it can 3D-Print onto itself?! 

"The machines rose from the ashes of the nuclear fire. Their war to exterminate mankind had raged for decades, but the final battle would not be fought in the future. It would be fought here, in our present." Come with me if you want to print

Well, the printer in the video is already rising up

The automated players i proclaim

The only way that humans could ever beat them is if we somehow figure out a way to replicate ourselves... how will we ever do that?!

@@cursed_cats5710 good one

Wasn’t that the entire idea behind the rep rap project, this guy is just taking it a lot further....

​@Volt64bolt yeah Prusa and the University of Bath did have the headstart tho

@@thenewsonatrain wdym, they started ages ago if thats what your talking about. Doesn’t make this guys project any less impressive now does it.

​@@thenewsonatrainAndrian bowyer .... father of reprap project. This project, well it has some advancement. but, as the collection of oo

Have you ever played astroneer before? cause that's pretty much how you progress, small printer make bigger printer. although you have to collect the resources for it.

throw in a solar energy system and it may be able to be used to help developing countries.

I would imagen cnc machines being more useful

@@Marcos-eg9lt And I imagine a genie that grants you infinite wishes to be even more useful. What the fuck are you on about? Do people even think before posting anymore?

Combine that with certain inventions like the tiny hand powered centrifuge for malaria testing, and a few other innovations and you could basically send a small box to a remote area, and within a few days start large scale testing for diseases/parasites, water testing, printing prosthetics… etc! It would make a huge difference by helping sick/injured people to be useful and productive again, it would add value to trash and plastics which would incentivize clean up and recycling and it would allow those small poor areas to become a bit more self sufficient and ready to receive aid! Often times the issue is that testing can cost more than a cure.. the logistics and potentially dedicating time and money without knowing how bad a situation is becomes the problem. If you can test an entire area for maybe 50 bucks and give confirmed numbers for malaria and parasites, you basically jump to the top of the list for aid, because it’s so much easier to order and procure a known quantity of drugs and know that they’re going to be used and not go to waste or get sold and lost.. Instead of spending thousands of dollars and needing several skilled technicians and doctors to examine and fit a few people with prosthetics, you can basically send one trained person with a single 3D scanner that costs a few hundred bucks, and a single 3D printer like this one and start getting prosthetics fitted to people in record time! Proper fitting ones that don’t cause more issues because of bad fit, like nerve damage, open sores that can get infected.. etc. There’s tons of videos on RU-vid of people making their own prosthetics and the process is super fast and easy, you don’t need a trained doctor or technician… any local could be trained to use a 3D scanner and printer over a weekend and use one of several free programs that generate prosthetics based on measurements! You don’t even need to know how to 3D model! This could genuinely change the world one day. I believe it because regular printers already have… this is just another big step in the right direction.

​@@Marcos-eg9lt a 3d printer is a CNC machine (Computerized Numerical Control) the difference is just that a CNC Mill/Lathe subtract Material and 3d printer add Material same system different process 😂

You two should adopt this as a baby and combine your ultra light and strong grantry rails in your last video to further make this printer fully 3d printed. 😄

This is genius and I love it. I hope I can contribute at some point!

Infinite support material

You still run into open-span material structural limits. The printer isn't infinitely rigid, so there is an upper bound on size before something breaks under its own weight. But this does drop the minimum required mass-volume needed to pack into an unmanned space craft in order to fabricate on-site. NASA's own estimates in 2004 estimated the seed robots would need to mass 500 kg and be 2x1x1.5 meters and that three (two assembled and one unassembled for making molds) would need to be sent. Mind, this also included all of the infrastructure to harvest, refine, and power everything. www.niac.usra.edu/files/studies/final_report/880Chirikjian.pdf

Caught you here, JON!

Anyone can be valuable so don’t be hard on yourself

When the concept finally works, it wouldn't even be a problem if it was very slow (because printing a complete solid shell). Since it replicates exponential, the print speed would only matter in the beginning...

Whats if you make a Big plate on the ground and make the z axis on it

French cleat with angled steps, comes to mind

Printing sides may seem like a good idea, until you realize that it can't make a second print with sides in place. Because the Z-axis is inside the print volume, and the X and Y inherently cross the build area, any bracing between the Z pillars will cause the X and Y axis to crash when approaching Z-0.

​@@Kineth1It can't make a *full-size* second print with solid sides, but it could still make repeated prints within a slightly smaller volume. It seems to me that it would make sense for the larger printers to make this trade-off - they can still continue to scale up their copies at a slightly reduced ratio.

Haha, happy to hear!

"I wish I could've done better at school to be able to help make this project better" is how I feel. Hahaha! Love the genius and insanity level of this project. Thanks Sunshine!

@@josephgaston5866 You'd be hard pressed to learn this in school. Yes, even engineering school.

you still need to take the electronic parts and move them to the bigger and bigger printers. untill you have a football field sized printer so you can finally print the electronics for the second printer you printed. otherwise you are still going to have to buy printer motherboards. and control screens. and stepper motors. and heater cartriges. and you name it in parts. and untill 3d printers become advanced enoegh to print computer chips. we will NOT be able to self replicate a 3d printer by just printing a second one. and that not even factoring the material cost. because an extruded piece of aluminium used for the frame. is actually cheaper than a 3d printed frame of the same strenght. fillament isn't cheap you know. not to mention printing rails is fun as a concept. but even the tinyest error in one of them. will compound into a giant error after x amount of replications. so first we need to reach a level of incredible accuracy. and then a level of insane intricasy (being able to print smaller and smaller things) and then a level of versitilty so we can print any material. before we can even think about doing things like this. the video is a fun watch. but this project is a huge waste of time.

@@ryanellis4383 3d printing is something that is litterally taught in school these days. it's not 1990 anymore.

This is far from a new idea. The concept of self-replicating machines has been around for nearly a century. 3D printing definitely is an obvious leap towards realizing it, but all the core problem remains the same: precision. 3D printers almost universally get their precision, and thus ability to print reliably and to spec, from metal parts. Printers that use 3D printed parts, like Prusa printers, only print structural pieces, not functional ones. Without things like precision machined linear bearings, the printer won't be able to print anything of use and the fact of the matter is that printers aren't capable of printing to the same precision they are manufactured with. It's inherent to the material used to print. Plastic deforms where metal doesn't. Metal-infused filaments are still majority plastic, there's no getting around it. And all of that ignores that a truly autonomous system would need a method of raw material extraction and processing. And then you start to run into possible doomsday scenarios like Horizon Zero Dawn. It's an interesting concept to explore for sure, but to say at this stage that this will "revolutionize manufacturing" is nothing more than hyperbole.

@@needamuffin Ah, that's an enlightening perspective. Perhaps I was a little caught up in the wonderful presentation in the video

Concept may have been around but this is a say "proof of concept" we've never seen the likes, of in my opinion. ​@@needamuffin

do gotta say this kind of attitude is what is needed to change the world

That's why we can bridge between the legs ;)

@@TurboSunShine you should make it create a vertical lattice of about 15% to 35% infill between each leg (test around with infill and patterns)

@@TurboSunShine Why not just accept that it's a 3D printer and that it can't do everything, and instead of making it so complicated just use a very simple 3D printer that can print a more standard X Y and Z axis extensions that a human or a robot arm (that the 3D printer could print) put it in place. This makes it MUCH easier, and you can then focus on the hard parts, getting strength with a little metal as possible, getting metal printed (your electrolysis system, lost PLA casting, print a green part) and as these clever minutia of how to lift itself up and print it's own axis is fascinating but hardly critical. One other idea, with a good system to pinpoint the print head location (something exceedingly accurate, maybe camera based, or laser, IDK) then you can worry less about just some limit switches or how rigid an axis printed out plastic is as you only need to know when the print head is in the right place, consider how they 3D printed with drones, silly but you get the point, heck, you could 3D print from a vehicle that runs around below the print bed squirting plastic at the right spot, rails are only one way, and as a bonus if you have a great vision/scanning system you can not only know where the print head is but you can have a 3D printer that can scan and repair failed prints, repair incomplete prints, you could also have a subtractive tool (router bit) that can remove material.

what you want is basically the thinkpad nubs, the hard part has basically no travel but can detect force being applied to it. the way the strain gauges are made (basically a resistor that will slightly increase in resistance as it gets stretched), you might be able to 3d print them with conductive filament.

@@satibel exactly

me to, subscribed now, hope it does not go off topiic, and turn into never ending of short video clips

would not says its genius, its a cleaver way to fix an irrelevant problem

@@Cj19944 maybe we need a *cleaver* way to fix your grammar

I 2nd dat😂

the kralyn isi wicked; hope this guy can pull off a similar build!

Kralyn has consistently billed the Position as a printer that's portable and nothing else, but from the first moment I saw it I've always thought it was cool that it's a printer _that you can put away_ for the 99% of the time, when you're not using it. I mean taking up space is what's keeping the average person away from having a 3D printer. Like how everyone has a drill they barely use, and no-one has a drill _press._ Portability of a 3D printer of all things really is a niche requirement.

At that point they were so small tgey could change the structure of water into alcohol, so the entire world's oceans became beer lmao

You could maybe find a way to 3D print fiducial markers into your parts, idk

But then you need to add the camera too.

This device still needs help gathering the materials needed to replicate itself, but I think that could be resolved by having it print a different robot to help with that.