Rhys Jones, Patrick Haufe, Edward Sells, Pejman Iravani, Vik Olliver, Chris Palmer, and Adrian Bowyer (2011). "RepRap – the replicating rapid prototyper”

About the Text

The Text is about the RepRap project, a replicating rapid prototype, and why and how they invented it.

What is RepRap?

https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2Ftse1.mm.bing.net%2Fth%3Fid%3DOIP.1b6o1IV8brM_g9ewcKdauAHaFj%26pid%3DApi&f=1&ipt=74ede5d3706ea9ba51ec2d615a2190b11b4f1b83b14c961287a1f5db9005bd7f&ipo=images

It’s an open-source, self-replicating rapid prototype machine. It is able to print itself to generate even more RepRaps out of one.

RepRap uses the technique of fused-filament fabrication. This is the well-known fabrication procedure from classical FDM printers as shown in the image below.

Source: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Abbas-Razavykia/publication/344071560/figure/fig2/AS:932134646722562@1599249626821/Schematic-of-fused-filament-fabrication-FFF.ppm

The main goal of RepRap is to print out fractions of his own body automatically. This reduces the manufacturing cost but also increases the technology accessibility. How this open-source and self-replacing approach is found in the world is easily seen by many 3D-Printers from the market. They contain a lot of pieces that are made by themselves, which already works philosophically.

The authors say RepRap is a kinematic-assisted self-replicating and self-manufacturing machine.

By their description, this means:

“Self-replication: We start with the idea that self-replication could mean an imaginary Platonic process by which a kinematic machine was able to create an exact copy of itself. The Second Law of Thermodynamics and Shannon’s theorem1 show that information cannot be copied without loss or error indefinitely, implying that the idea of an exact replicator is impossible. (Of course, it is the errors that drive Darwinian evolution.) Whilst it is philosophically and poetically useful to have words for impossible ideas, here we reduce the strength of the word “replication” to give it an engineering meaning: a copy within specified tolerances that will work as well as the original.”