(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.

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.

This week has been an AMAZING week for upgrading your 3D printer with Thingiverse.

There’s heated build platforms, a dremel attachment, Mendel parts, a durability upgrade, and even router-friendly versions of the MakerBot files!  How long before the vitality of open source starts elbowing the big dogs in build quality?  Might be sooner than you think!

Blender has had a sculpt mode for a while now, but with the recent release of the ground-up recode 2.5, a few minor tweaks have made it into a really powerful tool, especially for people looking to interact with their 3D in a more intuitive way than painstakingly dragging vertices around and fretting over topology.  In this tutorial, we’ll start with Blender’s default cube and carve numbers into it!

For this tutorial, you’ll need to go grab the latest release of Blender 2.5, which is still in alpha but stable enough to work with.  It’s a well-behaved zip file– just dump it in a directory and run the executable.

Pretty different from 2.4x, huh?  Not to worry, the stuff you’ve learned so far (hopefully you still remember when I used to do tutorials on a regular basis) still applies.  Some windows are moved around, but the modeling stuff is still mostly where it was in 2.4x, and the shortcuts haven’t changed.

Sculpt mode performs a lot better on a mesh with some amount of detail to it (IE, 50 or more faces), so our first step will be to subdivide the cube.  Hit tab or select edit mode from the mode dropdown.  One thing you’ll notice is that the buttons on the left side of the screen change: this is the new-for-2.5 Tool Shelf, and it’s context-sensitive, which is pretty keen.  For our purposes, it’s just good that you can see this:

Click subdivide.  You can either adjust its settings in the panel that appears below or hit it again to get a subdivided cube that’s ready for sculpt mode:

You can use any sort of mesh as a starting point for sculpting.  I’ve uploaded a few additional start points, but sculpt mode can be used on just about anything, including imported models from other programs!

Go down to where the window says edit mode and switch to sculpt mode:

The Tool Shelf responds to this by morphing into a sort of paintbrush window– this is sculpt mode.  With the low-resolution mesh we started with, it’s kind of hard to sculpt much of anything, but the tools should already work:

To get really nice results though, we’ll need more polygons.  It’s time to revisit the Modifier Stack.  Over on your right you should see the properties buttons.  Click the wrench:

And select add modifier below:

Select Multiresolution.  This tool works well with sculpt mode and allows you to hop back and forth from higher to lower resolution versions of the same model.  This can be handy when you’re trying to optimize for performance.  (For example, knocking down the subdivision will make something skin a LOT faster in skeinforge.)

Hit subdivide a few times.  I went with 3 times, but you can go higher or lower, depending on how much detail you want to carve (and how fast your computer is!)  You should now have a pretty smooth looking cube:

Notice how the edges have been rounded off.  Subdivision in Blender tends to smooth everything out.

Now, enough fiddling with settings, let’s sculpt!

These controls should be pretty self-explanatory– size makes a bigger brush, strength increases or decreases its effect.  Add/Subtract lets you reverse the effect.  At this point, feel free to experiment and create your own shapes– this is definitely the fun part of this tutorial!

One feature you could miss: if you scroll down on the tool shelf you’ll find a group of symmetry locks, which can be really handy when sculpting animals, which tend to have bilateral symmetry.

I took a size 25 strength .5 draw brush and in subtract mode carved numbers on the faces of my cube:

When I switched into object mode, all my sculpting seemed to disappear, though!  After a bit of worrying, I looked at the modifier stack (still on the right side of the screen):

With the Preview button set to 3, I could see my detail from object mode.  Next I went to the export option:

Blender 2.51 doesn’t come with an export to .stl yet, but .obj works with a lot of other 3D programs, including earlier versions of Blender.  We also just sculpted this at a width of 2mm, so following Bre’s tutorial on resizing objects at this point may be in order anyway.

Hopefully this all made sense, and if there’s any confusion, let me know in comments and I’ll see what I can do!

At around the midway point of 2008, the RepRap project achieved “replication,” a goal which, at the time, meant that all the 3D printed parts they were using to build one machine could be printed on the previous one, resulting in the Darwin model “giving birth” to the first RepRap child.  The latter half of 2008 saw a bloom of interest in 3D printing, and a year and ten days ago I predicted that the RepRap project was going to have a really big year.

I think it’s pretty impossible to argue otherwise, given that:

The MakerBot has gotten tons of attention and started shipping lots and lots of units.

Thingiverse is exploding with .stl files of printable objects, as well as photographs of objects printed.

Functioning tools of science and engineering undergo dramatic cost reductions due to 3D printed parts.  Frequently.

MakerBot Industries became the first company to crowd-source manufacturing.

Hardware can now have downloadable “patches” as though it were software.

Hobbyists are designing major upgrades which become available to everyone.

As for 2010, I think given that personal digital fabrication was the cover story on Wired this month, it’s entirely possible that the operative phrase might be you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Now that low-cost 3D printing is really on the rise, increasingly complex projects like this stunning execution of a 2D positioning system are becoming more common.  The implications of this low-metal setup are pretty huge, especially for the RepRap, but what gets me is how this complex machine is now part of the Creative Commons.  As personal fabrication becomes more popular, open designs like this one will raise the baseline functionality of, well, just about everything.

Parametric GCoding can still beat even CSG on some specific problems, like these snowflakes!  I absolutely love that with a 3D printer you can now automatically and randomly generate such delicate and gorgeous designs!

Another brutally difficult week to chose the best entry– Thingiverse is becoming a real treasure trove of design!

This hinge makes use of the feedstock itself as a pin.  Designs which rely on a few hardware-store-available parts to do really amazing things are great, but any time we learn how to squeak by with one less bit of external parts is a solid win.