools for 3D printing are exploding in diversity.  Some day, the system might settle out into commodity systems and commodity software running them, but right now, it’s a free for all of open source and new ideas.  How exciting!

I mean seriously look at that thing.  Not only is it gorgeous, but it’s Makerbot-printable, and thus reprappable and totally independent of the closed-source 3D printing we’re all so used to needing to do stuff like this.

And as if a gorgeous gothic cathedral that you build from MakerBotted parts wasn’t enough, its modular design allows it to be assembled into larger (or smaller) cathedrals– it’s like cathedral lego.

A pretty solid epic win, this one.

(Photo: more reprap parts being made on a MakerBot)

One point I didn’t address in the atoms vs bits debate was transmutation.  In the information domain, transmutation is fundamental, and fundamentally easy: 0 -> 1.

Transmutation in the atomic domain is… substantially less so.  Some forms of transmutation are easier than others, and with varying levels of machinery atomic transmutation is possible.  But it’s pretty impractical and so far we’re mostly only good at moving down in stored energy.  Iron has the least energy, so transmuting it into other atoms is really hard, where super big elements like Uranium transmute on their own, and small elements like hydrogen give off energy when transmuted into bigger ones.  The tradeoff is possible but requires tremendous energy and represents a significant hurdle to building an Anything Machine.

So, strictly speaking, atoms are not going to turn into bits easily, even if we get the general assembler built.  But how much do we need it, and more to the point, how many of the fundamental characteristics of digital technology can we squeeze out of the atoms we have?  I’d argue, quite a lot:

Say you had the General Assembler but you could only “print” in a few elements.  Carbon, Hydrogen, Nitrogen, and Oxygen, let’s say.  You can get these four atoms from just about anywhere.  Anything organic, in fact, will have all these to spare, so our CHON assembler won’t want for components.  You could hook it up to your compost pile.  Or sewer line.  And print any of the following: plastics, fuels, food, water, agars, glues, tape, wood, diamonds, and more.

Let’s say you had a General Assembler which could do any assembly task but could not transmute atoms.  Last year’s cell phone is now next year’s cell phone.  The same goes for pretty much all the gadgets.  And it’s true that in recent decades there’s been a trend towards more and more exotic elements in our gadgets and daily life, but elements are a commodity, not a product, and the markets for them wouldn’t work the same way if anyone could squeeze every bit of use out of, say, a small lump of tellurium.

An early goal of alchemy was to convert other metals into gold, which was proved impossible because they are different elements.  But modern chemistry certainly can turn many base things into highly precious ones, and even without transmutation, a General Assembler could spin coal into diamonds, sewage into sales binders, and hair into pasta.  If technology like that isn’t fundamentally disruptive to the existing one, I don’t know what would be.

At the turn of the century, the gap between fantasy and reality was already getting narrower.  Computer generated graphics were beginning to merge with traditional film techniques, 3D printing had been invented, if not popularized, and simulations of everything from bridges to molecules were teaching us about their real counterparts.

But this century.. hoo boy.

The image above is from the RoboThespian project, an animated puppet controlled by Blender.  Besides the fact that I called it before I heard about this, I think it’s worth pointing out that this is the shape of things to come.  As the twenty first century continues, Thingiverse and places like it will become home to projects like this, with increasing sophistication and depth, and with 3D printing added to the mix, it isn’t hard to imagine a future where designers of characters in Blender use scripts to generate 3D printable assemblies to construct and animate those same characters, using the same systems that animated them in the purely virtual world.

Blender’s python scripting seems to be lending itself to lots of other really cool virtual/real overlap projects as well: whether it’s freestanding spherical screens, virtualizing whole landscapes, or the open movie project showing up on bookshelves, the Blender community is increasingly aware of its applications in the real world.

And the better our systems of transmission between the real and virtual worlds become, the more blurred that line is going to get.

Printed parts for a new 3D printer.  The repraps are replicating in the wild.  With Thingiverse, the blueprints have a home, and so do the upgrades.  Instead of a single blueprint for a self-making machine, the reprap foundation has sparked a whole new ecosystem of self-making machines, and I can’t help but shiver at the possibilities.

Sure, makers aren’t the norm.  These are the early adopters, the gadget fiends, the jackdaws, who do these things.  But they are doing these things.  How soon before your neighborhood has a guy with a CNC fabrication site in his basement?  How do you know it doesn’t already?  How long before there are machine shops practically everywhere?

How long before really disruptive hardware can be open sourced like it was an operating system?

Maybe it already has.

Cathal Garvey, the man who brought you the makerbottable dremelfuge and micro-lathe needs a mousetrap and he’s willing to pay $25 for someone to design it.

I have a problem. There lives in my house a tiny mouse, and as I am friend to all animals I wish him no harm.

The live mousetrap I tried didn’t work: crafty mouse escaped it repeatedly. I also invented a few wacky methods involving pitfalls, narrow bottles full of bloating foods and even tried to suck him out onto a vacuum cleaner head covered with cheesecloth. No avail!

I am offering a bounty for something:
$25 to the first design that catches the mouse. It must:
- Not harm the mouse
- Be printable on a Makerbot
- Work

Mouse get!

Whichever design Cathal chooses, we’re going to sweeten the deal and send them a MakerBot t-shirt if they will upload the design to Thingiverse under an open license.

Can you build a better (MakerBottable) mousetrap?

In many respects, the recent announcement that Atoms are the New Bits is accurate.  The transition into the information age meant that, in terms of information, we became a post-scarcity society.  There is no want for information anymore.  We all have the ability to reach out into the infosphere and, with a precision that, while not infinite, is so vast compared to that of previous generations as to seem so, pluck what we want to know from it.

So too, we think, will we eventually do with physical objects.  Eventually we will not need factories, or ultimately, even farms– we will only need energy, and lots of it, to directly synthesize everything we need.  Atoms, after all, are not unique.  Any one hydrogen atom is exactly identical to every other hydrogen atom (barring isotopes) in the universe.  And so what is to stop us, then, from taking everything we used to think of as garbage, waste, and trash and reorganizing it into new things, and have the garbage and scarcity problems solve each other?

For now, the answer is technology isn’t that great yet.

What we want is the general assembler, and what we have is a collection of specialized fabrication technologies which lower boundaries to entry for a gradually-widening collection of manufacturing tasks.  We have the MakerBot and Mendel, which make plastics manufacture accessible to a very wide audience.  Add to them CNC laser cutters and CNC routers and CNC sewing machines and digital representations of a wide class of objects are becoming close to, if not indistinguishable from, the very tokens needed to pull them into existence on the spot.

But it’s pretty poor compared to that general assembler, isn’t it.  You need materials, which have to come from centralized manufacture, and instead of one package you need a dozen to do multi-material fabrication work.  The benefit of CNC fabrication is that the value-added of manufacturing processes is rendered transparent, repeatable, and hackable.  It’s hard to over-estimate the importance of this benefit, but if we’re going to start calling atoms the new bits, we need to go further.

And where exactly should we be looking?  Here’s my list of the technologies we should be researching if we want to *really* turn atoms into bits:

1: Recycling.  This one is very important and thankfully has not escaped the attention of the RepRap community, among others.  A fabrication technology that not only cleans up after itself but squeezes every last scrap of potential value out of its feedstock is a big step towards using digital fabrication to reduce scarcity.

2: Scale reduction.  Smaller is the new bigger.  Better quality CNC tables, sharper tips, finer extrusion nozzles, these are steps in the right direction.  At some point, however, these kinds of steps will need to be replaced by…

3: Materials definition.  Believe it or not, CNC printed plastic already permits the creation of different materials in situ, by varying temperature of extrusion, feedrate, and flowrate.  At smaller scales, more pronounced material transitions will become possible.  Patterning becomes microstructure.  And microstructure begets mechanical properties.  But to really bust open the floodgates in possibilities here, we’ll need to combine materials on the spot, at first mixing pastes and filaments and ultimately mixing more subtle chemical reagents, to a level where we being flipping the switches of:

4: Self assembly.  Self assembling molecular machinery is all around us, and nature has left behind vast libraries of code for us to draw from.  Unfortunately she’s only provided undocumented binaries, or in her case, quaternaries.  As we decompile and comment this code, we can use tools provided from steps 1-3 above to begin coaxing bacteria and yeasts into the production of physical structures.  Adding this to the home maker’s toolkit will require an entire separate branch of inquiry in the form of molecular biology, but using that toolkit can likely be done with many of the same CNC technologies as above: minutely depositing droplets of chemicals or applying charge to command biological assembling agents might become a natural extension of this line of technology.

I don’t think we’ve really “bit-ized” atoms yet.  But I think we’re on the right track.  By thinking of the state of the art in personal fabrication as a step towards Feynman’s hundred tiny hands, we can see each “domain change” from the milli to the micro, and from micro to nano, as a challenge to CNC, rather than an end point.  And as these technologies take us deeper into the microcosm, each step will make them more powerful.

And atoms, more like bits.