yes?

So I've been going back and forth on actually starting this blog. Mostly because I'm not too great with keeping up with this sort of thing, and I do enough documentation and reports while at work. But, here we are. I hope it's informative.

For a while now I've been following along with the concentrated efforts of a great variety of people through the web. The goal for this group is "democratizing manufacturing" or "China on your desktop" or a bunch of other PR slogans people have put together on a bunch of articles and interviews and blah blah blah. I've come to just refer to it as "my nerd project". Others know it as RepRap, or more descriptively it's an open source Fused Deposition Modeling (FDM) 3D rapid prototyper.

The basic premise is this; Wouldn't it be awesome if you could hit print on a 3d model you just downloaded on the web and then have it in your hands later the same day? If you need a custom bracket or brace, why not sketch it up in a free program and then have it built one layer at a time? For pennies.

I'll tell you why I was attracted to it, it is probably similar to why many of the participants spend so much weekend and evening time on it. It's a playground. These machines already exist commercially. They cost thousands of dollars and that puts it out of reach for many many people. Plus making something out of plastic can only be so much fun. It's the building and tweaking and hacking that's the real appeal. The project is open source, and there is a fantastic array of people of all different spheres to help you through with just about any problem (I'll start a list of links sometime soon, I promise). There's been great strides on all aspects of the project; electronics, mechanics, and software, and a lot of different ways to put all of those parts together as a functioning system. Imagine an erector set that is self-expanding.

Now for why I'm starting this blog. I've been doing "hella" research on this project. What's the way I want to get started? What do I need? What do I need to learn? What are going to be my biggest hurdles? After months and months and months of following the forums and trying things out myself, I've got a good idea of what I need to do, so maybe I can share that with other people interested in the project. Eventually, when I do have my hapsrap built and functioning, I'd like to push new "technologies" and methods, bring a little bit of my engineering experience and design some experiments to hopefully help the certainly capable people who already helped me get to that point.

Also I can point my friends and coworkers to this page and they hopefully get a better idea about what this nerd project I keep referring to is about.